From Fragmented Data to Faster Decisions: Skin Institute’s Modern Data Platform Journey

“Theta spent the time to understand what we needed and were able to deliver that... As a result, we have a consistent source of the truth to answer most questions that we may have about our business, which is completely reliable.”

Andy Walker, Chief Infrastructure Officer, Skin Institute.

Customer overview

Customer: Skin Institute | Skin Cancer, Varicose Veins & Appearance Medicine

Location: New Zealand.

Employees: 250 employees across 12 clinics.

Skin Institute is a leading provider of skin cancer, vein, dermatology, and appearance medicine services, with over 30years of experience. Offering end-to-end care, from prevention and diagnosis to treatment and cosmetic services.

Technologies

The solution was designed to be flexible, scalable, and cloud-based using:

• Microsoft Azure.
• Microsoft Power BI.

Challenges

Skin Institute faced several data and reporting challenges:

• No centralised data platform.
• Heavy reliance on data extracts, spreadsheets and manual reporting.
• Limited ability to generate timely and useful insights from available data.
• Low confidence in data consistency and definitions across teams.
• Difficulty analysing clinic, clinician, room, and service utilisation.
• Limited visibility of future capacity, bookings, cancellations, and operational trends.
• Existing reporting did not adequately support forecasting, workforce planning, facility planning, promotions, or executive decision making.
• A need for an analytics platform that could scale as the organisation evolved without creating high maintenance overhead.
• Desire to understand how a single customer interacted across Skin Institutes core three service types.

“Previously, when we needed data, 90% of the resource would be creating some data, and only 10%on thinking about it. That’s flipped now, and most things can be created very,very simply, so our time is spent on considering what to do and how to make good decisions.”

Andy Walker, Chief Infrastructure Officer, Skin Institute.

Project objectives

Skin Institute partnered with Theta on a multi-phase modern data platform engagement with the following objectives:

• Establish a single source of truth for the business.
• Enable reliable operational and executive insights to support better planning across clinics, clinicians, rooms, and services.
• Deliver a platform that was sustainable, secure, flexible, and scalable on Microsoft Azure.

Solution

Theta designed and delivered a modern,cloud-based analytics solution built on Microsoft Azure and visualised through Microsoft Power BI.

A scalable Azure-based analytics environment that:

• Consolidates practice management, financial, and operational data into a single source of truth.
• Supports consistent reporting across the business.
• Is flexible and scalable for future growth allowing additional data sources to be added in the future.

Automated data pipelines built to improve reliability and reduce manual effort:

• Reduce double handling.
• Improve consistency and accuracy.
• Help ensure users are working from current and trusted information.

Power BI analytics and dashboards provide key operational and business insights to help Skin Institute:

• Optimise capacity and use of facilities.
• Identify opportunities to fill appointment gaps.
• Support better operational and growth decisions.

Designed to scale with the business through:

• Quality assurance processes.
• Low-maintenance architecture.
• Ability to support future enhancements (e.g., adding new data sources or extending dashboards and reporting).

Outcomes

The platform enables Skin Institute to access a wide range of business and operational insights, from clinical performance, room utilisation and budget performance to trends and opportunities.

“It’s much, much faster for us to be able to make decisions, so data is no longer holding us back.For example, we now have very good visibility on each of our service providers around the utilisation of their time. We can view time data split by schedule gaps vs gathering revenue, as well as breaks and administration time. From that, we can benchmark what the future demand is looking like for that individual, group or location.”

Andy Walker, Chief Infrastructure Officer, Skin Institute.

The project delivered many measurable and practical benefits for Skin Institute:

Improved usability and adoption

• Dashboards available on demand, decision makers have information at their fingertips.
• Different user groups could easily access information tailored to their needs.
• Dashboards require no specialist technical knowledge to interpret.

“It is much easier for people to use the reporting... a lot of the people that actually need the data, are not analytical and were not able to manipulate the data, so now it’s presented in such a way that they can use it as it is.”

Andy Walker, Chief Infrastructure Officer, Skin Institute.

Consistency and trust in data

• Improved data security and accuracy.
• Centralised data model and automated pipelines that established a single source of truth.
• Improved confidence in reported numbers across the organisation.

“The data is uniform across the business and across the time we're looking at it. And it's presented in a way that is very user-friendly.”

Andy Walker, Chief Infrastructure Officer, Skin Institute.

Operational efficiency

• Automation significantly reduced manual reporting and data maintenance effort.
• Reduced risk of teams making decisions from conflicting datasets.
• Internal teams could focus more time on analysis and value add activities like marketing to fill empty appointments or discover client trends.

“We are making quicker, better decisions about our services and how we operate our business... from a technology management point of view, there's fewer issues in dealing with data.”

Andy Walker, Chief Infrastructure Officer, Skin Institute.

Scalable, future ready platform

The solution was designed to grow with the organisation. It has removed reporting fragmentation and technical debt and provided a strong foundation for future analytics use cases and enhancements with minimal maintenance requirements.

“Theta delivered a good mixture of technical expertise, very good relationships and a clear understanding of our business needs and how we work. We've continued to be able to work with the same people, which has been great. Looking back on it, I'm proud of the process that we went through and the outcome that we ended up with on this.”

Andy Walker, Chief Infrastructure Officer, Skin Institute.

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