Carbon Health transforms operating outcomes with Connected Sheets for Looker

Everyone wants affordable, quality healthcare but not everyone has it. A 2021 report by the Commonwealth Fund ranked the U.S. in last place among 11 high-income countries in healthcare access.1 Carbon Health is working to change that. We are doing so by combining the best of virtual care, in-person visits, and technology to support patients with their everyday physical and mental health needs.

Rethinking how data and analytics are accessed at Carbon Health 

Delivering premium healthcare for the masses that's accessible and affordable is an ambitious undertaking. It requires a commitment to operating the business in an efficient and disciplined way. To meet our goals, our teams across the company require detailed, daily insights into operating results.

In the last year, we realized our existing BI platform was inaccessible to most of our employees outside of R&D. Creating the analytics, dashboards, and reports needed by our clinic leaders and executives required direct help from our data scientists. 

However, this has all changed since deploying Looker as our new BI platform. We initially used Looker to build tables, charts, and graphs that improved how people could access and analyze data about our operating efficiency. As we continued to evaluate how our data and analytics should be experienced by our in-clinic staff, we learned about Connected Sheets for Looker, which has unlocked an entirely new way of sharing insights across the company.

A new way to deliver performance reporting and drive results

Connected Sheets for Looker gives Carbon Health employees who work in Google Sheets—practically everyone—a familiar tool for working with Looker data. For instance, one of our first outputs using the Connected Sheets integration has been a daily and weekly performance push-report for the clinic’s operating leaders, including providers. 

Essentially a scorecard, the report tracks the most important KPIs for measuring clinics' successes, including appointment volume, patient satisfaction such as net promoter score (NPS), reviews, phone call answer rates, and even metrics about billing and collections. To provide easy access, we built a workflow through Google App Script that takes our daily performance report and automatically emails a PDF to key clinic leaders each morning. 

Within the first 30 days of the report's creation, clinic leaders were able to drive noticeable improvements in operating results. For instance, actively tracking clinic volume has enabled us to manage our schedules more effectively, which in turn drives more visits and enables us to better communicate expectations with our patients. Other clinics have dramatically improved their call answer rates by tracking inbound call volume, which has also led to better patient satisfaction. 

Greater accountability, greater collaboration

As you can imagine, a report that holds people accountable for outcomes in such a visible way can create some anxiety. We've eased those concerns by using the information constructively, with the goal to use reporting as a positive feedback mechanism to bolster open collaboration and identify operational processes that need improvement. For example, data about our call answer rates initiated an investigation that led to an operational redesign of how phones are deployed and managed at more than 120 clinics across the U.S.

Looker as a scalable solution with endless applications

We're now rolling out Connected Sheets for Looker to deliver performance push-reporting across all teams at Carbon Health. Additionally, we continue to find new ways to leverage Connected Sheets for Looker to meet other needs of the business. 

For instance, we've recently been able to better understand our software costs by analyzing vendor spend from our accounting systems directly in Google Sheets. Going forward, this will allow us to build a basic workflow to monitor subscription spend and employee application usage, which will lead to us saving money on unnecessary licenses and underutilized software. 

We've come a long way in the last year. Between Looker and its integration with Google Sheets, we can meet the data needs of all our stakeholders at Carbon Health. Connected Sheets for Looker has been an impactful solution that's going to help us drive measurable results in how we deliver premium healthcare to the masses.

<sup>1. Mirror, Mirror 2021: Reflecting Poorly
2.  HEALTHCARE EDITORS' PICK Meet The Immigrant Entrepreneurs Who Raised $350 Million To Rethink U.S. Primary Care</sup>