When to Ditch Your Spreadsheets in Digital Health

Globally ~3.2 Billion people use spreadsheets (Google Sheets + Excel) per month. [1]  

We’re not here to tell you that you need to get rid of them for all of your daily activities in your life, but, in digital health specifically, there are specific indicators that might be a sign to your team that it’s time to move on.

In this blog, we’ll review 6 scenarios that signal that it’s time to ditch the spreadsheet.

If there are multiple people constantly updating, editing, and making changes to a spreadsheet, it can lead to data integrity issues for formatting, data entry, and updates that aren’t properly communicated with the rest of the team. 

Often, to do reporting through a spreadsheet, companies have to pull data from an external system, clean it to match their appropriate formatting, and only after that can they utilize the formulas they’ve written to analyze the data. 

At scale, it can be time-consuming to constantly pull data and clean it, and even when doing that, the data is static and cannot be reviewed in real time.

Related to the previous point, while some companies can bear the amount of time, effort, and lag of real-time data, other companies cannot.

When companies need to have a real-time view of their patient population, a static spreadsheet won’t cut it. In many industries, tools like Zapier can help pipe in data to sheets in real-time from external sources without having to build an integration. In healthcare, however, if PHI needs to be transmitted, Zapier isn’t HIPAA-compliant, so it cannot be used.

When your business is just getting started and you’re unsure what data you need and want to be collecting about patients, spreadsheets are great because they’re super flexible, and additional fields can be easily added or removed. 

However, as businesses mature, they typically want to have more structured data. Because of that, having a system that has set profile fields and data input options, ensures less variability around data.

Especially when it comes to patient engagement, some type of automation is typically critical at any type of scale. For example, being able to automatically follow up with certain patients or triggering a specific message to go out to patients based on an attribute in the profile can help companies save hours of work.

However, when this data is being stored in a spreadsheet, achieving this type of automation is typically difficult without having to build something custom or being restricted with what information can be sent to other systems with Zapier.

If you need more control over who can access and modify patient information and want to track changes for auditing purposes, a mature platform can provide better user access control and audit trail features.

While Excel or Sheets both track all changes, with many editors it can be difficult to navigate and identify granular changes. Additionally, because of how both tools are designed, it can be difficult to implement strict role-based access controls for different team members.

While spreadsheets can be an amazing and flexible tool to help your business get off the ground, at scale, they often aren’t practical or efficient.

To help, Tellescope’s HIPAA-compliant CRM provides digital health businesses with a flexible platform that enables more structured patient data, team collaboration, and reporting while empowering teams to create robust automations.

Fill out our form below to learn more.