Tag: aiops digital transformation solutions

Accelerating Out of Crisis with Digital Transformation

Posted on by Subhadeep Datta

Gouri Mahendru

Undoubtedly, business over the past few months has been unlike ever before. With the COVID-19 pandemic shutting physical stores, restaurants, and offices the world over, organizations of all shapes and sizes were compelled to move their businesses online and we were reminded of the power of technology as an enabler of success.

As businesses look beyond the immediate impacts of COVID-19, it’s time to adopt a connected enterprise mindset and accelerate digital transformation.

The New Customer Experience

When lockdown hit, customer service teams on the frontline found themselves at the centre of a perfect storm. Dealing with both the instant switch to remote working and staffing shortages due to the pandemic, they had to manage a huge influx in phone and email enquiries from customers struggling to keep their cool as they tried to rearrange cancelled bookings and secure refunds.

From market research, we know there is still a significant disconnect between the service businesses believe they are delivering, and the service customers believe they are getting. While the situation remains precarious, now is the time to focus on delivering fast, transparent, and verified support. Putting the right technology at the heart of this transformation will be key to success.

Reimagining CX in the wake of the pandemic

Many businesses shifted their operations online to continue selling safely through the pandemic, with worldwide spending on digital transformation technologies and services expected to rise by over 10% in 2020.

This has opened a vast array of new communication platforms on which organizations can engage with their customers. But businesses must ensure they are strengthening the bridge between their different channels to ensure a consistent customer experience. Omnichannel strategies have become a necessity, as companies find new ways to interact with their customer base on the channels they are using the most. Taking support to their customers rather than bringing them to support is critical.

Here are some useful tips for reinventing your customer experience with a supercharged omnichannel approach.

1.     No two customers are the same

People like to be treated as individuals and want to raise issues in the environment that they’re most comfortable in. It’s no good for businesses to invest heavily in one channel at the risk of another, as they could end up isolating a big customer segment.

Being able to support customers through email, phone, and chat services in a single, streamlined solution can help businesses deliver a better overall experience. The last thing customers want to do is repeat themselves when they switch between a chatbot interaction, text, email, or phone exchange. Offering a seamless experience means a customer’s query is logged once and shared across all communication channels, reducing the likelihood of them becoming dissatisfied with the service they are receiving.

2.     Look inward, as well as outward

It’s not just your customer-facing technology that you should consider, you also need to think about the internal systems that can help improve your target market’s perception of the company. Taking an omnichannel approach to customer communication provides multiple platforms to collect customer data. With more data, you can build a better picture of the average customer journey – from awareness and consideration to purchase – and deliver a better experience for each of them.

By offering your customers multiple touchpoints to interact with your brand, they can get everything they need from a single source of truth, without having to switch between the channels.

3.     Tweak and optimize campaigns as necessary

To succeed in hitting the right tone, keeping existing customers, and attracting new ones, you should understand exactly which marketing campaigns are resonating, and which aren’t. The results right now are likely to be very different to ‘business as usual’ – so the approach taken needs to be tailored to each customer accordingly.

Surveys of sales leaders during COVID-19 found that 62% have directed their teams to spend more time in their CRM system, looking at what insights they can glean from it. The CRM system is a powerful tool for collecting data and learning more about each customer, with the goal of delivering a better experience and building trust between buyer and seller.

Whatever systems you deploy, it’s important to be mindful of how your customers want to interact with you, not the other way around. As customers look to support the businesses that are looking after them the most, offering a consistent experience across your channels is key to securing loyal customers and repeat business.

Smarter CX starts with AI

There is a growing AI revolution taking place in customer service centers. Our own research found that a quarter of businesses want to use AI to improve their customers’ experience of their brand. This is hugely encouraging for the industry, but organizations shouldn’t invest in AI just for the sake of it. They need to find areas in which its use will see the most value.

For example, over a quarter (27%) said that their biggest frustration when dealing with customer service agents was being left on hold for too long. This issue has been exacerbated further by the huge volume of enquiries customer support teams now find themselves facing, with some customers waiting hours before getting through. AI-powered chatbots can remove some of this backlog by automating simple questions and routing customer chats that require urgent attention through to human service agents.

We know that consumers prize human interaction, especially during a time when it is so limited. For this reason, AI should only be brought into augment, not replace human customer service agents. In doing so, businesses can develop AIs that mimic the behaviour of their best agents, while freeing up their time to focus on trickier cases. This will ultimately lead to more positive outcomes, better all-round customer experiences, greater brand loyalty, and increased long-term value.

About the Author –

Gouri is part of the Quality Management function at GAVS, handling the Operations and Delivery excellence within ZIF Command Centres. She is passionate about driving business excellence through innovative IT Service Management in the Digital era and always looks for ways to deliver business value.
When she’s not playing with data and pivoting tables, she spends her time cooking, watching dramas and thrillers, and exploring places in and around the city.

From Good to Great – DNA of a Successful Leader (PART II)

Posted on by Subhadeep Datta

Rajeswari S

“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others” – Jack Welch

In my previous article, I wrote about a few qualities that make for a good leader. In this article, I discuss a few ways in which a leader can become great from good.

  1. Seek to understand and be understood: Seeking feedback and taking criticisms is not an easy task for anyone. When you are holding a leadership position and people look up to you, it is even more difficult. But a true leader does exactly that and does it HONESTLY. A good leader focuses on the needs of others. When you are open to feedback and constructive criticism, you have the right to give the same to others. Make genuine efforts to listen when your team speaks. Great leaders listen first, speak second.
  1. Be there: Being there is just not about being the center of attention. You need to be there for your people during critical times and help members across your organization find solutions to roadblocks. Mentorship is an art. Your people should accept you as their mentor and gaining that space is not as easy.
  1. Demonstrate empathy and compassion: This quality is an extension of the previous point. When you are laser-focused on your goals, it can be difficult to focus on the needs of others around. You need to know not only how your actions affect people, but what you need to do to show understanding and sympathy for others.
  1. Get curious: Leaders are often driven with an insatiable desire to learn; they push the limits of what’s possible and explore opportunities as a continuous process. Expanding your mind can often be as simple as reading and asking ‘why’ more often. Curiosity can help you to get to the root of a problem and promote better ideas and thoughts. Leaders think and embrace others’ ideas. A correctly asked question with the right intention could lead to many opportunities and achievements.
  1. Be in the know: Leaders go out of their way to stay educated and up-to-date. Intentional learning is a continuous process of acquiring, understanding information with the goal of making yourself more intelligent and prepared on a specific subject. People cannot always see your work, it is how you talk that creates the first impression. When you make an informed or up-to-date speech, you get the edge over others.
  1. Enjoy the ride: Smart leaders know that their journey is often more rewarding than their destination. Which is why they take the time to enjoy life and what they have already achieved because they know nothing can last forever. When you can enjoy the journey, you’ll be amazed by what you can learn. A great leader embraces each day as an experience. They grow every day!
  1. Celebrate and Connect: Leaders working toward a brighter future share their success with the people they care about – business partners and customers, family and friends, employees, and their families, etc. Great leaders celebrate other’s victory as their own; this creates a high-performing team and culture. A true captain takes time to know about the people around her and their lives. It goes a long way in running not only a successful business but a happy one too!
  1. Pursue new experiences: Mountains are interesting to watch and hike. Why? Because of its rugged terrain and unpredictable nature. Straight roads are boring, that is why we sleep on a highway drive! An intelligent leader is never complacent and constantly pushes himself out of his comfort zone. To stay prepared for any bumps along the road, leaders actively pursue new experiences that allow them to learn and grow. From starting a new venture to coaching a little league to diversifying the business.

Unique brands of Leadership

A quick look at successful CEOs, new-age entrepreneurs, and their unique leadership mantras:

Ø  Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google LLC

Leadership mantra:

  1. Never forget your roots
  2. Focus more on others’ success than your own
  3. Empower the youth
  4. Stay humble and keep learning

Ø  Bill Gates, Founder, Microsoft

Leadership mantra: 

  1. Knowledge is different from wisdom
  2. Take a step-by-step approach to make progress towards your vision
  3. Empower people to create new opportunities to explore ideas; Embrace creativity
  4. Be caring and passionate

Ø  Suchi Mukherjee, CEO, Limeroad, an Indian online marketplace
Leadership mantra: True leadership is about enabling the voice of the youngest team member.

Ø  Amit Agarwal, CEO, NoBroker, a real estate search portal
Leadership mantra: Leaders provide employees the opportunity to be leaders themselves.

References   

About the Author –

Rajeswari is part of the IP team at GAVS. She is involved in technical and creative content development for the past 13 years. She is passionate about music and writing and spends her free time watching movies or going for a highway drive.

 

Tuning Agile Delivery for Customer and Employee Success

Posted on by Subhadeep Datta

Ashish Joseph

What is Agile?

Agile has been very popular in the software development industry for empowering delivery to be more efficient and effective. It is a common misconception for Agile to be thought of as a framework or a process that follows a methodology for software development. But Agile is a set of values and principles. It is a collection of beliefs that teams can use for decision making and optimizing project deliveries. It is customer-centric and flexible, helping teams adapt accordingly. It doesn’t make the decision for the team. Instead, it gives a foundation for teams to make decisions that can result in a stellar execution of the project.

According to the Agile Manifesto, teams can deliver better by prioritizing the following over the other.

  • Individuals and Interactions over process and tools
  • Working Model over Comprehensive Documentation
  • Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
  • Responding to Changes over following a Plan

With respect to Software Development, Agile is an iterative approach to project management which help teams deliver results with measurable customer value. The approach is designed to be faster and ensures the quality of delivery that is aided with periodic customer feedbacks. Agile aims to break down the requirement into smaller portions, results of which can be continuously evaluated with a natural mechanism to respond to changes quickly.

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Why Agile?

The world is changing, and businesses must be ready to adapt to how the market demands change over time. When we look at the Fortune 500 companies from 1955, 88% of them perished. Nearly half of the S&P 500 companies is forecasted to be replaced every ten years. The only way for organizations to survive is to innovate continuously and understand the pulse of the market every step of the way. An innovative mindset helps organizations react to changes and discover new opportunities the market can offer them from time to time.

Agile helps organizations execute projects in an everchanging environment. The approach helps break down modules for continuous customer evaluation and implement changes swiftly.

The traditional approach to software project management uses the waterfall model, where we Plan, Build, Test, Review and Deploy. But this existing approach would result in iterations in the plan phase whenever there are deviations in the requirement with respect to the market. When teams choose agile, it helps them respond to changes in the marketplace and implement customer feedback without going off the plan. Agile plans are designed in such a manner to include continuous feedback and its corresponding changes. Organizations should imbibe the ability to adapt and respond fast to new and changing market demands. This foundation is imperative for modern software development and delivery.

Is Agile a right fit for my Customer? People who advocate Agile development claim that Agile projects succeed more often than waterfall delivery models. But this claim has not been validated by statistics. A paper titled “How Agile your Project should be?” by Dr. Kevin Thompson from Kevin Thompson Consulting, provides a perspective from a mathematical point of view for both Agile and Waterfall project management. Here both approaches were followed for the same requirements and were also affected by the same unanticipated variables. The paper focused on the statistical evidence to support the validity of both the options to evaluate the fit.

While assessing the right approach, the following questions need to be asked

  • Are the customer requirements for the project complete, clear and stable?
  • Can the project effort estimation be easily predicted?
  • Has a project with similar requirements been executed before?

If the answer to all the above questions are Yes, then Agile is not the approach to be followed.

The Agile approach provides a better return on investment and risk reduction when there is high uncertainty of different variables in the project. When the uncertainty is low, waterfall projects tend to be more cost effective than agile projects.

Optimizing Agile Customer Centricity

Customer centricity should be the foundation of all project deliveries. This help businesses align themselves to the customer’s mission and vision with respect to the project at hand. While we consider an Agile approach to a project in a dynamic and changing environment, the following are some principles that can help organizations align themselves better with their customer goals.

  • Prioritizing Customer Satisfaction through timely and continuous delivery of requirements.
  • Openness to changing requirements, regardless of the development phase, to enable customers to harness the change for their competitive advantage in the market.
  • Frequent delivery of modules with a preference towards shorter timelines.
  • Continuous collaboration between management and developers to understand the functional and non-functional requirements better.
  • Measuring progress through the number of working modules delivered.
  • Improving velocity and agility in delivery by concentrating on technical excellence and good design.
  • Periodic retrospection at the end of each sprint to improve delivery effectiveness and efficiency.
  • Trusting and supporting motivated individuals to lead projects on their own and allowing them to experiment.

Since Agile is a collection of principles and values, its real utility lies in giving teams a common foundation to make good decisions with actionable intelligence to deliver measurable value to their customers.

Agile Empowered Employee Success

A truly Agile team makes their decisions based on Agile values and principles. The values and principles have enough flexibility to allow teams to develop software in the ways that work best for their market situation while providing enough direction to help them to continually move towards their full potential. The team and employee empowerment through these values and principles aid in the overall performance.

Agile not only improves the team but also the environment around which it is established by helping employees to be compliant with respect to audit and governance.  It reduces the overall project cost for dynamic requirements and focuses on technical excellence along with an optimized process for its delivery. The 14th Annual State of Agile Report 2020 published by StateofAgile.com surveyed 40,000 Agile executives to get insights into the application of Agile across different areas of enterprises. The report surveyed different Agile techniques that contributed most towards the employee success of the organization. The following are some of the most preferred Agile techniques that helped enhance the employee and team performances.

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All the above Agile techniques help teams and individuals to introspect their actions and understand areas of improvement in real time with periodic qualitative and quantitative feedback. Each deliverable from multiple cross functional teams can be monitored, tracked and assessed under a single roof. All these techniques collectively bring together an enhanced form of delivery and empower each team to realize their full potential.
Above all, Agile techniques help teams to feel the pulse of the customer every step of the way. The openness to change regardless of the phase, helps them to map all the requirements leading to an overall customer satisfaction coupled with employee success.

Top 5 Agile Approaches

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A Truly Agile Organization

Majority of the Agile approach has been concentrated towards development, IT, and Operations. However, organizations should strive towards effective alignment and coordination across all departments. Organizations today are aiming for greater expansion of agility into areas beyond building, deploying, and maintaining software. At the end of the day, Agile is not about the framework. It is all about the Agile values and principles the organizations believe in for achieving their mission and vision in the long run.

About the Author –

Ashish Joseph is a Lead Consultant at GAVS working for a healthcare client in the Product Management space. His areas of expertise lie in branding and outbound product management. He runs a series called #BizPective on LinkedIn and Instagram focusing on contemporary business trends from a different perspective. Outside work, he is very passionate about basketball, music, and food.

Patient Segmentation Using Data Mining Techniques

Posted on by Subhadeep Datta
Srinivasan Sundararajan

Srinivasan Sundararajan

Patient Segmentation & Quality Patient Care

As the need for quality and cost-effective patient care increases, healthcare providers are increasingly focusing on data-driven diagnostics while continuing to utilize their hard-earned human intelligence. Simply put, data-driven healthcare is augmenting the human intelligence based on experience and knowledge.

Segmentation is the standard technique used in Retail, Banking, Manufacturing, and other industries that needs to understand their customers to provide better customer service. Customer segmentation defines the behavioral and descriptive profiles of customers. These profiles are then used to provide personalized marketing programs and strategies for each group.

In a way, patients are like customers to healthcare providers. Though the element of quality of care takes precedence than profit-making intention, a similar segmentation of patients will immensely benefit the healthcare providers, mainly for the following reasons:

  • Customizing the patient care based on their behavior profiles
  • Enabling a stronger patient engagement
  • Providing the backbone for data-driven decisions on patient profile
  • Performing advanced medical research like launching a new vaccine or trial

The benefits are obvious and individual hospitals may add more points to the above list; the rest of the article is about how to perform the patient segmentation using data mining techniques.

Data Mining for Patient Segmentation

In Data Mining a, segmentation or clustering algorithm will iterate over cases in a dataset to group them into clusters that contain similar characteristics. These groupings are useful for exploring data, identifying anomalies in the data, and creating predictions. Clustering is an unsupervised data mining (machine learning) technique used for grouping the data elements without advance knowledge of the group definitions.

K-means clustering is a well-known method of assigning cluster membership by minimizing the differences among items in a cluster while maximizing the distance between clusters. Clustering algorithm first identifies relationships in a dataset and generates a series of clusters based on those relationships. A scatter plot is a useful way to visually represent how the algorithm groups data, as shown in the following diagram. The scatter plot represents all the cases in the dataset, and each case is a point on the graph. The cluster points on the graph illustrate the relationships that the algorithm identifies.

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One of the important parameters for a K-Means algorithm is the number of clusters or the cluster count. We need to set this to a value that is meaningful to the business problem that needs to be solved. However, there is good support in the algorithm to find the optimal number of clusters for a given data set, as explained next.

To determine the number of clusters for the algorithm to use, we can use a plot of the within cluster’s sum of squares, by the number of clusters extracted. The appropriate number of clusters to use is at the bend or ‘elbow’ of the plot. The Elbow Method is one of the most popular methods to determine this optimal value of k i.e. the number of clusters. The following code creates a curve.

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In this example, based on the graph, it looks like k = 4 would be a good value to try.

Reference Patient Segmentation Using K-Means Algorithm in GAVS Rhodium Platform

In GAVS Rhodium Platform, which helps healthcare providers with Patient Data Management and Patient Data Sharing, there is a reference implementation of Patient Segmentation using K-Means algorithm. The following are the attributes that are used based on a publicly available Patient admit data (no personal information used in this data set). Again in the reference implementation sample attributes are used and in a real scenario consulting with healthcare practitioners will help to identify the correct attributes that is used for clustering.

 To prepare the data for clustering patients, patients must be separated along the following dimensions:

  • HbA1c: Measuring the glycated form of hemoglobin to obtain the three-month average of blood sugar.
  • Triglycerides: Triglycerides are the main constituents of natural fats and oils. This test indicates the amount of fat or lipid found in the blood.
  • FBG: Fasting Plasma Glucose test measures the amount of glucose levels present in the blood.
  • Systolic: Blood Pressure is the pressure of circulating blood against the walls of Blood Vessels. This test relates to the phase of the heartbeat when the heart muscle contracts and pumps blood from the chambers into the arteries.
  • Diastolic: The diastolic reading is the pressure in the arteries when the heart rests between beats.
  • Insulin: Insulin is a hormone that helps move blood sugar, known as glucose, from your bloodstream into your cells. This test measures the amount of insulin in your blood.
  • HDL-C: Cholesterol is a fat-like substance that the body uses as a building block to produce hormones. HDL-C or good cholesterol consists primarily of protein with a small amount of cholesterol. It is considered to be beneficial because it removes excess cholesterol from tissues and carries it to the liver for disposal. The test for HDL cholesterol measures the amount of HDL-C in blood.
  • LDL-C: LDL-C or bad cholesterol present in the blood as low-density lipoprotein, a relatively high proportion of which is associated with a higher risk of coronary heart disease. This test measures the LDL-C present in the blood.
  • Weight: This test indicates the heaviness of the patient.

The above tests are taken for the patients during the admission process.

The following is the code snippet behind the scenes which create the patient clustering.

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The below is the output cluster created from the above algorithm.

Just from this sample, healthcare providers can infer the patient behavior and patterns based on their creatinine and glucose levels, in real-life situations other different attributes can be used.

AI will play a major role in future healthcare data management and decision making and data mining algorithms like K-Means provide an option to segment the patients based on the attributes which will improve the quality of patient care.

About the Author –

Srini is the Technology Advisor for GAVS. He is currently focused on Healthcare Data Management Solutions for the post-pandemic Healthcare era, using the combination of Multi Modal databases, Blockchain and Data Mining. The solutions aim at Patient data sharing within Hospitals as well as across Hospitals (Healthcare Interoprability), while bringing more trust and transparency into the healthcare process using patient consent management, credentialing and zero knowledge proofs.

Customer Focus Realignment in a Pandemic Economy

Posted on by Subhadeep Datta

Ashish Joseph

Business Environment Overview

The Pandemic Economy has created an environment that has tested businesses to either adapt or perish. The atmosphere has become a quest for the survival of the fittest. On the brighter side, organizations have stepped up and adapted to the crisis in a way that they have worked faster and better than ever before. 

During this crisis, companies have been strategic in understanding their focus areas and where to concentrate on the most. From a high-level perspective, we can see that businesses have focused on recovering the sources of their revenues, rebuilding operations, restructuring the organization, and accelerating their digital transformation initiatives. In a way, the pandemic has forced companies to optimize their strategies and harness their core competencies in a hyper-competitive and survival environment.

Need for Customer Focused Strategies

A pivotal and integral strategy to maintain and sustain growth is for businesses to avoid the churn of their existing customers and ensure the quality of delivery can build their trust for future collaborations and referrals. Many organizations, including GAVS, have understood that Customer Experience and Customer Success is consequential for customer retention and brand affinity. 

Businesses should realign themselves in the way they look at sales funnels. A large portion of the annual budget is usually allocated towards the top of the funnel activities to acquire more customers. But companies with customer success engraved in their souls, believe in the ideology that the bottom of the funnel feeds the top of the funnel. This strategy results in a self-sustaining and recurring revenue model for the business.

An independent survey conducted by the Customer Service Managers and Professionals Journal has found that companies pay 6x times more to acquire new customers than to keep an existing one. In this pandemic economy, the costs for customer acquisition will be much higher than before as organizations must be very frivolous in their spending. The best step forward is to make sure the companies strive for excellence in their customer experience and deliver measurable value to them. A study conducted by Bain and Company titled “Prescription for Cutting Costs” talks about how increasing customer retention by 5% increases profits from 25%-95%. 

The path to a sustainable and high growth business is to adopt customer-centric strategies that yield more value and growth for its customers. Enhancing customer experience should be prime and proper governance must be in place to monitor and gauge strategies. Governance in the world of the customer experience must revolve around identifying and managing resources needed to drive sustained actions, establishing robust procedures to organize processes, and ensuring a framework for stellar delivery.

Scaling to ever-changing customer needs

A research body called Walker Information conducted an independent research on B2B companies focusing on key initiatives that drive customer experiences and future growth. The study included various customer experience leaders, senior executives, and influencers representing a diverse set of business models in the industry. They published the report titled “Customer 2020: A Progress Report” and the following are strategies that best meet the changing needs of customers in the B2B landscape.

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Over 45% of the leaders highlighted the importance of developing a customer-centric culture that simplifies products and processes for the business. Now the question that we need to ask ourselves is, how do we as an organization scale up to these demands of the market? I strongly believe that each of us, in the different roles we play in the organization, has an impact.

The Executive Team can support more customer experience strategies, formulate success metrics, measure the impact of customer success initiatives, and ensure alignment with respect to the corporate strategy.

The Client Partners can ensure that they represent the voice of the customer, plot a feasible customer experience roadmap, be on point with customer intelligence data, and ensure transparency and communication with the teams and the customers. 

The cross-functional team managers and members can own and execute process improvements, personalize and customize customer journeys, and monitor key delivery metrics.

When all these members work in unison, the target goal of delivery excellence coupled with customer success is always achievable.

Going Above and Beyond

Organizations should aim for customers who can be retained for life. The retention depends upon how much a business is willing to go the extra mile to add measurable value to its customers. Business contracts should evolve into partnerships that collaborate on their competitive advantages that bring solutions to real-world business problems. 

As customer success champions, we should reevaluate the possibilities in which we can make a difference for our customers. By focusing on our core competencies and using the latest tools in the market, we can look for avenues that can bring effort savings, productivity enhancements, process improvements, workflow optimizations, and business transformations that change the way our customers do business. 

After all, We are GAVS. We aim to galvanize a sense of measurable success through our committed teams and innovative solutions. We should always stride towards delivery excellence and strive for customer success in everything we do.

About the Author –

Ashish Joseph is a Lead Consultant at GAVS working for a healthcare client in the Product Management space. His areas of expertise lie in branding and outbound product management.

He runs a series called #BizPective on LinkedIn and Instagram focusing on contemporary business trends from a different perspective. Outside work, he is very passionate about basketball, music, and food.

Patient 360 & Journey Mapping using Graph Technology

Posted on by Subhadeep Datta

Srinivasan Sundararajan

360 Degree View of Patient

With rising demands for quality and cost-effective patient care, healthcare providers are focusing on data-driven diagnostics while continuing to utilize their hard-earned human intelligence. In other words, data-driven healthcare is augmenting human intelligence.

360 Degree View of Patient, as it is called, plays a major role in delivering the required information to the providers. It is a unified view of all the available information about a patient. It could include but is not limited to the following information:

  • Appointments made by the patients
  • Interaction with different doctors
  • Medications prescribed by the doctors
  • Patient’s relationship to other patients within the eco-systems specially to identify the family history related risks
  • Patient’s admission to hospitals or other healthcare facilities
  • Discharge and ongoing care
  • Patient personal wellness activities
  • Patient billing and insurance information
  • Linkages to the same patient in multiple disparate databases within the same hospital
  • Information about a patient’s involvement in various seminars, medical-related conferences, and other events

Limitations of Current Methods

As evident in most hospitals, these information are usually scattered across multiple data sources/databases. Hospitals typically create a data warehouse by consolidating information from multiple resources and try to create a unified database. However, this approach is done using relational databases and the relational databases rely on joining tables across entities to arrive at a complete picture. The RDBMS is not meant to handle relationships which extend to multiple hops and require drilling down to many levels.

Role of Graph Technology & Graph Databases

A graph database is a collection of nodes (or entities typically) and edges (or relationships). A node represents an entity (for example, a person or an organization) and an edge represents a relationship between the two nodes that it connects (for example, friends). Both nodes and edges may have properties associated with them.

While there are multiple graph databases in the market today like, Neo4J, JanusGraph, TigerGraph, the following technical discussions pertain to graph database that is part of SQL server 2019. The main advantage of this approach is that it helps utilize the best RDBMS features wherever applicable, while keeping the graph database options for complex relationships like 360 degree view of patients, making it a true polyglot persistence architecture.

As mentioned above, in SQL Server 2019 a graph database is a collection of node tables and edge tables. A node table represents an entity in a graph schema. An edge table represents a relationship in a graph. Edges are always directed and connect two nodes. An edge table enables users to model many-to-many relationships in the graph. Normal SQL Insert statements are used to create records into both node and edge tables.

While the node tables and edge tables represent the storage of graph data there are some specialized commands which act as extension of SQL and help with traversing between the nodes to get the full details like patient 360 degree data.

MATCH statement

MATCH statement links two node tables through a link table, such that complex relationships can be retrieved. An example,

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SHORTEST_PATH statement

It finds the relationship path between two node tables by performing multiple hops recursively. It is one of the useful statements to find the 360 degree of a patient.

There are more options and statements as part of graph processing. Together it will help identify complex relationships across business entities and retrieve them.

GRAPH processing In Rhodium  

As mentioned in my earlier articles (Healthcare Data Sharing & Zero Knowledge Proofs in Healthcare Data Sharing), GAVS Rhodium framework enables Patient and Data Management and Patient Data Sharing and graph databases play a major part in providing patient 360 as well as for provider (doctor) credentialing data. The below screen shots show the samples from reference implementation.

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Patient Journey Mapping

Typically, a patient’s interaction with the healthcare service provider goes through a cycle of events. The goal of the provider organization is to make this journey smooth and provide the best care to the patients. It should be noted that not all patients go through this journey in a sequential manner, some may start the journey at a particular point and may skip some intermediate journey points. Proper data collection of events behind patient journey mapping will also help with the future prediction of events which will ultimately help with patient care.

Patient 360 data collection plays a major role in building the patient journey mapping. While there could be multiple definitions, the following is one of the examples of mapping between patient 360-degree events and patient journey mapping.

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The below diagram shows an example of a patient journey mapping information.

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Understanding patients better is essential for improving patient outcomes. 360 degree of patients and patient journey mapping are key components for providing such insights. While traditional technologies lack the need of providing those links, graph databases and graph processing will play a major role in patient data management.

About the Author –

Srini is the Technology Advisor for GAVS. He is currently focused on Data Management Solutions for new-age enterprises using the combination of Multi Modal databases, Blockchain and Data Mining. The solutions aim at data sharing within enterprises as well as with external stakeholders.

Enabling Success through Servant Leadership

Posted on by Subhadeep Datta
Vasu

Vasudevan Gopalan

Servant Leadership – does it seem like a dichotomy? Well, it is not so. In this new age of Agile and Digital Transformation, this is a much sought-after trait in Leaders by their Organizations.

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The goal of Servant Leadership is to Serve. It involves the leader supporting and empowering their teams and thus enabling Success. The paradigm shift in the thought process here is that – instead of the people working to serve the leader, the leader exists to serve the team. And do remember that a Servant Leader is a Servant first, Leader next – not the other way around 😊

In today’s Agile world of Software Delivery, the Scrum Master needs to be a Servant Leader.

So, what are the characteristics of a Servant Leader?

  • Self-aware
  • Humble
  • Integrity
  • Result-oriented
  • Has foresight
  • Listener
  • Doesn’t abuse authority
  • Intellectual authority
  • Collaborative
  • Trusting
  • Coach
  • Resolves conflict

As you can see here, it is all about achieving results through people empowerment. When people realize that their Leader helps every team member build a deep sense of community and belonging in the workplace, there is a higher degree of accountability and responsibility carried out in their work.

Ultimately, a Servant Leader wants to help others thrive, and is happy to put the team’s needs before their own. They care about people and understand that the best results are produced not through top-down delegation but by building people up. People need psychological safety and autonomy to be creative and innovative.

As Patrick Lencioni describes, Humility is one of the 3 main pillars for ideal team players. Humility is “the feeling or attitude that you have no special importance that makes you better than others”.

Behaviors of Humble Agile Servant Leaders

  • Deep listening and observing
  • Openness towards new ideas from team members
  • Appreciating strengths and contributions of team members
  • Seek contributions of team members to overcome challenges and limitations together
  • Be coachable coaches – i.e. Coach others, and simultaneously be easy to be coached by others

Humility’s foe – Arrogance

In Robert Hogan’s terms, arrogance makes “the most destructive leaders” and “is the critical factor driving flawed decision-makers” who “create the slippery slope to organizational failure”.

Humility in Practice

A study on the personality of CEOs of some of the top Fortune 1000 Companies shows that what makes these companies successful as they are is the CEOs’ humility. These CEOs share two sets of qualities seemingly contradictory but always back each other up strongly:

  • They are “self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy”. They are modest. And they admit mistakes.
  • At the same time, behind this reserved exterior, they are “fiercely ambitious, tremendously competitive, tenacious”. They have strong self-confidence and self-esteem. And they’re willing to listen to feedback and solicit input from knowledgeable subordinates.

According to Dr. Robert Hogan (2018), these characteristics of humility create “an environment of continuous improvement”.

What are the benefits of being a humble Servant Leader?

  • Increase inclusiveness – the foundation of trust
  • Strengthen the bond with peers – the basis of well-being
  • Deepen awareness
  • Improve empathy
  • Increase staff engagement

So, what do you think would be the outcomes for organizations that have practicing Servant Leaders?

Source:

https://www.bridge-global.com/blog/5-excellent-tips-to-become-a-supercharged-agile-leader/

About the Author –

Vasu heads the Engineering function for A&P. He is a Digital Transformation leader with ~20 years of IT industry experience spanning across Product Engineering, Portfolio Delivery, Large Program Management, etc. Vasu has designed and delivered Open Systems, Core Banking, Web / Mobile Applications, etc. Outside of his professional role, Vasu enjoys playing badminton and is a fitness enthusiast.

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

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Dr. Ramjan Shaik

Scientific progress is about many small advancements and occasional big leaps. Medicine is no exception. In a time of rapid healthcare transformation, health organizations must quickly adapt to evolving technologies, regulations, and consumer demands. Since the inception of electronic health record (EHR) systems, volumes of patient data have been collected, creating an atmosphere suitable for translating data into actionable intelligence. The growing field of artificial intelligence (AI) has created new technology that can handle large data sets, solving complex problems that previously required human intelligence. AI integrates these data sources to develop new insights on individual health and public health.

Highly valuable information can sometimes get lost amongst trillions of data points, costing the industry around $100 billion a year. Providers must ensure that patient privacy is protected, and consider ways to find a balance between costs and potential benefits. The continued emphasis on cost, quality, and care outcomes will perpetuate the advancement of AI technology to realize additional adoption and value across healthcare. Although most organizations utilize structured data for analysis, valuable patient information is often “trapped” in an unstructured format. This type of data includes physician and patient notes, e-mails, and audio voice dictations. Unstructured data is frequently richer and more multifaceted. It may be more difficult to navigate, but unstructured data can lead to a plethora of new insights. Using AI to convert unstructured data to structured data enables healthcare providers to leverage automation and technology to enhance processes, reduce the staff required to monitor patients while filling gaps in healthcare labor shortages, lower operational costs, improve patient care, and monitor the AI system for challenges.

AI is playing a significant role in medical imaging and clinical practice. Providers and healthcare organizations have recognized the importance of AI and are tapping into intelligence tools. Growth in the AI health market is expected to reach $6.6 billion by 2021 and to exceed $10 billion by 2024.  AI offers the industry incredible potential to learn from past encounters and make better decisions in the future. Algorithms could standardize tests, prescriptions, and even procedures across the healthcare system, being kept up-to-date with the latest guidelines in the same way a phone’s operating system updates itself from time to time.

There are three main areas where AI efforts are being invested in the healthcare sector.

  • Engagement – This involves improvising on how patients interact with healthcare providers and systems.
  • Digitization – AI and other digital tools are expected to make operations more seamless and cost-effective.
  • Diagnostics – By using products and services that use AI algorithms diagnosis and patient care can be improved.

AI will be most beneficial in three other areas namely physician’s clinical judgment and diagnosis, AI-assisted robotic surgery, and virtual nursing assistants.

Following are some of the scenarios where AI makes a significant impact in healthcare:

  • AI can be utilized to provide personalized and interactive healthcare, including anytime face-to-face appointments with doctors. AI-powered chatbots can be powered with technology to review the patient symptoms and recommend whether a virtual consultation or a face-to-face visit with a healthcare professional is necessary.
  • AI can enhance the efficiency of hospitals and clinics in managing patient data, clinical history, and payment information by using predictive analytics. Hospitals are using AI to gather information on trillions of administrative and health record data points to streamline the patient experience. This collaboration of AI and data helps hospitals/clinics to personalize healthcare plans on an individual basis.
  • A taskforce augmented with artificial intelligence can quickly prioritize hospital activity for the benefit of all patients. Such projects can improve hospital admission and discharge procedures, bringing about enhanced patient experience.
  • Companies can use algorithms to scrutinize huge clinical and molecular data to personalize healthcare treatments by developing AI tools that collect and analyze data from genetic sequencing to image recognition empowering physicians in improved patient care. AI-powered image analysis helps in connecting data points that support cancer discovery and treatment.
  • Big data and artificial intelligence can be used in combination to predict clinical, financial, and operational risks by taking data from all the existing sources. AI analyzes data throughout a healthcare system to mine, automate, and predict processes. It can be used to predict ICU transfers, improve clinical workflows, and even pinpoint a patient’s risk of hospital-acquired infections. Using artificial intelligence to mine health data, hospitals can predict and detect sepsis, which ultimately reduces death rates.
  • AI helps healthcare professionals harness their data to optimize hospital efficiency, better engage with patients, and improve treatment. AI can notify doctors when a patient’s health deteriorates and can even help in the diagnosis of ailments by combing its massive dataset for comparable symptoms. By collecting symptoms of a patient and inputting them into the AI platform, doctors can diagnose quickly and more effectively.   
  • Robot-assisted surgeries ranging from minimally-invasive procedures to open-heart surgeries enables doctors to perform procedures with precision, flexibility, and control that goes beyond human capabilities, leading to fewer surgery-related complications, less pain, and a quicker recovery time. Robots can be developed to improve endoscopies by employing the latest AI techniques which helps doctors get a clearer view of a patient’s illness from both a physical and data perspective.

Having understood the advancements of AI in various facets of healthcare, it is to be realized that AI is not yet ready to fully interpret a patient’s nuanced response to a question, nor is it ready to replace examining patients – but it is efficient in making differential diagnoses from clinical results. It is to be understood very clearly that the role of AI in healthcare is to supplement and enhance human judgment, not to replace physicians and staff.

We at GAVS Technologies are fully equipped with cutting edge AI technology, skills, facilities, and manpower to make a difference in healthcare.

Following are the ongoing and in-pipeline projects that we are working on in healthcare:

ONGOING PROJECT:

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PROJECTS IN PIPELINE:

AIOps Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations
AIOps Digital Transformation Solutions
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Following are the projects that are being planned:

  • Controlling Alcohol Abuse
  • Management of Opioid Addiction
  • Pharmacy Support – drug monitoring and interactions
  • Reducing medication errors in hospitals
  • Patient Risk Scorecard
  • Patient Wellness – Chronic Disease management and monitoring

In conclusion, it is evident that the Advent of AI in the healthcare domain has shown a tremendous impact on patient treatment and care. For more information on how our AI-led solutions and services can help your healthcare enterprise, please reach out to us here.

About the Author –

Dr. Ramjan is a Data Analyst at GAVS. He has a Doctorate degree in the field of Pharmacy. He is passionate about drawing insights out of raw data and considers himself to be a ‘Data Person’.

He loves what he does and tries to make the most of his work. He is always learning something new from programming, data analytics, data visualization to ML, AI, and more.

Center of Excellence – Big Data

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The Big Data CoE is a team of experts that experiments and builds various cutting-edge solutions by leveraging the latest technologies, like Hadoop, Spark, Tensor-flow, and emerging open-source technologies, to deliver robust business results. A CoE is where organizations identify new technologies, learn new skills, and develop appropriate processes that are then deployed into the business to accelerate adoption.

Leveraging data to drive competitive advantage has shifted from being an option to a requirement for hyper competitive business landscape. One of the main objectives of the CoE is deciding on the right strategy for the organization to become data-driven and benefit from a world of Big Data, Analytics, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things (IoT).

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“According to Chaos Report, 52% of the projects are either delivered late or run over the allocated. The average across all companies is 189% of the original cost estimate. The average cost overrun is 178% for large companies, 182% for medium companies, and 214% for small companies. The average overrun is 222% of the original time estimate. For large companies, the average is 230%; for medium companies, the average is 202%; and for small companies, the average is 239%.”

Big Data CoE plays a vital role in bringing down the cost and reducing the response time to ensure project is delivered on time by helping the organization to build the skillful resources.

Big Data’s Role

Helping the organization to build quality big data applications on their own by maximizing their ability to leverage data. Data engineers are committed to helping ensure the data:

  • define your strategic data assets and data audience
  • gather the required data and put in place new collection methods
  • get the most from predictive analytics and machine learning
  • have the right technology, data infrastructure, and key data competencies
  • ensure you have an effective security and governance system in place to avoid huge financial, legal, and reputational problems.
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Data Analytics Stages

Architecture optimized building blocks covering all data analytics stages: data acquisition from a data source, preprocessing, transformation, data mining, modeling, validation, and decision making.

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Focus areas

Algorithms support the following computation modes:

  • Batch processing
  • Online processing
  • Distributed processing
  • Stream processing

The Big Data analytics lifecycle can be divided into the following nine stages:

  • Business Case Evaluation
  • Data Identification
  • Data Acquisition & Filtering
  • Data Extraction
  • Data Validation & Cleansing
  • Data Aggregation & Representation
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Visualization
  • Utilization of Analysis Results

A key focus of Big-data CoE is to establish a data-driven organization by developing proof of concept with the latest technologies with Big Data and Machine learning models. As of part of CoE initiatives, we are involved in developing the AI widgets to various market places, such as Azure, AWS, Magento and others. We are also actively involved in engaging and motivating the team to learn cutting edge technologies and tools like Apache Spark and Scala. We encourage the team to approach each problem in a pragmatic way by making them understand the latest architectural patterns over the traditional MVC methods.

It has been established that business-critical decisions supported by data-driven insights have been more successful. We aim to take our organization forward by unleashing the true potential of data!

If you have any questions about the CoE, you may reach out to them at SME_BIGDATA@gavstech.com

CoE Team Members

  • Abdul Fayaz
  • Adithyan CR
  • Aditya Narayan Patra
  • Ajay Viswanath V
  • Balakrishnan M
  • Bargunan Somasundaram
  • Bavya V
  • Bipin V
  • Champa N
  • Dharmeswaran P
  • Diamond Das
  • Inthazamuddin K
  • Kadhambari Manoharan
  • Kalpana Ashokan
  • Karthikeyan K
  • Mahaboobhee Mohamedfarook
  • Manju Vellaichamy
  • Manojkumar Rajendran
  • Masthan Rao Yenikapati
  • Nagarajan A
  • Neelagandan K
  • Nithil Raj Tharammal Paramb
  • Radhika M
  • Ramesh Jayachandar
  • Ramesh Natarajan
  • Ruban Salamon
  • Senthil Amarnath
  • T Mohammed Anas Aadil
  • Thulasi Ram G
  • Vijay Anand Shanmughadass
  • Vimalraj Subash

Center of Excellence – .Net

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“Maximizing the quality, efficiency, and reusability by providing innovative technical solutions, creating intellectual capital, inculcating best practices and processes to instill greater trust and provide incremental value to the Stakeholders.”

With the above mission,we have embarked on our journey to establish and strengthen the .NET Center of excellence (CoE).

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs

Expertise in this CoE is drawn from top talent across all customer engagements within GAVS. Team engagement is maintained at a very high level with various connects such as regular technology sessions, advanced trainings for CoE members from MS, support and guidance for becoming a MS MVP. Members also socialize new trending articles, tools, whitepapers and blogs within the CoE team and MS Teams channels setup for collaboration. All communications from MS Premier Communications sent to Gold Partners is also shared within the group. The high-level roadmap as planned for this group is laid out below.

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The .NET CoEfocused on assistingourcustomers in every stage of theengagement right from on-boarding, planning, execution, technical implementation and finally all the way to launching and growing. Our prescriptive approach is to leverage industry-proven best practices, solutions, reusable components and include robust resources, training, and making a vibrant partner community.

With the above as the primary goal in mind the CoE group is currently engaged inor planning the following initiatives.

Technology Maturity Assessment

One of the main objectivesof this group is to provide constant feedback to all .NET stack project for improvement and improvisation. The goal for this initiative is to build the technology maturity index for all projects for the below parameters.

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Using those approaches within a short span of time we were able to make a significant impact for some of our engagements.

Client – Online Chain Store: Identified cheaper cloud hosting option for application UI.

Benefits: Huge cost and time savings.

Client – Health care sector: Provided alternate solution for DB migrations from DEV to various environments.

Benefits: Huge cost savings due to licensing annually.

Competency Building

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.” – Henry Ford

Continuous learning and upskilling are the new norms in today’s fast changing technology landscape. This initiative is focused on providing learning and upskilling support to all technology teams in GAVS. Identifying code mentors, supporting team members to become full stack developers are some of the activities planned under this initiative.  Working along with the Learning & Development team,the .NET CoE isformulating different training tracks to upskill the team members and provide support for external assessments and MS certifications.

Solution Accelerators

“Good, better, best. Never let it rest. ‘Till your good is better and your better is best.” – St. Jerome

The primary determinants of CoE effectiveness are involvement in solutions and accelerators and in maintaining standard practices of the relevant technologies across customer engagements across the organization.

As part of this initiative we are focusing on building project templates, DevOps pipelines and automated testing templates for different technology stacks for both Serverless and Server Hosted scenarios. We also are planning similar activities for the Desktop/Mobile Stack with the Multi-Platform App UI (MAUI) framework which is planned to be released for Preview in Q4 2020.

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Additionally, we are also adoptingless-code, no-code development platforms for accelerated development cycles for specific use-cases.

As we progress on our journey to strengthen the .NET CoE, we want to act as acatalyst in rapid and early adoption of new technology solutions and work as trusted partners with all our customer and stakeholders.

If you have any questions about the CoE, you may reach out to them at COE_DOTNET@gavstech.com

CoE Team Members

  • Bismillakhan Mohammed
  • Gokul Bose
  • Kirubakaran Girijanandan
  • Neeraj Kumar
  • Prasad D
  • Ramakrishnan S
  • SaphalMalol
  • Saravanan Swaminathan
  • SenthilkumarKamayaswami
  • Sethuraman Varadhan
  • Srinivasan Radhakrishnan
  • Thaufeeq Ahmed
  • Thomas T
  • Vijay Mahalingam