Royal Flying Doctor Service IT Manager Adam Int In theCUBE During Hadoop Summit 2014

The Royal Flying Doctor Service, an Australian nonprofit, uses dashboards from Splunk Inc. to support their day-to-day mission, providing medical care via airplane to remote communities throughout Australia.

The Royal Flying Doctor Service uses Splunk to index data from two main sources: flight trackers from Flight Explorer and temperature sensors from Corintech vaccine-bearing refrigerators and boxes.

Once indexed from the data aggregators, Splunk turns this information into dashboards that help medical personnel stay organized and maintain medicine within acceptable temperatures. The Royal Flying Doctor Service has been able to get real-time visibility of service patterns. Furthermore, Adam Ind, the Royal Flying Doctor Service IT Manager, explained that Splunk helps with day-to-day IT challenges in addition to niche needs like aircraft and vaccine temperature tracking. He said that the nonprofit also uses Splunk to easily and readily get information out to all the staff, or to achieve more granular communication control.

Beyond operational clarity, Ind called out that the Royal Flying Doctor Service uses Big Data to foster relationships with donors. For contributing $50, donors will receive a “patch of sky” — when a Royal Flying Doctor Service airplane flies through a particular geographic area monitored by Flight Explorer and Splunk, the donor will receive a notification. It’s a way to engage donors and raise awareness about services, said Ind.

The Royal Flying Doctor Service first encountered Splunk through a local partner. The “try before you buy” model was essential to the non profit, said Ind, because it needs “to maximize dollars from donors.” The chance to run a trial before buying, Ind noted, “convinced [him] that it definitely would provide value.”

See Ind’s entire segment below.

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Photo by SiliconANGLE