Medical technology company, Bamboo Health, uses Mixpanel to create a seamless experience for its users—improving retention by 10%

Bamboo Health is a rapidly growing medical technology company headquartered in Boston. It hosts more than 25,000 subscribers across the U.S., including medical providers to insurers, hospital systems, and governing agencies. It’s one of the first platforms created for healthcare networks to communicate and collaborate in real-time on patient care coordination. But in order for the platform to provide the most value to networks and their patients, subscribers have to understand Bamboo Health’s many uses.

Providers, insurers, and hospital systems have a lot of responsibilities. They treat patients and must ensure that their medical information is secure. The entire Bamboo Health team takes these responsibilities seriously. When the company was using a different data-analysis platform—a Mixpanel competitor—it encountered limitation after limitation. The leadership team set out to find a replacement. “We had a list of things we definitely needed, things we wanted, and a price range that was comfortable,” says Julia Sanders, Director of Operations. “Mixpanel met our requirements and we had access to all the features. Unlike other products, Mixpanel had no hidden pieces.”

Project managers at Mixpanel are always stepping up when it comes to laws regarding medical records and patient data. “The PMs communicated with our legal team just as a safeguard,” says Julia. “They go the extra mile to understand our complex HIPAA policies and requirements.”

Partnering with new providers and hospital networks plays a significant role in making Bamboo Health so valuable across the healthcare industry. The company’s goal was to make sure subscribers get a seamless user experience and understand all of its offerings.

Inspiring a data-first culture

Corinne Pellows, Senior User Success Lead at Bamboo Health, understood the importance of data transparency across multiple teams. She knew that to create a data-first culture, there had to be a shared understanding of what the data represents and how it’s being tracked. She used Mixpanel’s Lexicon to create a canonical source for events and people profile information, accessible and understandable in nomenclature by all teams—success, support, product, and marketing. When Bamboo Health decides to add new data to Mixpanel, first they determine a clear and intuitive process for business and operations units and initiate a quick implementation so data is live with every new feature launch.

With a solid foundation and trust in its data, Bamboo Health leveraged the Mixpanel Community to gain access to industry best practices, join betas for new features, and share product feedback directly with Mixpanel’s Product team. On more than one occasion, PatientPing submitted a product idea to the Community, which Mixpanel quickly acknowledged, internalized, and built.

Improving Retention

Seeking to improve customer retention and onboarding, Bamboo Health went straight to its Mixpanel data. The team wanted to know which users stayed engaged with the platform, what those users were doing, and how conversion teams could use that data to retain more new users at a higher rate. With that in mind, Bamboo Health referred to Mixpanel’s Retention report. There, the team saw that users with high activity levels within the first week of onboarding had the highest staying power. That begged the question, what made those specific customers so successful in the Bamboo Health application?

For the answer, the team turned to the Mixpanel Signal report to segment users and correlate customer events with active retention. Bamboo Health identified that its Patient Story feature had a very high stickiness value and retention numbers had a positive correlation with new subscribers’ level of engagement with the popular feature within the first week of their Bamboo Health lifecycle.

Bamboo Health’s Mixpanel champions served up this insight to the product teams and a decision was made to modify the onboarding process and decrease the span of time between login and the first Patient Story view. In the first seven days following this tweak, user retention increased 10%.

There are a few things that Julia is eager to start working on. (“I can’t decide which I’m more excited for!”) Bamboo Health’s market operations team gets bombarded with a lot of information. So creating custom alerts that triages important data will be useful and save a lot of time. They also want to A/B test the value of keeping inactive groups more engaged by delivering Patient Stories to them earlier in onboarding and soon after login. “We’re always testing ways to re-engage customers,” says Julia “Since our users’ time is already constrained, anything we can take off their plate—like searching for information about patients—is going to benefit them, and help us grow and improve, too.”