Improving Heart Health with Data

May 8

How Good Data Studio united a complex ecosystem of data sources to create a critical reporting layer for Miga .

“They’ve helped significantly simplify and accelerate our processes, allowing us to concentrate on serving our patients. Their written communication is fantastic and they embraced our async working culture. They’re awesome operators as well as data scientists.”

— Dre Limberopoulos, Miga Co-Founder

About Miga

Miga is a virtual medical practice dedicated to improving the heart health of millions. Its multidisciplinary team, including medical providers, registered dietitians, and health coaches, offers individualized care plans to manage weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes.

Patients receive at-home devices like weight scales and blood pressure monitors, allowing their care team to track progress remotely. Meanwhile Miga's app integrates patient/provider messaging, health data, and more in one place. Each touchpoint, whether a personalized service or device, collaborates to share essential information that keeps patients on track with their health goals.

Navigating a Complex Ecosystem

Miga needed to knit together its complex ecosystem of devices and services to consistently deliver the best patient outcomes. The organization operates an electronic health record (EHR) for documentation, a dedicated appointment system for patient appointment management, and a separate patient app for tracking daily progress. Alongside sits a network of devices that patients use to monitor their health. Inefficient, manual data processing placed a significant burden on Miga’s team and was hampering organizational growth.

Additionally, as a healthcare provider, Miga bills patients’ insurance companies and needed a way to effectively manage Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) billing, to be able to quickly understand which services could be claimed for, and where further data was required.

Partnership with Good Data

Miga partnered with Good Data Studio to create a robust data stack and reporting layer. This system collates and monitors vast amounts of growing data across Miga’s device and service ecosystem, providing deep insights into patient service utilization and streamlining the complex RPM billing process. This work was split into four key pillars:

Operational Hygiene
Outcomes Data
Billing/Claims Submissions
Operational Efficiency

Operational Hygiene

Miga was able to save hours of administration through Good Data Studio’s bespoke reporting system, enabling them to review at-a-glance how patients utilize appointments and services. Through visual dashboard reports and easily transferable data, Miga now has easy access to deep analysis of appointment utilization for visits to healthcare providers, dietitians, and coaches, organized by patient cohort. This informs the team’s daily activities, like patient outreach.

“This has been an incredibly beneficial support mechanism for us,” Miga Co-Founder Dre Limberopoulos said. “Without these reports, we would manually export appointment data, device readings, and enrollment data, and then try to piece it all together. Operating without the dashboards would probably be untenable.”

Outcomes Data

Miga needed a way to unify data from disparate patient devices to monitor ongoing progress, like tracking weight loss. Today, Miga has access to highly accurate, up-to-date evidence reports of patient data, enabling the team to assess progress and to provide other services that would better support patients.

“The more data that we collect on our patients, the better we can serve them. It's a virtuous cycle. More data in your heart health record leads to better care, and more services we can offer,” said Limberopoulos.

Billing/Claims Submissions

RPM billing is a complex challenge facing healthcare providers in the United States. Patients are required to complete a certain number of device readings in order for claims to be permissible, and must deliver supporting evidence via health readings each month.

Working with Good Data Studio, Miga now runs a simplified RPM billing process, relieving a heavy burden from the team to manually sift through patient data and allowing staff to concentrate on better serving patients.

“RPM was a tough manual grind to determine claim eligibility. We had to pull information from various sources, like the EHR and device readings, to see if a patient qualified. Complex data engineering was required to streamline this process,” said Limberopoulos.

Operational Efficiency

Finally, Good Data Studio supported Miga’s analysis of patient retention and churn. Understanding churn is essential for Miga’s growth and business planning, enabling the organization to easily assess which patients are likely to drop out of the program. It also uncovers trends, helping Miga to budget and plan more effective marketing and sales strategies.

“We can now review each month and ask: What did we do differently? Did we change our marketing strategies? Are we communicating better with patients? Was there media coverage that attracted patients who weren't the right fit for the program,” said Limberopoulos.

Impact

The impact of Good Data Studio’s work has been instrumental in Miga’s positive patient outcomes and for the organization’s ongoing expansion. While the majority of the team interfaces with data in visual dashboard reports, others are now diving deeper, going straight to a data warehouse to perform further analysis.

“Working with Good Data Studio has been incredibly valuable. In healthcare, there is no Salesforce or unifying platform to bring all this data together, so they've been instrumental in many ways and I only have positive things to say,” said Limberopoulos.

“They’ve helped significantly simplify and accelerate our processes, allowing us to concentrate on serving our patients. Their written communication is fantastic and they embraced our async working culture. They're awesome operators as well as data scientists.”

As Miga continues to grow, scaling nationally across the United States, Good Data Studio is working with the team’s fast moving priorities and providing sustainable, long-term solutions to data challenges that will help millions of individuals improve their heart health.

“Working with Good Data Studio has been incredibly valuable. In healthcare, there is no Salesforce or unifying platform to bring all this data together, so they’ve been instrumental in many ways and I only have positive things to say”