Carrot Health scales SaaS offering with Tableau Advanced Management

Carrot Health is a Minneapolis-based healthcare data analytics company that offers actionable insights to healthcare payers, providers, and community care organizations with Tableau dashboards embedded in its SaaS product, Carrot MarketView™. The company began using the Content Migration Tool, included in Tableau Advanced Management, to efficiently migrate workbooks from its development environment to customer-facing views. Today, Carrot Health has replaced tedious, manual operations with 150 streamlined migration plans, consistently delivering more than 100 customized workbooks from 8 templates—many jobs are now just a one-click operation. “Prior to the Content Migration Tool, it was a very manual process—downloading workbooks from our development environment and publishing them to our production server for our customers’ use,” said Candace Slattery, Senior Director of Security and Technical Operations. “It was very time consuming, wasn't a scalable solution, and didn’t give us any level of compliance tracking.” Now, instead of manually updating and tracking content migrations, Candace has streamlined jobs with the Content Migration Tool, making it easier to run them when needed and providing log files to attach to JIRA tickets for improved SOC 2 compliance tracking. “We have proof when production updates are made, with log files that indicate which workbooks were published and when,” Candace said. “It's given us a level of detail around reporting that's way beyond what we had previously.”

Carrot Health uses more than 80 data sources, including medical claims and membership data, health indicators, market analysis, and third-party data, combined with more than 330 proprietary predictive models to help customers better understand, reach, and offer care to their consumers. Due to regional nuances for each customer, and to ensure HIPAA compliance, the Carrot Health team customizes workbooks for each customer, a process that had been manual and cumbersome. With so many data sources, calculations, and parameters across different customers, sometimes workbooks got out of sync, increasing the risks of deploying incorrect or outdated content to end consumers. Today, Carrot Health has enabled new levels of parameterization and control over workbooks, actually transforming them during the migration. "Tableau Advanced Management and Content Migration Tool are the foundation and building blocks for allowing us to move to a more DevOps type of environment for Tableau workbooks,” shared Alex Sweet, Senior Director of Product Development. “We're at the point where we're not just throwing more people at problems—we’re able to be smarter about how we solve those problems from technology and design standpoints using Tableau." With the help of the data engineering team, Alex and his product engineers standardized code bases and data architecture behind the scenes, and adopted a thoughtful approach to workbook template design. This has made it easier to dynamically set different defaults and swap out values in workbooks for different customers during the migration. Carrot Health is not only scaling templates across more customers, but has improved their prototyping process, delivering new analytics functionality and modules to customers faster than before.

As their SaaS offerings continue to grow, Candace and Alex plan to take advantage of other Advanced Management for Tableau Server features, such as the Resource Monitoring Tool, which provides agent-based cluster monitoring and session-level user data. The development team runs a lot of extracts, and this will help Alex better track the performance of the jobs and the system. Carrot Health also plans to use the Advanced Management for Tableau Server configuration features to help scale automated testing frameworks, plan for multi-node deployments, and eventually offload some services into Amazon Web Services for more efficiency and scalability.