Modern Data Stack: SIRUM's Journey To Supercharged Decision Making

About The Company

SIRUM is revolutionizing healthcare access in the United States by running the nation's largest medicine redistribution program. Harnessing the capabilities of technology, SIRUM facilitates the donation process for organizations, including nursing homes, pharmacies, and manufacturers, ensuring that unused medicine reaches those who need it most.

Challenge

As SIRUM prepared for its next phase of growth as a startup, it needed new data capabilities to scale efficiently. The challenge was clear: reevaluating the most effective ways to derive value from their data, and most importantly doing so in a manner that guaranteed the quality of their data. This meant consolidating and centralizing their data to modernize and improve their analytics.

Being a small company, the challenge lay in implementing their data stack. It had to be user-friendly for various stakeholders in the organization, as well as easy to maintain without external technical support — a solution that enables self-service. Steep learning curves and onboarding delays for new teams or hires had to become a thing of the past.

The new stack also had to make data dependable and trustworthy. The company was identifying errors and rectifying them in a reactive manner, having to analyze their origins and check Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Without a proactive approach to data quality, uncertainty was building up around KPIs, impeding confidence in decision making.

Lastly, the solution had to be scalable. Startups grow, and they do so quickly. This data stack had to function as a robust foundation that would enable SIRUM to experiment with and incorporate machine learning and AI capabilities in the future.

In essence, the task was to assist SIRUM in becoming an increasingly data-driven non-profit organization, ultimately enhancing its ability to support the patients it serves.

Solution

Airflow served as a scalable solution for overseeing data pipelines and provided DAG templates, simplifying the creation of multiple workflows based on dbt. These workflows facilitated essential functions like re-processing and rollback. dbt was chosen to design, document, and validate views and tables.

Additionally, our partner Soda was chosen for data quality monitoring and assurance due to its capability to define tests that become aggregated SQL queries, whose results are consolidated into a readable format stored in a table. This versatile tool offers a wide array of built-in tests, extending beyond SQL file-based tests.

Impact

The recently implemented modern data stack has enabled effortless access to essential data, fostering agile decision-making driven by data. Furthermore, SIRUM has gained heightened trust in the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) generated, thanks to proactive data quality monitoring best practices and tools. Quality assurance alerts have also been implemented to address consistency issues, ensuring reliable data analytics. Over twenty customized KPIs, metrics, and alerts for BizOps were implemented.

SIRUM has already helped over 150,000 uninsured and underinsured patients get access to life-saving medicine – and they are just getting started. By becoming a data-driven organization, their vision to get nearly $1 billion of medicine to one million patients over the next five years is within reach.

Wrapping Up!

Mutt Data can help you crystallize your data strategy through the design and implementation of technical capabilities and best practices. We study your company’s business goals to understand what has to change so we can help you accomplish it through a robust technical strategy with a clear roadmap and set of milestones.

Talk to one of our sales reps at hi@muttdata.ai or check out our website for specific solutions in FinTech, AdTech, MarTech, Telco, or more information on Modern Data Stacks and Marketing Mix Modeling.