Sports and Spinal Physio
Sports & Spinal Physio partnered with Breadcrumb Digital to modernise their analytics by developing a foundational reporting solution. Leveraging Microsoft Fabric, the project established a centralised reporting hub, significantly enhancing analytical reporting and preparing the organisation for future data needs.
The client
Sports & Spinal Physio is a leading allied health provider in Queensland, operating approximately 30 locations across the state. With services spanning physiotherapy, podiatry, dietetics, exercise physiology and more, Sports & Spinal have empowered clients on their health and wellbeing journey for over 30 years.
Background
Sports & Spinal commissioned Breadcrumb to develop a curated data store and a suite of reports that would elevate their analytic capabilities. The company’s scale and diversity demanded a robust, scalable analytics solution to support operational and strategic decision-making. After careful evaluation, Microsoft Fabric was selected for its seamless integration with Power BI, advanced data management features, and ability to support scalable, reusable data models.
The project focused on delivering:
- a single source of truth
- a robust semantic model
- a suite of actionable reports for directors, site managers and key stakeholders.
Key reporting areas included revenue, clinician capacity, and client retention.
The skills
The project required the following skills and competencies:
- expertise in Microsoft Fabric pipelines, dataflows, and notebooks for ETL processes
- proficiency with bronze, silver, and gold medallion architecture
- strong business and data analysis skills for stakeholder engagement
- experience with complex APIs and adaptive data loading
- data quality assessment and cleansing strategies
- advanced data modelling for semantic layer development
Mark Habgood
Michael Cowls
Alison Utting
The approach
Discovery phase
The project began with a discovery phase to assess data quality and API usability. Data returned by the source system API was evaluated against requirements and reconciled with internal data.
Solution design was undertaken once the data discovery phase was concluded.
Architecture and implementation
A medallion architecture was adopted:
- bronze (lakehouse): raw data ingested via Fabric pipelines and stored as-is in CSV format
- silver (warehouse): dataflows aggregated and cleaned the data, transforming it into Delta Lake tables
- gold (semantic model): a Power BI semantic model was built on top of the silver layer, enabling reusable measures and relationships.
The implementation was iterative, targeting high-value subject areas first. A Fabric notebook was used to dynamically calculate API parameters, improving flexibility and reducing manual effort.
Handover
Breadcrumb conducted demonstrations and provided documentation to ensure a smooth transition to go-live and enable Sports & Spinal’s technical staff to take ownership of the solution.
Key challenges and solutions
API limitations
The source system’s API frequently returned an error message if the date range of requested data was too large. To handle this issue, the data pipelines were built to loop through a date range returning only a few days of data per call. Although increasing the pipeline run time, it ensured fewer failures and all data landed successfully.
Security requirements
The security requirements for the solution were complex. The implementation needed to ensure that each clinic could only access data relating to their clinic. Furthermore, the clinics needed to be securely grouped by region and business area. In total, around 50 roles were required.
While Fabric supports security at the silver warehouse level, it requires a complex configuration using SQL. Instead, the semantic model was switched to import mode, to take advantage of the simple and flexible row-level security (RLS) feature available in Power BI.
The solution
The Microsoft Fabric solution included:
- a data pipeline calling the source API and storing JSON responses as CSV files
- a Fabric notebook for dynamic parameter logic
- a Fabric Lakehouse for raw data and reference data
- Dataflows to transform and aggregate data into Delta Lake tables
- a Fabric Warehouse for cleansed, structured data
- a Power BI semantic model with relationships and measures
- three Power BI reports tailored to different business needs
The outcome
Staff at Sports & Spinal now benefit from up-to-date, intuitive dashboards that provide clear insights into revenue trends, client retention, and clinician capacity.
Subject matter experts are empowered to work directly with clean, transformed datasets, enabling deeper analysis and faster response to business needs.
The adoption of a Lakehouse architecture has positioned Sports & Spinal for future scalability, allowing new data sources to be integrated seamlessly into the existing framework.
This foundational setup ensures the organisation is well-prepared to evolve its analytics capabilities as its data landscape grows.