Challenge: Enabling Customer Success & Ops while accelerating product development

Casechek is an implant supply chain automation company that bridges the gap between healthcare providers and the implant vendor ecosystem. From procurement to payment, Casechek streamlines workflows so hospitals can better manage vendors and the cost of their patient specific supplies and stay focused on their medical procedures. 

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With billions of dollars spent each year on implant procedures, Casechek expanded their hospital platform with a new solution aimed at solving the industry wide problems associated with paying vendors for non-stock items, also known as Bill Only payments. The new product reinvented the slow, manual, paper-based process into a fully automated process that benefits both hospitals and implant vendors by making it faster and more accurate. 

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As adoption for its new Bill Only Payment Solution increased, Casechek wanted to concentrate its internal resources on the continued innovation of its new offering. However, they simultaneously needed internal tools to scale operations and deliver high quality service to their growing customer base. This meant either redirecting development resources to building internal tools from scratch, or finding a faster solution that wouldn’t sacrifice engineering time. The areas Casechek needed to tackle included: 

1. Implementation efficiency: With the current workforce constraints in healthcare, onboarding a new hospital network meant working with the limited availability of the hospital's IT staff.  To make its hospital Implementation team efficient, they needed to create collaboration tools that were as effective as possible or risk delays.
2. Back office support: As service inquiries from clients and vendors increased, the Customer Success team needed dedicated back office tools to see the status or history of a bill.
3. Product performance: Customer Success and Leadership needed daily visibility into multiple org and hospital level metrics to ensure that every point in the pipeline (from medical procedure to purchase order) was performing optimally.

Solution: Superblocks Applications to scale healthcare customer support

Casechek used Superblocks to build customer focused internal tools in just days, enabling their Customer Success team to better serve clients, while allowing Engineers to stay focused on core product features.

1. Hospital Management for Implementation Team

While Engineers were finishing the data structure and APIs for internal platform services, Casecheck Product Managers used Superblocks to build a Hospital Management app for their Implementation team. With Superblocks, PMs implemented the user interface, as well as several APIs, that queried data directly from Casecheck's RDS databases as well as internal AWS APIs. With only basic SQL knowledge and no frontend experience, the Product team was able to independently build the app while Engineers focused on core product development. The Implementation team can now easily configure new organizations, add or remove hospitals from an organization, and verify integrations with hospital systems in a single view, eliminating back and forth and saving hours of work for the team that would otherwise have to request these operations through the hospital’s IT team.

2. Bill Explorer for Customer Success

Without disrupting developers to run SQL queries across multiple databases, the Customer Success team can quickly get insight into all client and vendor bills to answer support inquiries faster. Not only does the view provide the current status of a bill, but it also displays a detailed version history, correlated with the hospital's EMR and purchase order information.

3. Billing Analytics for the Executive Team 

To facilitate hospital financial processes, Casechek strives to reduce cycle time from the operating room to bill submission. Tracking key metrics like number of bills submitted, age of those bills, and average time from surgery to PO is critical for leadership. In addition, Customer Success reps can drill down into more detail based on bill status or the vendor they’re serving. With native Chart components integrated with data from Postgres and custom JavaScript business logic, building this in Superblocks was a natural extension of Casechek’s internal tools and replaced the need to request ad-hoc reports.

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Why Superblocks

1. Data security with the On-Premise Agent

For a company processing healthcare and medical data, keeping data within their VPC was a must. With the Superblocks On-Premise Agent, Casechek ensured their customer data stayed within their private network, while still getting access to the latest features from the Superblocks cloud platform. By leveraging automation/container management tools like Terraform and AWS EKS, Casechek can easily scale their agents to handle data collection for their internal RDS instances and REST APIs, without the maintenance overhead of a full on-premise installation.

2. Quickly build without consuming developer cycles

With limited resources, Casechek needed a tool that allowed them to deliver new internal tools but keep Engineers working on product features for their clients. The intuitive drag and drop Application builder allowed Product Managers to connect to their data and build frontends in just hours, as well as iterate and deploy changes in minutes.

3. Reusability of code with Workflows 

For common API operations used across applications like fetching settings, listing hospitals, or getting a vendor, Casecheck was able to create modular Workflows to plug into multiple applications. 

Future state 

With the performance gains seen on the customer service and payment side of the business, Casechek plans to consolidate existing procurement / supply chain tooling into Superblocks and expand adoption internally to other business functions.