Doximity

Doximity's primary objective is to afford doctors more time to dedicate to patient care. To achieve this, Doximity offers a range of tools that streamline career navigation, networking, scheduling, telehealth, and various other tasks incidental to providing healthcare services.

Challenge

Doximity provides many products and services, they used Jupyter notebooks as their main analytics tool to deeply explore their data to find insights to further improve their offerings. Unfortunately, due to Jupyter notebooks primarily serving the python-savvy data developer many talented data people at Doximity who were more experienced in SQL were not able to get much value out of them.

The Jupyter notebooks were great for the Python enabled folks to do ad-hoc questions and deep dive analyses but the SQL team members could not get them set up properly and found it difficult to collaborate on. Doximity also found that when presenting findings to stakeholders they couldn't share the notebooks directly, instead they had to screenshot different charts inside the notebook to share.

They wanted a cloud hosted notebook where they could write SQL or Python and then create a shareable dashboard. They wanted all of their team members to have a full and rich notebook solution no matter where their expertise fell between the two languages. 

Solution

Doximity chose Hex to empower everyone on their team to do exploratory data and easily share their work securely.

SQL & Python

Hex made querying Snowflake, their cloud data warehouse, simple and secure. Doximity teams can write ad-hoc queries and get answers fast without having to pre-model the data. When they end up creating metrics in Hex that they want to define consistently across the organization they can then build those inside of Snowflake for future users to query directly in Hex.

In each notebook, Hex also pre-installs and manages popular Python packages removing all overhead on getting up and running with a notebook. Every query returns a dataframe which you can then transform, visualize, and prototype scripts on top of with SQL or Python.

Ad Hoc to Operational

Exploratory work often creates insights that should be consistently available to an organization. At Doximity, explorations into their Snowflake costs and Airflow jobs have turned into critical dashboards for monitoring their data stack. 

When someone calls the Doximity support line for help with Dialer it's essential for their support team to have up-to-date information about the user's dialer usage. In the web app the support team uses we have a link to a hex dashboard, using the Hex url param they can surface the proper hex dashboard filtered with all the relevant data of the person calling for help. Making it super fast for a support team member to get the information they need to help the caller.

Many of Doximity’s goals and project end up being both initially explored through Hex (ie exploring the data and presenting ideas to product people) while Hex also continues to follow the lifecycle of the project by providing dashboard with quality/performance metrics of the goal/project and measuring the long-time performance over time once the goal/project is fully productionized.

Sharing Work

All of these Hex dashboards are easily shared with a link to everyone in org. They grant the Hex "Guest" access to everyone at Doximity by default. No access request needed. Making it very easy to quickly share with people who might otherwise have to go through an access request process slowing things down or forcing people to screenshot/share in other ways.

Hex also allows Doximity to set security controls at the data, logic, and dashboard level, this makes sure no one is accessing data they aren’t supposed to throughout the analysis and sharing process.

Results

With Hex and Snowflake, Doximity was able to completely transition off of Jupyter Notebooks. This made it possible to enable over 60 people at Doximity to ask and answer questions and grant the entire company viewer access. In addition to making it easy to explore data in a notebook format, Hex's components feature has allowed Doximity to re-write less code. Doximity already has over 1000 projects on Hex and loves the search and admin features that make it easy to curate their organization’s knowledge.