Great Falls Clinic focuses on primary practice care, medical specialties, and urgent care. The clinic serves the needs of 225,000 residents living in the seventeen north central Montana counties and operates 37 specialist departments from audiology to chemotherapy and robotic surgery to wound care. 

The problem: Spending days collecting Excel spreadsheets and  suffering from disconnected systems

Justin Donaldson, Assistant Controller, Great Falls Clinic, and Gerald Gavin, Business Intelligence Analyst, Great Falls Clinic faced disparate systems and tons of Excel spreadsheets. 

Prior to using Datarails, they had to pull their financials and Excel spreadsheets, trace them, drop them into Excel, and perform endless lookups. 

Justin explains: “To get details, we had to pull two different reports in Excel and try to get the columns to line up exactly, which was very difficult because they didn’t match at all.

The process was manual and time-consuming.

The solution: Requiring easy-to-use visual and readable data that’s tied together

The finance team at Great Falls Clinic quickly realized that they needed help “speeding up their work environment”. Once they saw Datarails in action they immediately saw the benefits and signed up.

It took us at least a good two days if not a little bit longer to gather everything. And now it takes a matter of 10 minutes to upload and download the reports. The time savings has had a big impact.”

—Justin Donaldson
Assistant Controller, Great Falls Clinic

Gavin adds that clear data visualization and being able to show trending data was also an issue Datarails brought to the team for the first time. 

“Now we can change the visualization of the financial data and trending data by just clicking a button as opposed to going back into Excel and creating different charts.

– Gerald Gavin
Business Intelligence Analyst, Great Falls Clinic

The Great Falls team uses Datarails to pull their different Electronic Health Record (EHR) and financial systems data together. Datarails makes it easy for them to grab the information they need and make it usable to anyone. 

Now, anyone can easily go and check how much was spent on office supplies in a single department or over the last two years. Since that information is in one spot, the data is easily accessible.  

“There are mountains of data there that anybody could quickly pour through. You don’t need to be a genius to be able to figure out the system.”

—Gerald Gavin
Business Intelligence Analyst, Great Falls Clinic

The impact: Having a single source of truth and saving hours put back into better patient care

Gavin shares: “The system as a whole is great. We started with just Excel and now we can do so much.”

Datarails has provided a single source of truth for their finance team. They are now able to present their information to 60+ managers and different departments through Datarails. 

All Datarails users at Great Falls now rely on the platform monthly for their Variance Analysis. Managers know exactly where the variance is coming from. They go in every month and can check their actual versus budget widget and detailed account information. Overall, Gavin added that he feels that there is a more accurate variance reporting system since using Datarails.

The Great Falls Clinic team has also benefited from better business partnering across more than 60 managers and team performance since using Datarails. 

Datarails allows non-finance colleagues the ability to understand data in a user-friendly way. They no longer have to understand and work with complex Excel spreadsheets. The Datarails dashboards, in particular, helps them visually see and understand the data in front of them.  

Datarails “tempers down” fear of Excel to promote Business Partnering

Gerald and Justin both shared how some people get really intimidated by Excel. “Datarails tempers down that fear”.

“Our surgical director, Scott, adapted to Datarails pretty quickly. He took it upon himself, to help out other leaders across the organization and make suggestions on how to make the most of it. He’s helping people in other departments that he probably otherwise wouldn’t talk to.”

The ultimate goal for the Great Falls Clinic team is to keep improving operational efficiency so that staff can focus on other tasks and patient care. Datarails helps them do just that.

Justin says: “We’re saving money just by reducing time on our current operations”. Gerald added, “If we can save all the managers two hours a month and days of work on reporting, it pays for itself over time”

“I would say time-wise… it varies. It saves us anywhere from 20 hours to 40 hours a month at the minimum.”

—Justin Donaldson
Assistant Controller, Great Falls Clinic

Some of the team’s managers and directors do direct patient care as well. They now have an extra hour to provide their patients with more assistance and care.

What’s next for Great Falls Clinic and Datarails?

Every hour saved is an extra hour for more patient care and efficiency. 

Once they’ve gotten all users more familiar with the platform, the next step is to focus on using Datarails for their Budget process. 

They are also looking forward to using the AI capabilities of Datarails to automate many of their tasks.