Healthfinch: health tech innovator
Hey Vicky! Tell us a bit about what you do.
I work in health tech for a company called healthfinch. We develop the Charlie Practice Automation Platform, which helps health organizations reduce provider burnout, improve quality metrics and enhance patient satisfaction.
It’s all about automating tasks to get more quality from your time – probably why I took to Timely so easily! Essentially, Charlie integrates with EHRs to automate routine workflows, so clinicians can spend more time on direct patient care, and less on non-reimbursable, below-license work.
You’re right up our street. Where do you fit into all of that?
As a Customer Operations Analyst, I focus on the internal efficiency of the Customer Success Team at healthfinch. My role is all about making it easier for my teammates to service our customers, who are generally large enterprise health systems. Time tracking is essential to all of that – it’s the primary means for seeing how the team spends its time and where we can make changes to make tasks more efficient.
So you use time tracking to optimize efficiency, not to bill hours?
Correct. Accurate time tracking is key to helping us manage two important areas of our service: Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and resource planning.
COGS is the amount of money we spend to sell our software product, and time tracking helps us determine the cost of human time in that calculation.
And for resource planning, understanding how long it takes to on-board a customer helps Customer Success employees plan their time, and helps management to distribute work evenly between employees.
Why did you pick Timely for the job?
Well, we were actually using a project management software with built-in time tracking first. It tried to do a lot of different things at once (instead of focusing purely on time tracking), and since it was primarily designed for project management, the quality of time tracking feature suffered as a result. It just wasn’t configured well for our needs.
I tried a few dedicated time trackers out before recommending Timely to my team. It was simply the easiest to use and the “Memory” feature meant we could completely automate our time tracking!
Automation aside, what’s the biggest benefit of Timely?
For starters, our time tracking compliance went from about 60% of total time tracked to almost 100% once we switched to Timely.
But it’s actually directly improved employee happiness too. Two people on my team have used Timely data to show that their day-to-day work strayed significantly from their title and job description. We’ve used that data to put both of those people in more appropriate roles and they’re now much happier.
Amazing! So employees actually feel it’s a tool for them too?
Definitely, and I think that’s evident by the flexibility it gives you. Everyone on our team uses Timely differently – some people put off time tracking until the end of the month, others do it every day. We only require Timely to be updated by the end of the month for our accountant to calculate COGS, so outside of that people can fit it into their workflows as they see fit.
As a healthcare company, how did you feel about automatic time tracking?
For any company dealing with extremely sensitive private individual data, the idea of “automatic tracking” sounds alarming. Timely’s Memory desktop app can be a tricky one for compliance people, but it sounds more invasive than it actually is.
We are able to use Timely’s automatic time tracking even with HIPPA requirements, since the app can only access basic metadata of computer apps, not the information contained within those apps themselves. My main piece of advice for other health tech companies looking to do the same would be to make sure you engage your compliance team at the very start of the process.
Do you have any Timely set-up tips?
Sure. We set up our customers as “Clients” in Timely with two active projects each: Implementation and Support. We then log our tracked activities to each of these, which helps us track implementation time and how long we spend supporting each customer after go-live.
We’re just starting to use tags in Timely to track our most frequently done tasks, so we can quickly understand how long it takes to complete our most common implementation tasks. The idea is to eventually use this data to help our Product team make our internal tooling more efficient.
