Eight Years of Small Fixes That Kept a Health System’s Data Trustworthy
Duke Health’s engagement with Cirrius began with a Health Cloud integration in 2017 and ran on a monthly retainer renewed every year after. The work was rarely dramatic — leads that stopped disappearing, duplicates that stopped appearing — and that was the point.
The Challenge
Headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, Duke Health is an academic health system spanning Duke University Hospital, community hospitals in Durham and Raleigh, and a network of facilities providing primary and specialty care, home and hospice care, clinical research and public education.
At that scale, data problems aren’t dramatic — they’re quiet, and they compound. Critical lead contact information was at risk of being lost outright when leads were deleted from the system. Form submissions for a weight-loss program were creating duplicate records in Salesforce because of a database permissions change on the Drupal side. And across a global healthcare network, there was no standardized locale format, so dates, times and numbers didn’t agree between regions.
None of those would make a headline. All of them erode the thing a marketing and communications team runs on: whether the data can be trusted.
The Solution
The work was diagnostic rather than transformational — each issue traced to its actual cause.
- Automated lead data capture. An automated system securely captured and stored lead email information and IDs, so the data survived deletion rather than vanishing with the record.
- The duplicate submissions traced to their actual cause. The Drupal–Salesforce integration issue was resolved by addressing the MySQL database permissions change behind it — fixing the cause instead of cleaning up the symptom.
- Locale standardization tested before rollout. An ICU locale format analysis was performed in a sandbox, so a change touching every region could be rolled out safely.
The Result
- Lead data secured. automated capture prevented the loss of valuable contact information
- Improved data accuracy. eliminating duplicate entries removed a recurring manual cleanup
- Actionable standardization recommendations. for date, time and numerical formats globally, improving consistency and usability
- A relationship that renewed for eight years. from the 2017 Health Cloud integration through annual managed-services renewals, plus physician relationship management, marketing templates and a GeoPointe-to-Salesforce-Maps migration along the way
Always responsive to all of our needs. Provide deep expertise on all the topics that interest our organization, from data management to security management to email and customer journey design, etc. Always go above and beyond the requested tasks and projects by highlighting potential risks and benefits of the chosen solutions and options. Highly recommend them as a technology and implementation partner.
— Senior IT Analyst, Marketing & Communications, Duke Health
The Pattern
Nobody writes a case study about a permissions bug. But an eight-year relationship isn’t built on transformation projects — it’s built on being the partner who traces the duplicate records back to the actual cause and tests the locale change in a sandbox first.
Want a partner who sweats the details?
Let’s talk about the quiet work that keeps your data trustworthy.