Automating Manual Data Transferring

Situation

Every month, Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) requires medical case management agencies to provide data on its platform CAREWare, as an attempt to hold agencies accountable and collect nation-wide data. The problem is, agencies typically have their own data platform to keep track of clients and services, with features that CAREWare does not provide. To comply, agencies need to transfer data from their platform to CAREWare on a monthly basis.

Suppose the organization has 100 clients, each receiving on average 5 services during the month, the average monthly total entries would be 500. If it takes 1 minute to copy and paste entries to the corresponding fields between the two systems, the organization would need to spend 500 minutes or more than 8 hours of staff billable hours just on such mindless task.

What most agencies are not aware of, is that CAREWare has an import feature that allows importing data instead of manual copy-and-paste. Now, the csv file to import needs to be specifically configured, so that the program would know which information goes to which field for which client. To prepare such csv file, even with Excel, is no easy task, no less mindless, and most importantly, not repeatable in a time-efficient manner.

Imagine a repeatable process that can be run in a matter of minutes or seconds every month. In some cases, this process might be fully automated, with smart scheduling and tight security, so that teams can spend time on meaningful works, such as taking care of clients.

There has been no one-size-fit-all, off-the-shelf solution for all agencies, using vastly different platforms, to automate the process of transferring data into CAREWare, or transferring data from any one to another platform. This is due to the diversity of technology and specific business requirements. Such diversity necessitates tailored solutions and long-term partnership.

Anfluss can provide such solution and be your partner. Read further on how we have done so with a client.

From Clarity to CAREWare

A client uses Clarity, a data platform provided by the city of Boston, for daily data collection. They need to transfer service data from Clarity to CAREWare. Clarity does not allow flexibly changing data structure in reports or even in the database itself. Nor does it provide a direct data link, like an API or ETL capability. It does allow downloading csv files.

Based on the client’s data structure and business logics, we wrote a Python script to convert data as structured in Clarity to another format that is readable and importable to CAREWare. Some fields in Clarity are qualitative texts that need to be categorized in CAREWare. We deployed a local large language model, customized for medical case management, to categorize qualitative texts. All data are protected.

The result is that the agency now only spends less than 3 minutes each month to convert their data, instead of 8-10 hours. What’s more, we schedule and supervise those 3 minutes, so that agency has total peace of mind, that their data are handled professionally and safely.