Case Study
Leading Healthcare Software Firm Applies Data-Driven Planning
Reinvigorates a 25-year-old Practice Management System
Related Resources
A market leader in healthcare practice management software had insufficient insight into how customers were using a 25-year-old software package that achieved wide distribution through multiple versions.
Challenge
- Insufficient insight into how customers were using a 25-year-old software package that has achieved wide distribution through multiple versions
- Sub-optimal decisions being made based on anecdote rather than objective data
Solution
- Implement usage analytics platform to get more accurate and actionable anonymous data for understanding customer usage, planning features, improving quality, and making key product roadmap decisions
Benefits
- Higher product quality
- More efficient R&D investments
- Tighter alignment with customers’ environments
- Greater customer loyalty
UNDERSTANDING USAGE PATTERNS IN MATURE SOFTWARE: BEYOND ANECDOTES
Tens of thousands of physicians’ offices rely on the customer’s comprehensive practice management solution to handle everything from electronic prescriptions and claims to monthly business reporting. To add functionality, its software integrates with innovative web services and an ecosystem of products from other technology companies. The result for its users: better care, higher employee productivity, and faster practice growth.
The company has continually evolved its product over 25 years, anticipating and responding to advances in both technology and practice standards. To support existing customers, many older features have been retained. “We needed to understand how much of our product was actually being used,” says the company’s senior product manager. “We try to be very datadriven here, but all we had was a lot of speculation and anecdotal evidence from client visits.”
Product team members suspected that as little as 50% of the product was being used by the vast majority of clients. Could some older modules be retired or replaced?
To plan product roadmaps, the company and its professional services division also needed a better understanding of users’ hardware and operating systems. “How many were still running older versions of Windows? If we stopped supporting those versions, how much impact would that have?”
In addition, once third-parties gained certification and connected with the SDK and APIs to integrate their own offerings, the company had no practical way of tracking and analyzing those ongoing connections. Finally, says the PM, incoming support calls only uncovered an unrepresentative fraction of product errors. “If your customer can work around a problem, they will. They’re busy. They won’t call you unless it’s totally impeding them. We knew things were happening in the wild that we couldn’t track.”
Usage Intelligence software usage analytics delivers the actionable and granular insights product managers need to make consistently data-driven decisions.
CHOOSING THE BEST SOLUTION
At a software product management conference, the senior product manager heard how Usage Intelligence could deliver reliable and actionable anonymous usage data. “To my amazement,” the PM said, “it not only did the feature tracking I needed, it also had many other capabilities we found quite valuable.”
The company deployed Usage Intelligence during the beta cycle for its next major release. “Revenera experts quickly helped us integrate the product. Our support experience with Revenera has been fantastic.”
We’d made a major architectural shift that came with many nuances. Usage Intelligence helped us address those before general availability, so users found our new version ran faster and more reliably. This translated into greater customer loyalty—and that’s huge.
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER LEADING PRACTICE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE PROVIDER
DATA-DRIVEN, CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND CUSTOMER ALIGNMENT
Usage Intelligence now helps the company’s product team address each of the problems it identified, driving quantitative improvements in key metrics.
The company quickly discovered that individual medical practices were indeed using only 50% of its feature set, but the 50% varied radically by office. Eliminating modules would cause more pain than had been expected. “That’s been eye-opening,” says the PM. “Rip-and-replace wouldn’t have gone over well, but without Usage Intelligence data, we would likely have gone down that road.”
Early on, the product team found many customers still trying to squeeze more life out of legacy hardware running old 32-bit versions of Windows. This was crucial information for scheduling feature introductions that might not fit within 32-bit memory limits. More recently, it wanted to leverage improved TLS network security. Usage Intelligence reported that the vast majority of the user base had now upgraded to versions of Windows that supported it; the team could move forward confidently.
Using Usage Intelligence’s custom events, the team tracks connections from certified third-party products, learning which ones connect and at what volumes—valuable information for assessing and strengthening partner relationships. Event tracking proved exceptionally valuable in the beta process. “We’d made a major architectural shift that came with many nuances. Usage Intelligence helped us address those before general availability, so users found our new version ran faster and more reliably. This translated into greater customer loyalty—and that’s huge.”
Since its major new version went live, the company has continually delivered improvements via point releases. “Usage Intelligence helps us monitor not only what features customers use, but how they get to those features. By specifically monitoring workflows, we can align more closely with how they want to work.” This has already translated to specific improvements in several modules.
The team is now exploring even more of Usage Intelligence functionality. For example, it can use ReachOut™ in-app messaging to notify users of security enhancements and bug fixes, encouraging them to download and install these more rapidly. ReachOut can be used in very granular ways, precisely targeting specific subsets of customers based on feature usage, computer environment, and other attributes.
Usage Intelligence is consistently helping us to make better, more data-driven product management decisions,” the PM concludes. “All too often, it’s easy to have the sense that ‘if I do it like this, my users will, too.’ That’s wrong more often than it’s right. With Usage Intelligence data, I know what my customers are doing.
“Not only that: when I go to the executive team and ask for more resources, or say, ‘I don’t think X is smart,’ I have the data. It’s hard to argue against the data.”