⭕️ Build Internal Tools Fast and at Scale
Retooling Supply Chain, Nursing Tools, and Hardware Calibration
At high growth startups, small engineering teams are tasked with supporting exponentially complex operational needs. This ultimately requires that dozens of internal tools be built to support and scale the business. In this post, we’re going to show you how we solve this problem for our healthcare business by using Retool, a frontend app builder.
Today, we have 309 unique Retool apps that drive our operational workflow. Our tooling ranges from utilities that help operators calibrate hardware devices prior to boxing to dozens of dashboards scattered around the company for metric visibility. The use cases for Retool are limitless.
Why Retool?
Healthcare is exceptionally complex and we needed to build tools quickly to solve problems for various teams at Athelas. Earlier, here’s what that work stream looked like for an engineer:
Spend some time scoping out the issue and spec out what needed to be built
Design the backend, write REST endpoints and respective integration tests
Build a frontend and wrangle with UI frameworks to make sure everything is linked properly
Build out state management flows and continue iterating on design & features for a couple more days after initial deploy until the stakeholder is content
Be the primary responsible party for the tool you’ve built since you have the most expertise in the tool’s construction.
Maintaining our own tooling end-to-end took away time from building products that directly impacted our customers: patients & doctors. This all changed once we adopted Retool.
One of our company values is, ‘Speed above all else’. Retool lets us live up to this value by giving us the tools necessary to built internal tooling quickly and with ease. Here are the benefits we found by using Retool:
Data ingestion streamlined: Engineers were no longer required to build endpoints for every database interaction. Retool has automated integrations with virtually every database you can think of - Salesforce, CSVs, Postgres, Google Sheets, Snowflake, etc. Instead of building endpoints, engineers can just write queries that directly read from and write to the database.
Fast frontend development: Retool provides a library of UI components like tables, buttons, graphs, sliders, and more that let us drag-n’-drop entire interfaces in minutes. These elements can be connected via listeners that can trigger various actions (i.e. hitting endpoints, querying databases, sending emails, etc).
Access control: Retool has an in-built access control layer that lets us share tooling with specific departments and ensure that all engineers can view & edit tools ranging the company.
After integrating Retool into our workflow, any engineer can spot a problem at Athelas and build a solution in hours (or even minutes) instead of days and weeks.
Strategies for Using Retool
As mentioned earlier, Retools permeate every corner of our business. Here are three interesting use cases we’ve found:
Building Real Time Metrics Visibility
User Interfaces Over Databases
Building Complex & Interactive Applications
Strategy 1: Build Real Time Metrics Visibility
Retool has two features that make it perfect for building metrics to analyze business operations: dozens of database integrations and full suite charting libraries. You can pool together data from all sorts of databases: Snowflake, Postgres, Databricks, Google Sheets — all into one place. Then, you can write Javascript functions that transform that data which can ultimately be piped into different types of graphs (powered by Plotly.js).
At Athelas, we’ve built dashboards that measure everything: revenue, net growth, retention, customer success, blood diagnostic test completions, referrals, and even inventory management.
Example: Inventory Management
Every day, we ship out thousands of smart healthcare devices to patients around the country. In order to do this, our manufacturing and shipping team executes a variety of tasks: manage inventory, bulk print shipping labels, kickstart shipping enablement, track shipments, and more. We have a unique workflow in the sense that some of our devices are built in-house, and others are sourced from partner organizations, so we needed to customize that aspect of the workflow.
Our RPM Inventory Dashboard gives us visibility into existing device inventory and lets us predict how much additional inventory we need to purchase or build for forecasted onboarded patients. This lets us continually ship without having ‘drought weeks’ where we have a surplus of patients who are eligible for remote patient monitoring, but a deficit of devices.
Strategy 2: User Interfaces Over Databases
Prior to Retool, a lot of the inbound requests for our engineers were about reading & writing to our customer data (i.e. ‘Can you delete this test result?’, ‘Can you edit this user’s contact information?’). Although we were easily able to shell into the production environment and complete these requests, it was not a very scalable solution.
With Retool, we can build a simple application layer over our database so anyone on our team can interact with the data and change, delete, or view information as needed.
Example: Nurse Portal
At Athelas, we have a team of remote nurses who regularly review patient data, write diagnostic notes, and escalate readings that may require further intervention. All of our patient’s medical information exists in secure data stores and our nurses needed a way to see all this data, and add supplementary information.
To address this need, we built ‘Nurse Portal’ - an application layer over our database of patients, test results, hospital information, and more. Nurses have already used this application to submit thousands of reports and the best part is, this application is almost entirely powered by raw SQL queries (rather than dozens of REST endpoints).
Strategy 3: Build Complex & Interactive Applications
Beyond dashboards and simple database interactions, Retool can also be used to build more complex tools. For example, folks have built machine learning image taggers and interactive maps.
With constant additions to their UI library and various data integrations, the possibilities are endless. One non-conventional use case that we’ve had is the calibration utility we built for our signature blood diagnostics device, Athelas One.
Example: Athelas One Calibration
Athelas One is a 3-minute blood diagnostics tool that segments and counts the hematology composition of one’s blood. You can read more about it on our previous engineering blog post. At a very basic level, the Athelas One works by moving a physical stage (which holds a slide with a blood sample) on three axes (X, Y, Z). A stationary microscopic camera then takes high resolution images from multiple sections of the slide. One of the problems we encountered when building this moving stage component of the Athelas One was, “How do we calibrate our software to account for small hardware differences.”
Our hardware and software teams built out a solution that utilized geometry and software calibration - you can read more about it here. Since then, we needed a way to calibrate devices and ensure that device stages were properly set prior to shipping. That’s what led to the Athelas One Device Stage Calibration retool.
This tool directly interacts with Athelas One devices, runs a calibration script, and maps out (with a scatter plot) what the calibrated movement parallelogram looks like. The shape you see above is a visualization of what the movement of the actual motors of one of our devices looked like. Using this tool, our operators can identify whether a stage is properly calibrated or not, and can adjust the tuning parameters accordingly.
Closing
Moving fast is often the main competitive advantage a startups has over incumbents. Moving fast means iterating quickly, automating repetitive workflows, and scaling time non-linearly. Retool gave us the ability to do this by enabling us to build robust internal tooling for departments ranging across the company - fast.
As a final note, our engineering team is always on the lookout for talent. If you’ve gotten this far in this piece and are considering new opportunities, feel free to reach out to us via email at careers@athelas.com or apply to one of our Engineering positions directly on the Athelas careers page. We have interesting and impactful problems ahead, and you’ll have great chances to significantly impact the future of American healthcare.
Disclaimer: This piece was not sponsored nor endorsed by Retool or any Retool affiliates. We are huge fans of the product and wanted to share how we use it.
Shoutout to Ivana Ivanovic from Retool for her help ideating for this piece!
I only now saw the shoutout - still appreciate it! You guys are awesome.