The Challenge

SimplePractice provides an intuitive and comprehensive platform for mental health and wellness professionals—streamlining scheduling, documentation, billing, and client communication in one secure, compliant environment. Its platform empowers therapists, counselors, and psychiatrists to focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional care.

As SimplePractice scaled, its data requirements evolved. The company relied on Aurora MySQL for transactional storage but needed to move toward a modern analytics platform capable of handling increasing data volumes and near real-time reporting demands.

The organization’s growing user base and data complexity created new challenges:

• Limited analytics performance: Aurora MySQL was optimized for transactions, not complex analytical workloads.
• Slow data refresh rates: Reports and dashboards could not reflect near real-time updates from production systems.
• Scalability and cost concerns: Traditional data solutions were expensive to scale and lacked flexible pricing models.
• Operational efficiency: Teams needed faster query performance and integrated automation to drive insights across the business.
• Security and compliance: As a healthcare platform, SimplePractice had to maintain HIPAA and industry-standard compliance while scaling its infrastructure.

To deliver faster, more reliable analytics and prepare for long-term growth, SimplePractice sought a modern cloud data warehouse aligned with AWS Well-Architected best practices.

The Solution

SimplePractice engaged UTurn Data Solutions, an AWS Advanced Tier Consulting Partner specializing in data and analytics modernization, to design and implement a real-time analytics data platform using Amazon Redshift.

Phase 1: Architecture Assessment and Design

UTurn collaborated with SimplePractice stakeholders to define a future-state data architecture tailored to their business needs and scalability goals.

The engagement began with:

• Conducting stakeholder interviews to understand data flows, latency requirements, and analytics use cases.
• Evaluating data ingestion methods for real-time sync between Aurora MySQL and Redshift.
• Designing an architecture aligned with AWS best practices for security, performance, and cost optimization.

Phase 2: Implementation and Infrastructure-as-Code

To ensure automation, repeatability, and compliance, UTurn implemented Terraform Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to stand up the Redshift production environment.

• Amazon Redshift: Configured as the core analytical data warehouse for high-performance querying and near real-time reporting.
• ETL Infrastructure: Deployed production ETL pipelines to execute data synchronization within five minutes between Aurora MySQL and Redshift.
• Automation & Optimization: Set up Redshift clusters with optimized configurations for compute, storage, and query parallelization.
• Security & Compliance: Incorporated encryption at rest and in transit, IAM least-privilege policies, and network isolation for HIPAA alignment.
• Documentation & Knowledge Transfer: Delivered full architecture documentation and trained SimplePractice’s internal data team for long-term management.

Phase 3: Knowledge Enablement and Future Expansion

Following successful implementation, UTurn provided SimplePractice with hands-on enablement and documentation to ensure the internal team could independently manage the new environment.

With the architecture in production, SimplePractice now has a robust, scalable analytics platform capable of powering future data use cases as the organization continues to grow.

“UTurn helped us transform our data infrastructure into a real-time analytics engine. Their expertise in AWS and Redshift allowed us to accelerate insights and improve performance across our platform.”

– SimplePractice Data Engineering Lead

Tech Stack:

Amazon Redshift · Aurora MySQL · Terraform · AWS IAM · AWS KMS · AWS CloudWatch · ETL Pipelines · AWS Well-Architected Framework

The Outcomes

SimplePractice’s partnership with UTurn delivered measurable improvements in data performance, efficiency, and scalability.

• Real-time analytics: Achieved data sync within five minutes between Aurora MySQL and Redshift, enabling near real-time insights.
• Improved performance: Reduced query execution times and enabled faster decision-making across business teams.
• Scalable infrastructure: Elastic AWS-based platform supports growing data volumes and future analytical use cases.
• Enhanced compliance and security: Architecture aligned with AWS Well-Architected best practices and HIPAA requirements.
• Operational efficiency: Infrastructure-as-Code ensures repeatability, automation, and simplified environment management.

As SimplePractice continues to grow, it is now leveraging its new Redshift-based analytics environment to integrate additional data sources, expand reporting capabilities, and further enhance business intelligence across the organization.

Why UTurn

SimplePractice chose UTurn for its AWS data and analytics expertise, structured modernization approach, and commitment to enabling client success.

Through its Well-Architected, automation-driven methodology, UTurn not only delivered a modern Redshift data platform but also empowered SimplePractice’s internal teams to operate, optimize, and scale independently.

UTurn’s blend of strategy, engineering, and enablement ensures each engagement drives lasting value—helping clients turn data modernization into measurable outcomes.

Ready to modernize your data platform for real-time insights? Partner with UTurn to design and deploy a cloud-native analytics architecture that delivers performance, scalability, and compliance at every level.