Tech For Good - Case Studies

How Danfoss is using AI to revolutionise building energy efficiency

Romily Broad — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:01:53 +0000

The urgency of climate action has never been greater. While it can feel lost in the maelstrom of world events, governments – and companies – around the globe continue to accelerate their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as temperatures continue to rise and increasingly extreme weather exacts ever greater costs.

Globally, progress remains mixed. Total emissions rose at the latest measure, increasing to 53 billion tonnes – up 3.3% since 2019 versus the 43% decrease by 2030 envisioned by the Paris Agreement.

Among the 195 signatories to the Paris Agreement, however, the EU is leading the charge.

The world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, its target is to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. At its latest reading, the EU’s 27 nations had achieved an 8.3% annual reduction – the largest in decades – and a 37% overall reduction since 1990.

That progress means the EU is almost on track to reach its target of cutting emissions to at least 55% of 1990 levels by 2030. Notably, it has achieved this while demonstrating that economic growth is not inherently tied to increasing emissions; GDP has grown 68% in the EU over the same period.

But being almost on track is not the same as hitting the target. The EU must achieve a reduction of 134 million tonnes of emissions every year to reach its goal, a number slightly higher than it has achieved on average to date. To achieve that goal, the latest EU Climate Action Progress Report says “efforts will have to focus increasingly on ‘harder-to-abate’ sectors”.

Building focus

One such sector represents both an enormous challenge and a huge opportunity: Buildings.

Collectively, our buildings consume vast amounts of energy for heating, cooling, and electricity. While the EU is rapidly transitioning away from supplying that demand with fossil fuels, buildings still represent more than a third of all energy-related emissions in the region. Recognising that 75% of its building stock is energy inefficient, the EU revised its Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) in 2024 with the aim of turning that around. Under its terms, all new buildings must be zero-emission by 2030, and the EU’s entire housing stock should be renovated to become highly efficient and decarbonised by 2050.

The ambition is huge and for building operators and energy providers the transition is complex. Increasingly extreme weather (Europe is warming faster than any other part of the world) has made demand less predictable, and the rise of renewable energy sources have made energy supply more variable, requiring smarter grid management. At the same time, demand-side pressures, including electric vehicle charging and urban expansion, are reshaping consumption patterns.

Without intelligent solutions, the risk of grid instability and inefficient energy use grows. With them, though, the rewards are plentiful.

Energy efficiency reduces bills, and therefore energy poverty, driving increasing living standards. Building operators save money, too, while energy suppliers benefit from reduced peak loads and the opportunity to leverage buildings themselves as energy stores.

Such intelligence is now possible to engineer with the emergence of AI in combination with cloud computing, Internet of Things, and advanced data analytics.

It’s something Danish engineering powerhouse Danfoss knows very well. It has been, heating and cooling buildings around the world since its founding in 1933. Despite its modern scale, the company is still family owned and resolutely committed to its central mission to ‘engineer a better future’.

In the last few years Danfoss has consolidated its digital operations and added software to its portfolio of engineering capabilities. One result has been an AI-driven, data-led solution called Leanheat ® Building, developed in partnership with AWS, that is already producing remarkable, transformative results for building owners, energy suppliers, and entire urban districts.

Leanheat^® Building

“At Danfoss, we’ve always taken pride in being in the forefront of technology. It’s something that we expect of ourselves. It’s something our customers expect,” says Thomas Kolster, head of commercial operations and strategy within Danfoss’s Digital Services division.

He explains the creation of the division three years ago was a mechanism by which the company could bring together an array of software solutions it had developed over the years into a single team devoted to the digital transformation of its customers.

“It’s an end-to-end organisation. We have the R&D, the developers, AI engineers, data scientists, and the commercial, financial, and customer success teams all in one place. Leanheat Building is a big part of that.

“In a nutshell, it’s an AI-powered solution that understands the unique properties of any building and optimises its energy efficiency in real time, more or less autonomously.”

In developing Leanheat Building, Danfoss was able to leverage its huge existing physical footprint in buildings around the world. Its AI has been trained with over a decade of real-world data from thousands of buildings to refine its understanding of structures’ unique behaviour. By integrating other data sources – from weather forecasts and heating system performance to energy tariffs – it is able to dynamically optimise heating with remarkable precision.

Leanheat Building continuously forecasts heating needs 48 hours in advance, adjusting hourly to minimise energy consumption, lower costs, reduce CO₂ emissions, and enhance efficiency.

From the customer’s perspective, it is also as fast and simple to deploy as it is to use, says Natalie Schnippering, head of digital services at Danfoss. Facilitated in part by the fact Danfoss already supplies a large number of buildings with their heating systems, the ease of installation is a benefit to both the customer and the policy makers driving the market towards efficiency on an accelerated timeline.

“I always say if you have a software solution like Leanheat, it’s a click of a button to get it installed,” says Schnippering.

“Every district heating network has a substation, and in the basement there’s a controller – probably from Danfoss. We hook into the controller and pull the data, then our software and AI runs on it. The system runs in the background, fully managed, and the customer typically doesn’t need to do anything other than sit back as they start to save up to 20% on their energy costs.”

Schnippering adds that in an ideal scenario, customers wouldn’t even need to view the Leanheat dashboard they are provided with. However, that portal adds another layer of cost optimisation for building operators, who can use it to proactively detect and tackle emerging issues in rooms or apartments and drive operational efficiencies.

Benefits cascade to district energy providers, too, as Leanheat-equipped buildings become active participants in the energy ecosystem.

“Our customers need tools to orchestrate both the supply and the demand side, so we avoid just producing more and more energy to meet an increasing need,“ says Kolster.

“Leanheat’s AI logic happens in the cloud, reacting to various data points and making real-time changes to the substation that is the connection to the district heating system. Of course, the energy savings make sense to building operators and tenants, but it also makes sense to the heating providers. They can use the buildings flexibly to reduce peak loads on the supply side.

“Peaks are expensive and typically not environmentally sustainable, and we can reduce those by up to 30%.”

Scaling the benefits

Since its inception around 10 years ago, and now as a centrepiece of Danfoss’ digital division, Leanheat Building has been deployed to buildings and districts across Europe, where it has proved its credentials.

It is now optimising energy use in more than 6,000 buildings across the continent, encompassing close to 250,000 apartments, and reducing their typical energy use by 20%. That represents a massive 180,000MWh of energy saved annually, equivalent to 12,000 family houses, and 120MW of peak-load reductions for greener, more stable energy grids.

Says Schnippering: “We are certainly not stopping here – there’s so much potential out there. Our plan is to at least double our install base every year going forward, as we have in the last two years.”

Achieving that rapid scale has meant building Leanheat on a platform that’s easily scalable, adaptable, secure, and capable of handling huge volumes of data. Key to accomplishing that has been a close partnership with AWS.

AWS has provided cloud infrastructure to the Danfoss team since the inception of the Leanheat project, but it’s a partnership that has deepened in the last two years to include much broader collaboration as Danfoss planned rapid expansion.

AWS is famous for its customer ‘obsession’ and a process that starts by imagining a detailed press release announcing how they succeeded for customers, before then working backwards to engineer it. In that, says Kolster, the companies are closely matched: “Danfoss and AWS share a lot of common values, and we like to work with partners that can help us innovate, and challenge us.

“We have the domain knowledge and after several years working together, AWS understands us, our customers, our applications, and our way of thinking. They understand that our objective is to help customers on their decarbonisation journey, and we both have skin in that game.”

Michael Wennerstrom, Country Manager for Denmark and Iceland at AWS, concurs. He points out that Amazon as a whole is the world’s largest buyer of green energy and is deeply invested in renewable energy projects around the world. Today, it produces as much green energy as it consumes.

“As a company, both AWS and Amazon as a whole, sustainability is at the core of everything we do today,” he says.

“With new EU directives, and rising energy prices, the need for intelligent buildings is big. Danfoss have created a very impressive solution. You can see how their engineering and their desire to create real value for their customers comes together super strong with AWS and our innovation focus and technology.

“Danfoss has big ambitions to grow Leanheat across the globe, and we’re excited to be with them in that – we can go global in seconds.”

Schnippering says Danfoss needed a partner with the weight and depth of AWS to help launch Leanheat on a trajectory of global expansion, having so impressively proven its capabilities to date. But it’s a partnership rooted in a joint mission and a focus on customers before profits that has led to success.

“We have the best engineers and data scientists around, and we have big plans, but AWS has been key to helping us innovate at scale.

“They say you never want to be the smartest person in the room, and that’s what you get with AWS. There are so many clever people you can brainstorm with, spar with, be honest with, have fun or difficult conversations with; that’s what partnership means, and it’s how we get to where we need to be.

“This will be a super exciting journey to go on.”

In action: Leanheat^® Building

Espoo: A citywide energy transformation

The City of Espoo, Finland, embarked on a pioneering collaboration with Danfoss and its Leanheat Building service to optimise heating across its vast building stock.

Danfoss worked with the district heating provider and an array of different building operators and owners to enrol more than 100 public buildings and nearly 15,000 apartments in the programme.

Leanheat Building’s AI-driven optimisation helped Espoo achieve €200,000 in annual energy savings.

By intelligently adjusting heating based on real-time data, the system reduced total consumption by 4,500 MWh, smoothing out peaks and improving indoor comfort.

“It’s a project we're all very proud of. We managed to decarbonise the district heating solution, create a more stable grid, and leverage the flexibility of the buildings so energy providers could produce just the amount of energy that's needed. That helps avoid using backup energy sources, which are typically gas or coal based.”

- Thomas Kolster

Enercity: AI-powered district heating in Hannover

Enercity AG is one of the largest utilities in Hannover, Germany, and faced the challenge of reducing and balancing energy consumption across a huge and complex portfolio of buildings.

Enercity is now working with Danfoss to take the solution to the owners of 5,000 apartment buildings, including 50,000 housing units.

The AI-powered system continuously analyses temperature and humidity data, enabling demand-based heating regulation, and also enables operational savings: A team at Danfoss remotely monitors energy usage in individual units to proactively flag and triage issues where they arise.

“In the first heating season, Enercity noticed we’d already saved 10% of energy and dropped the peak loads by 20%. They’re also making operational savings - you get a lot of data that you can investigate remotely and send service technicians proactively in a much more efficient, smarter way. Eventually, 5,000 buildings will be enrolled into Leanheat and then Enercity and all their customers will truly start to benefit.”

- Natalie Schnippering

Fortum: Virtual heat storage for smarter energy use

Fortum, a major energy supplier headquartered in Finland and operating across a number of European countries, leveraged Leanheat^® Building’s Virtual Heat Storage (VHS) technology to transform buildings into thermal batteries.

The company integrated Leanheat Building with its Smart Living Solutions product, which enables customers to monitor their individual energy consumption.

By preloading heat when production capacity was high and redistributing it during peak demand – typically shower-time in the morning and dinner time in the evening – Fortum created the equivalent of a 10MW thermal battery, leading to a 25MW peak reduction across its grid.

This innovative approach not only cut costs but also reduced reliance on fossil-fuel-based backup energy sources, accelerating the transition to emission-free district heating.

“A solution like Leanheat Building has significant impact for the planet and for building owners and district heating operators. It’s non-invasive, cash-flow positive, has a very fast ROI and, as Fortum have shown, the wider its usage, the bigger its positive impact.”

- Thomas Kolster

The post How Danfoss is using AI to revolutionise building energy efficiency appeared first on Tech For Good.

Codesigning technologies for healthier communities

Romily Broad — Fri, 16 May 2025 09:40:17 +0000

An interdisciplinary team of academics explored whether co-inventing novel technologies with local users could help tackle digital inequity. It did.

Now they want to take their ideas further.

As new digital technologies continue their rapid, relentless transformation of the way we live and work, more and more people are being left behind; the elderly, the econimically disadvantaged, the disconnected, or people living on a wide spectrum of health issues and disabilities.

Digital exclusion occurs at the intersection of a variety of factors, not least when times are economically tough. Often, it occurs – and continues – simply because of the conditions where someone lives.

In the UK, nearly 17 million people do not possess the digital skills needed for everyday life. Around 6% of the population remains unconnected from the internet entirely, and one-in-four people classify themselves as digitally excluded in some form, affecting everything from accessing healthcare or even their own money.

The cost of the quickening pace of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the digital ostracisation of a large proportion of the population and the personal, societal, and economic consequences that represents.

No-one knows that better than Professor Ray Jones.

While tackling digital inequality has become a hot topic for policy makers more recently – especially with the advent of generative AI – Prof. Jones has been researching the topic for the last 40 years.

He pioneered the first touch-screen health information kiosks in the 1980s – siting them in supermarkets, libraries, and even pubs – and has published more than 300 research papers on the intersection of technology and public health. He was recognised for his efforts with an MBA in 2021.

Now Professor of Health Informatics and Co-Director of the Centre for Health Technology (CHT) at the University of Plymouth on the southwest coast of England, Prof. Jones has been leading an innovative project that has aimed to find new ways to proactively get ahead of the problem.

The idea: radically localise technology development in partnership with end users themselves.

The ICONIC project – which stands for ‘Intergenerational Codesign of Novel Technologies in Coastal Communities’ – has sought to rethink technology innovation by building it from the ground up in a collaborative design process that puts local communities and their specific needs in the driving seat.

The results have been enlightening: Four working technology prototypes that connect users to their environment, each other, and their regional heritage. Now the team is looking to take the next step.

Teaming up to fight digital exclusion

The far southwest of England presents a set of socio-economic conditions that make it an ideal test bed for novel ideas like ICONIC.

Informally comprising the counties of Cornwall and Devon, Plymouth itself sits on the border between the two counties and is the region’s only major urban conurbation. While being home to western Europe’s largest naval base, the city of Plymouth is both relatively small – more than 30 British cities are larger – and relatively disadvantaged, ranking in the top fifth of the country’s most deprived districts.

Beyond the city is a wider region whose population is both older and more sparsely concentrated than the rest of the UK, and one that wrestles with historically poor transport interconnectivity with the rest of the country. Digital exclusion, therefore, is already a pressing concern.

“With Plymouth and the southwest being rural and coastal, there’s economic disadvantage, the disadvantage of being peripheral, but also the disadvantages for older people who don’t have the skills and the access to technologies,” says Prof. Jones.

“We have been looking at ways to address that.”

Beginning in 2022 and now concluding, the ICONIC project has been a continuation of a years-long academic effort led by Prof. Jones and the CHT that began with other initiatives proving the value of a codesign methodology to foster localised technology innovation.

The ‘eHealth Productivity and Innovation in Cornwall’ (EPIC) project worked to foster and grow the region’s enterprise R&D ecosystem in the area of digital health, while the ‘Generating Older Active Lives Digitally’ (or GOALD) project focused on using digital tools to support the wellbeing of older people.

Dr Rory Baxter, working alongside Prof. Jones on all three initiatives as part of a diverse and multidisciplinary team, says the process of extending academic pursuits directly into the community – and involving end-users directly in the development of new ideas – has been revelatory.

“I was lucky enough to join Ray and the CHT team on the GOALD and EPIC projects, and they were hugely beneficial – they gave me a real insight into the importance of codesigning digital health tools. The work has widened my horizon in terms of rampant digital exclusion, and ICONIC has shown how we can work in a more applied way to address the issue successfully.”

We’re in this because we want to make a difference

The CHT’s ability to marshal a widely interdisciplinary academic team has been key to its success, says Prof. Jones, as was the initial groundwork to enrol a multigenerational and representative cohort of volunteers from the region to participate in the codesign process.

“The team includes people from the arts, from health, from engineering, robotics, AI – really across the whole university – and that’s quite typical of what we do at CHT,” he says.

“The argument goes that the southwest isn’t great in tech. You know, we haven’t got Silicon Bay just yet. But what we have got is a lot of great resources in terms of heritage and the environment. So, let’s use what we’ve got to address the digital inequalities issue.”

Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the ICONIC project involved forging links with a wide range of regional community organisations, charities, businesses, and education providers to both build its cohort of participants and provide focused opportunities for the technologies it would look to develop.

Those technologies would ultimately aim to connect people to the region’s unique heritage, the environment, and to community resources.

The technologies

After a period of consultation with its many partners and navigating the difficult task of constituting a stable group of intergenerational volunteers, the ICONIC team focused on four technologies for development: A virtual reality (VR) application in the context of heritage locations; underwater telepresence in connection with the region’s rich coastal environment; a social videogame focused on locally relevant conservation; and AI voice assistance to connect users to local services.

Programmes of workshops, each including a different set of volunteers and led by CHT researchers Oksana Hagen and Dr Marius Varga, began in August 2023 and continued until the end of 2024.

The workshops began by introducing participants to the core concepts and opportunities of the respective technologies, before gradually homing in on specific applications, guided by the users. Between workshops, the CHT team would work on the technologies, solicit further feedback, and iterate them in concert with the groups.

As users’ understanding of the technologies grew, says Dr Baxter, they were able to focus on application ideas that would have the most impact for them in their specific contexts. But the process was, in of itself, a valuable means of tackling a key aspect of digital exclusion – self-imposed digital isolation driven by a resistance to the unfamiliar.

“One of the things that worked really well in the codesign process was breaking down the very essence of what these technologies are,” he says.

“The best example is with the social game. In the first workshop, Marius devised an activity where the participants basically did nothing with technology at all. They just designed their own board game with a pen and paper to get them think about game mechanics: cooperative or competitive, thinking about win-lose states, all the basic properties of any kind of game. And then we were able to get them to think about how that gets integrated into a digital format.”

Dr Baxter explains the team has been able to show how the codesign process not only led to fully realised prototype applications, but also provided an effective, systematic way of introducing technologies to participants in a way that lowered their barriers and reduced their exclusion from them.

As the team now looks to expand its activities further, they can point to a cascading set of benefits in terms of both technology and the people they involve in developing it.

“The process itself gives us a model for broadening people’s usage of technology,“ adds Dr Baxter. “There has been lots of positivity from our participants around how it’s widened their horizons.”

Cascading benefits

Prof. Jones and the CHT team are now actively seeking avenues to continue and broaden the impact of their work, as they analyse the evaluation data and write up their papers.

Each of the four codesigned prototype technologies are working and demonstrable, and themselves ripe for further development. But the process itself is also readily exportable, with each instance of locally codesigned technologies offering the potential to deliver both viable products and compounding community benefits in the area of digital exclusion.

As well as a working multiplayer social game that unites players around seagrass conservation, the CHT team and their codesigners successfully delivered an accessible VR experience that offers an intimate experience of local heritage location Cotehele Hall to those who would otherwise struggle to visit. The team has also taken visitors to Plymouth’s renowned National Marine Museum underwater via educational, interactive video streams into VR headsets, and unveiled an AI voice assistant that conversationally connects local people to help and services in their area via a simple phone call.

“We’re in this because we want to make a difference,” says Prof. Jones. “We want these technologies and prototypes to be used by people more broadly, so now we’re looking to not just maintain and really nurture the fantastic partnerships we already have, but bring in new partners as well.”

Prof. Jones explains the goal now is to attract interest from social-impact investors, sponsors, or funding bodies to help the CHT expand on its success.

“We want people to come with us on this journey, and to invest in it. Not just because it could make a good return, but to develop our ideas and contribute us new ideas now we have proven the academic case for the sorts of results we can deliver.”

Products of codesign: ICONIC prototypes

Gaming Seagrass

The city of Plymouth is a centre of ocean-based science and conservation and his home to the Ocean Conservation Trust. One of the Trust’s key initiatives is Blue Meadows, a project that aims to both conserve and grow vitally important coastal seagrass meadows.

Seagrass is often overlooked both literally and figuratively. It is around 35 times more efficient a carbon store than tropical rainforests, is a habitat for a vast array of fish and invertebrates, and helps prevent coastal erosion. And yet up to 90% of it has been lost in the last 100 years, primarily due to physical disturbance and pollution caused by humans.

The ICONC team and its panel of participants codeveloped the idea of a social game to educate users about this vital local resource and the key principles in its conservation. As well as using the codesign process to upskill participants in their awareness of digital technologies and game mechanics, and thus directly tackle digital exclusion, the eventual prototype would be one that could go on to be a useful tool for broadening awareness of – and even fundraising for – the conservation efforts themselves.

Through the codesign process, the ICONIC team was able to iterate on participant feedback to create a multiplayer game that focused on the growth mechanics of seagrass and reaping the benefits of success. The participants led the game to use non-verbal communication as a game feedback device and boon to its accessibility.

“Seagrass is not just important generally, but in particular to this group of people. We were able to build something together that really resonated with them, but also in a way that introduced them to this technology in a way they had never experienced. It widened quite a few horizons. Now we hope to find new partnerships to help us continue to develop it and widen its impact further."

– Marius Varga

Underwater telepresence

Also in conjunction with Ocean Conservation Trust and its National Marine Aquarium, the ICONIC team launched a workstream that aimed to connect local people with an underwater environment that, despite being next door, they may have never experienced firsthand.

The initiative focused on accessibility, ensuring that users – whether in care homes, schools, or other settings – could engage with underwater spaces through immersive technology. The primary concept involved a VR headset streaming video from a 360-degree camera submerged in an aquarium tank, allowing participants to observe marine life in a controlled environment while interacting with the experience through AI-powered species identification.

A key finding from the codesign process was the strong preference for live streaming over pre-recorded footage, particularly if the technology were deployed in open water rather than an aquarium. Insights came from testing an underwater robot, which participants operated remotely in Plymouth Sound. While logistical challenges such as weather conditions and infrastructure requirements ultimately made real-time streaming difficult, the project demonstrated the potential for future development, which the ICONIC team is now keen to explore with new partnerships.

Despite initial concerns about complexity, the experience proved highly engaging, suggesting that interactive telepresence could be a valuable tool for education and tourism, as well as digital engagement in the local community. Future development could involve refining AI capabilities, improving live-streaming infrastructure, and exploring commercial applications, such as tourism experiences or conservation awareness programs.

“Participants recognised the therapeutic benefits of viewing underwater spaces, so requested both a relaxing, passive version of the experience as well as an interactive learning experience.”

– Oksana Hagen

Extending reality into the past

The ICONIC team had a powerful asset at its disposal when conceiving technology applications that would resonate with project participants: The region’s unique cultural heritage.

A partnership with the National Trust and its late-medieval-era Cotehele estate became the focus for a technology application could create an immersive experience of the estate’s magnificent Tudor house, complete with tapestries, armour, and historic objects.

The project used 360-degree video and interactive VR elements to allow users to explore historically significant areas of the manor, including spaces normally inaccessible to visitors.

A key challenge was balancing historical authenticity with user interaction. The team captured six unique locations within Cotehele, including a restricted area with a centuries-old floor, using 360-degree imaging. Participants tested these immersive environments and provided feedback on usability and engagement. One major insight was the desire for interaction – users wanted to touch walls, examine artefacts, and move freely within the space.

To improve accessibility, the project refined VR hardware, replacing standard headset straps with custom designs that distributed weight more evenly, reducing discomfort. Controllers were also adapted for users with limited dexterity, allowing simplified interactions with objects in the virtual environment.

The final prototype featured a multi-sensory experience, incorporating visual, audio, and haptic feedback. Users could pick up historical artefacts, including swords and mugs, and even engage in playful interactions, such as pretending to eat virtual cheese. The project also explored gamification, with participants suggesting escape-room-style puzzles based on historical clues.

Now visitors unable to fully explore this treasure of their historic neighbourhood could gain an informative, entertaining experience like no other.

“We wanted to give users an experience of being in the space, rather than just recreating it. We made absolutely everything interactable. The ability to interact with objects and navigate freely in a space you can’t normally access made the experience more meaningful, especially having improved the accessibility of the devices. There is so much more we could do, and we are looking forward to expanding the amount of content we can include, as well as potentially using it in other historical contexts.”

– Marius Varga

A local AI voice assistant

Perhaps the ICONIC team’s most direct application tackling the digital exclusion problem, its AI voice assistance workstream led to the creation of an AI-driven voice-based system for social prescribing.

Designed for individuals who prefer traditional phone communication over digital interfaces such as chat, the concept is to connect users to local services and activities through a natural-sounding AI assistant. The project leveraged cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-4, to ensure intuitive and accurate interactions.

Participants tested prototypes and provided feedback on usability, voice characteristics, and conversational style. While the assistant was designed to prioritise functionality, offering clear and reliable information, participants also expressed interest in a more engaging assistant capable of light banter, hinting at a deeper social purpose.

The system operates via a simple phone number, making it accessible to users without internet access or smartphones. It uses advanced semantic processing to match user queries with relevant database entries, ensuring accurate recommendations even when phrasing differs. For example, it can link “activities for kids” with “youth clubs” based on conceptual understanding.

While the prototype clearly demonstrated significant promise, it is ripe for much expanded functionality including secure integration with public services, community organisations and other service providers.

"Participants were amazed by how natural the assistant sounded, often mistaking it for a real person. This shows the potential for AI to bridge the gap for digitally excluded individuals. It’s a technology that could have so many further applications and be able to reach a very large number of digitally excluded people.”

– Oksana Hagen

The post Codesigning technologies for healthier communities appeared first on Tech For Good.

Tracr: How De Beers’ is digitalising every diamond’s story

Romily Broad — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 11:10:08 +0000

The story of a natural diamond is a tale as rich and ancient as any known to mankind.

The diamond’s unique, unchanging properties speak of an incomprehensibly distant past – an era so remote it approaches the cosmological. Diamonds bore witness to the formation of our world itself.

Around three billion years after that moment, they worked their way up from the depths of the planet’s mantle to be found by us, inquisitive, bi-pedal lifeforms that had evolved both the minds they needed to understand their worth and the opposable thumbs to do something with them.

And so, diamonds began their second chapter. These progenies of astonishing geological forces became objects of intense fascination to a civilisation that had worked out how to cut and polish them into something more precious than anything else on Earth.

The diamonds we covet, manipulate, wear, and share, have become protagonists in the narrative of human history. Their stories are prefaced within the communities that have grown to depend on them – from mines to artisanal workshops to marketplaces – and weave through time as everlasting symbols of life’s most significant moments.

As much as a natural diamond is a product of time, geology, and human industry, each one also carries an intimate and nuanced story. Today, that story is as important a measure of a diamond’s quality as its cut, clarity, colour or carat weight.

In years past, that story was remote, obscure, and subject to the whim of its teller. And it could be dark – the intrinsic value of a diamond lending itself to abuses. For decades the industry has worked successfully to ensure the story of the natural diamond is a positive one – be that human or environmental – but it is not until now, with the help of advanced technologies, that it could imagine a way to embed complete transparency into every diamond produced.

"Tracr is a platform that we believe the industry really needs and deserves."

— Wes Tucker

For the last 135 years, one company has stood astride the global diamond industry like no other: De Beers. As storied as it is – and operating within an industry so traditional that a handshake remains the cornerstone of contracts – De Beers has always been an innovator. It is largely responsible for creating the global industry we know today, and is replete with internal innovation teams focused on harnessing new ideas in furtherance of its goal to “make life brilliant”. That’s innovating for the communities built around diamond mines, industry partners, customers, or as custodians of the natural world.

In 2017, De Beers saw an opportunity to leverage one new technology to fundamentally change how it presented diamonds to the global marketplace. Blockchain could be the answer to an ages old problem: Linking the physical to the digital and tracking the provenance of diamonds in an immutable and trustworthy way.

The project De Beers envisioned to explore the idea was called Tracr.

Wes Tucker joined De Beers as its new Head of Digital Transformation in 2021 and quickly became absorbed in the rapidly maturing project. A South Africa native with an engineering background that saw him work on technology-led projects in mining ventures across the African continent, Tucker was very well positioned to take Tracr out of the shadows and introduce it to the world.

Tracr was reshaped into a standalone company and Tucker was appointed CEO

“Our stretch ambition is to be able to tell the story of every single diamond in the world,” he tells Tech For Good. “The natural diamond industry has always been heavily based on the four Cs: cut, colour, clarity, and carat weight. That’s worked really well for hundreds – if not thousands – of years. But what is changing now is that we also care about the impact of the diamond; it’s story.”

Good diamonds

A diamond’s impact can be measured across a range of criteria over time, from its effects both negative and positive on the environment to the socio-economic benefits driven through investment in communities at all stages of the diamond supply chain. Ultimately it will arrive as the most luxurious of commodities in the marketplaces and outlets where they are retailed, and that’s where its origin story now means a great deal.

“The diamond industry is a fundamentally different place now,” says Tucker.

“There’s a historical perception of diamond mining perhaps in terms of it being detrimental to the environment, or not supporting its host communities. Then there’s another side of it that Leonardo DiCaprio helped illustrate in his movie. There was a time when perhaps some of these things were true, but what’s really great about the diamond industry is the change you’ve seen over the years.”

Podcast

Tucker explains that a significant part of the motivation for creating an unalterable record for every diamond is to enable the industry to better tell that story of change and embed transparency and accountability at every step of the value chain.

The industry supports the livelihoods of 10 million people around the world, and De Beers’ parent company, Anglo American, speaks openly of its goal to positively impact five additional lives for every person it employs.

Tucker’s own background informs an obvious passion for the good that can come from diamond discovery when it’s done ethically and responsibly.

“A diamond mine is an open pit mine, sure, but for that one hectare or less of land there are tens of thousands of hectares of conservation land looked after around it, schools built, hospitals built, communities built.”

“No harsh chemicals are used – it’s just water, and we reuse as much of that as possible. In terms of the relative cleanliness of it, its compact nature, and the kind of positive impact it has on communities and the environment, there’s a really important story to tell there.”

An incredible group of smart people

The greatest challenge Tracr has worked for years to overcome is building a system capable of tracking the surprisingly complex journey a diamond makes from mine to finger, and to do that for millions of individual diamonds.

“You can create a digital twin of something, but how do you make sure it’s the same diamond throughout the journey? The rough is mined in Botswana, say, then travels to India where it is split into multiple pieces, each of them unique, and then cut and polished in equally unique ways,” says Tucker.

The result of Tracr’s efforts is a hugely scalable platform, running on the AWS cloud, and leveraging a multitude of data sources – including IoT and specialised diamond scanning devices – to build a definitive and referenceable diamond library.

“We have an incredible group of smart people at Tracr who have done some amazing work. I’m not going to pretend to be able to do it justice,” adds Tucker.

One person who can is Chief Technology Officer Caroline Glassberg-Powell. She joined the company in 2021 in part because she saw the motivation behind the platform to engender positive change in the world, as well as its sustainable approach to its blockchain underpinnings.

“I have a background in environmental science, so that aspect of Tracr has always interested me. We can’t keep trashing the planet the way we are, and I see Tracr as a very useful step towards addressing that – perhaps far beyond the diamond industry.”

“Our algorithm is the key to making sure we can follow diamonds all the way through the supply chain.”

— Caroline Glassberg-Powell

She explains that the Tracr team has consisted of a collection of around 50 elite technologists and blockchain experts, many surged into the business at different times by key partner Accenture. Together they have built a cloud-based private Ethereum blockchain on which resides the diamonds’ digital twins.

“Ethereum blockchain is proof-of-stake, which is different to the proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin. Proof-of-stake doesn’t require the intensive calculations and is therefore far less energy hungry and better for the environment,” says Glassberg-Powell.

Tracr employs a microservices architecture, tailoring sets of JavaScript, REST, and Python microservices for each and every participant in the diamond supply chain. A global layer of microservices then facilitates cross-participant communication and allows the huge diamond archive to be searched in real time. The architecture ensures seamless interactions within the network, while robust data engineering pipelines execute ETL processes, harmonising Tracr’s systems with its ecosystem of data sources.

“And then there’s our machine learning, which we’ve been developing for a long time,” adds Glassberg-Powell.

She notes that while blockchain has allowed Tracr to build a fantastically accurate and trustworthy resource for the industry, it’s only with machine learning that they are able definitively to match a diamond against its various sources of data.

“The rough diamonds are scanned at the mine. Then the manufacturer scans all the finished diamonds as well. Our algorithm is the key to making sure we can follow diamonds all the way through the supply chain without losing them.”

Trust

The first phase of Tracr’s inception saw it build essential technology foundations and solve its core challenges, not least how to scale the blockchain in terms of its enormous data storage requirements. The second phase saw it consolidate its organisational structure and scale by onboarding a huge repository of De Beers’ own diamond production.

The company is now venturing forth into its final phase: expansion as a trusted platform of choice across the wider industry, and as a source of truth for the world’s stock of existing diamonds.

More than two thirds of De Beers’ production by value is now flowing through the platform on a monthly basis, or roughly 20% of the world’s diamonds. As Tracr brings other producers on board, that number increases.

But as Tucker freely admits, bringing other industry players into a system developed by De Beers will require a level of trust and transparency that’s not entirely achieved just by spinning the company out as its own independent entity.

“One of the fundamental challenges of trying to create an open platform for an industry to interoperate on is trust,” says Tucker.

“How do you get everybody in the diamond industry to start communicating with each other and trust that they can use this platform? That’s one of the biggest challenges, but also one of the biggest success stories for Tracr.”

“The diamond industry is a fundamentally different place now.”

— Wes Tucker

Market uncertainty against the backdrop of new sanctions and import restrictions has put an even greater emphasis on proving the provenance of diamonds, lending weight to Tracr’s offer to the industry. The company is now successfully building confidence amongst its industry peers by operating as transparently as possible, while proving itself with evidence of success earned out in the open.

Tracr is now collaborating with the Gemological Institute of America, the largest grading laboratory in the world. It has onboarded additional diamond producers, integrated with the world’s leading online diamond marketplaces – Rapnet and UNI Diamonds – and recently announced a groundbreaking collaboration with Sarine Technologies, the industry’s leading producer of diamond processing tools and which is already a major contributor to the quest for diamond traceability.

“We have designed the whole thing from the ground up to be trusted, to be as segregated and distributed as possible, and secure. That’s because we are owned by De Beers and we know the industry needs assurances on that,” says Tucker.

“That said, it has taken seven years of hard work to get where we are.”

“Tracr is a platform that we believe the industry really needs and deserves, and without the support of a partner like De Beers that would have been very difficult to achieve.”

Accenture Shines

De Beers, via its subsidiary Tracr, has been on a seven-year journey to immortalise every diamond in the world in digital form with blockchain technology.

It’s an enormous undertaking given the sheer volume of data necessary for the task: to capture it at the source and throughout a diamond’s production process, and then to secure it in an immutable way that is faultlessly trustworthy by the rest of the diamond industry and, of course, its customers.

A vital tool at Tracr’s disposal came via De Beers’ – and parent company Anglo American’s – existing close partnership with global consultancy Accenture.

In order to achieve its aims, Tracr needed to access the world’s very best blockchain expertise in order to tackle the enormous challenge of scaling the technology to meet its lofty goals.

“We’re a startup, but we have been able to work hand-in-hand with one of the world’s largest consultancies. We’ve been able to punch above our weight, and I like that!” says Tracr CEO Wes Tucker.

“It’s a bit like having a big brother. You can knock on his door and say, ‘I have this problem’. Sometimes it’s just guidance, but a lot of the time it’s bringing their people in directly to help.”

Hilary Allen, Client Account Lead and Innovation Director, Accenture

Vinod Nair, Engagement Lead, Accenture

Tracr CTO Caroline Glassberg-Powell points to the advantage the comes with having access to Accenture’s world-spanning talent pool: “From a project management standpoint, they’re worth their weight in gold.”

“They were able to spin up a blockchain team for us when we needed one. Now we have our own team, there’s a lot of open collaboration between them and us. We’re able to tap into the broader blockchain network of Accenture – the relationship is really important.”

Hilary Allen is Accenture’s client account lead for De Beers and Innovation Director for De Beers parent Anglo American. As part of a 15-year relationship crossing all functions of the wider business, Accenture put its shoulder to Tracr’s wheel in 2020 as it sought to scale its technology.

“When you innovate within any big organisation, you face this moment where there’s a little bit of an explosion as people try to work out how to manage the risk and uncertainty within an organisation that’s not set up for that,” she says.

“We have worked with Wes and the team to build the structure, to understand the skills profile of the team and build the right culture to succeed. And then of course there have been significant technical and data challenges we’ve worked through together.”

Vinod Nair represents Accenture on the ground as Engagement Lead with Tracr and knows those challenges well. He says: “We had a fair share of scalability challenges with the first pilot back in 2020. We were looking at data collection, management, quality, maintenance, security – everything as it relates to every single diamond.”

“We were able to use our experiences to identify the options and collaborate to build the solutions as we moved to production. It has been a true partnership – we’ve been embedded in a badge-less way to bring the right skills to bare.”

Adds Tucker: “They have such a diversity of skills and experience that no matter what problem we’re having, we know we can go to them, and they will bring the very best they have to offer in that space.”

The post Tracr: How De Beers’ is digitalising every diamond’s story appeared first on Tech For Good.

Thames Valley Police: A force for automation

Ben East — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 13:05:22 +0000

If you want to understand the sheer size of the challenge facing policing in Britain in 2023, it’s worth spending five minutes with Mike Lattanzio.

“It’s volume of demand,” he says. “Emergency calls are up over 23 percent in the last 12 months. The complexity of crime and the systems we have to navigate increases the time taken to deal with each job.”

Lattanzio is Chief Information Officer for Thames Valley Police, the largest non-metropolitan police force in England and Wales, which serves a swathe of territory covering three counties to the west of London. The force shares its technology resources and infrastructure with the neighbouring Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, extending Lattanzio’s remit all the way down to the south coast.

Tech For Good meets him and his team at offices in Eastleigh, just outside Southampton. It’s a hive of operational activity and home to trailblazing IT innovation that is helping the force – and perhaps the rest of the nation – meet its immense challenges.

Superintendent Rob Brind is part of the team. As Digital Silver (a senior officer in the force’s Gold-Silver-Bronze command hierarchy), he helps oversee digital transformation and innovation across both forces.

“Crime is now more complex than ever before. Our crime investigation and management unit have been inundated with an increase in the number of crimes that they needed to process. Criminals use technology to commit crime in innovative ways, and we need to maintain pace with that,” he says.“We are working to use Robotic Process Automation – or RPA – as a good option for us to free time for officers and staff so they can focus more on investigations.”

A Force for Automation

The picture of overstretched police forces is one painted across the entire country. In proactively deploying RPA at the sharp end of policing, Lattanzio’s team has demonstrated it is a technology that can quickly and cost-effectively provide solutions.

While RPA has already been used by police forces across the country to automate processes perceived as lower risk, Thames Valley Police has been more ambitious. It saw the potential for a series of applications that could not only make an instant difference to the way policing operates in the third decade of the 21st century, but the kind of service the public could expect to experience, too.

“We made a conscious decision to look at how we could benefit frontline policing through automation,” says Lattanzio. “And it wasn’t about automating or digitising an analogue process. It was about looking at that process and potentially reengineering it to work in a much smarter way.”

Thames Valley Police began proof-of-value work with Deloitte in 2020, the partnership highlighting where the opportunities for automation were, but also pinpointing the best platform to meet their requirements.

“Policing uses a lot of very specific tools,” says Tom Kempster, Thames Valley Police’s Head of Innovation Technology. “We have quite a wide and diverse application stack, more so than is typical in private enterprise, so the opportunities for automation were massive.”

Which is where SS&C Blue Prism came in. The Warrington, UK-headquartered multinational is the original pioneer of RPA and has developed vast public-sector experience over more than two decades.

“Blue Prism really understood the outcomes we were trying to derive from automation, right from the outset,” explains Kempster. “We didn’t come into it initially looking for financial savings, it was very much about being able to bridge that gap between capacity and demand. There was a collaborative approach to understanding that problem and delivering service improvement.”

One of the most immediate impacts was in Thames Valley Police’s component of the region’s Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH). This critical service exists to link a multitude of agencies together to protect children and adults at risk of abuse and neglect.

As Head of MASH, Charlotte Donahoe explains, the workload is immense.

“We are handling 14,000 tasks every month – triaging that amount of work was taking up a huge proportion of our officers’ time, taking them away from other important work.”

RPA now works across a plurality of systems to respond to triggers and carry out much of the administrative burden automatically, from intelligently researching signals that indicate a risk may exist for a child, to notifying the schools and agencies that need to know. It is returning thousands of hours to the force’s staff.

"RPA is a no brainer for us. We’ve saved money and we’re delivering a much better service to the public."

— Rob Brind

Donohoe adds: “What’s really exciting is that we’re now using RPA to help identify repeat perpetrators, particularly around domestic abuse, helping us prevent future harm.”

As Lattanzio puts it, people come into policing to keep the public safe, not to do endless paperwork. “Our responsibility is to make that as easy and as quick as possible, so they release more of their time to focus on the things that matter, which is people,” he says.

In MASH, that meant designing a system using four robotic processes where the data regarding an individual or incident could immediately be analysed and risk assessed. In a manual process, Lattanzio reveals, it can take longer for a high-risk case to be identified and prioritised.

“RPA can automate that data comparison, do some of that risk assessment and draw out items that need to go to the top of the queue.” he says.

“This is really, really important, because we’re talking about vulnerable victims. The quicker we are cutting through to those really high-risk cases, that will stop people coming to harm, or even save lives.”

Donohoe reckons those at highest risk of harm are now being targeted for support within an hour of the trigger arriving in MASH. And there have been other benefits, too.

“The MASH is a really good example of where we’re able to triage information coming in through the use of automation,” adds Kempster. “It takes us to a position where we’re better prioritising risk, we’re making faster and better decisions based on quality data. We are seeing the daily positive impact of RPA on our staff and citizens we serve, because the process directly offers them a better police service.”

Automated “transactional tasking”, as Brind puts it, is being repeated across Thames Valley Police. In fact, he jokes, as soon as one department sees the benefits of RPA, another lobbies for its own digital workers: “It’s like a runaway train; we’re inundated with ideas for RPA.”

Thames Valley’s crime investigation and management unit saw its outstanding tasks reduced to zero with RPA, immediately saw improved data quality, and was therefore able to make better decisions.

“It’s a no brainer for us,” adds Brind. “We’ve released time for officers and staff to do other tasks and we can focus them to be in the right place at the right time. We’ve saved money and we’re delivering a much better service to the public”.

As far as the public is concerned, a salient impact of RPA is in how it streamlines people’s direct interactions with police.

Kempster says: “With RPA we can set protocols and initiate processes when a call is made. Through pre-determined rule sets we can send out communications, provide updates, give advice and prioritise risk. We can start really biting away at the volumes of demand that are coming through into the contact centre.”

"We have a capability now that gives us the headspace to bring in policing transformation.”

— Tom Kempster

Lattanzio isn’t alone in believing that one of the main reasons RPA has been so successful at Thames Valley Police is that the focus is on resource release and service improvement, rather than budgetary savings. Not least because that’s meant force-wide buy-in on what they’re trying to achieve.

“It’s never been a cost-saving exercise for our department,” says Donohoe. “It was around working more smartly. It was around prioritising risks and implementing some standardised processes across the force.”

Kempster says RPA is now saving the force as much time in filing as would have previously required 50 full-time employees. That’s 390,000 hours a year that can be better spent on the streets doing vital work with the public.

Leading The Nation

Thames Valley Police’s digital transformation strategy has made it the leader in frontline policing automations – which begs the question, when and how can the benefits be realised nationwide?

“I think there’s a perception out there that this is really expensive technology, or really difficult to set up,” says Lattanzio. “But it’s a lot less challenging than we anticipated. My advice to other forces would be to start small, prove it works, gain momentum, and then gain support for further investment. That’s exactly what we did.”

He adds that the work Thames Valley has carried out already can now be lifted out, tweaked, and deployed at other forces. “We’re not competing with other forces; we can build a national portfolio in collaboration,” he adds.

Kempster is just as enthusiastic about sharing the force’s gains: “We were seeing benefits within six months, so my message to other forces is that this doesn’t have to be a complicated or long journey. We’ve done a lot of that complexity for them.

The next step for Thames Valley – and other forces on the same journey – will be AI, says Kempster.

“We’re at the start of a journey. We have a capability now that gives us the headspace to bring in policing transformation. We want to be able to augment this by having controls over data coming in, creating more trigger points for efficient automation

“And then what can we do with this data? This leads us nicely into AI, where we can make efficient decisions where it is safe and ethical to do so.”

"At the end of the day, policing is about people - and it’s about implementing technology that best looks after them.”

— Mike Lattanzio

Lattanzio has a simple example of how AI could help the forces of the future.

“Think about an environment whereby, actually, the officer doesn’t have to capture any information, because everything that victim is saying to the officer is being recorded via video.

“The AI captures that information in a structured manner. We still get what we need – but it completely changes the interaction between the officer and the victim. It means they can give them 100 percent focus, rather tapping away on a laptop or writing it down.

“It’s that sort of major digital transformation that forces should be setting themselves up for.

“At the end of the day, policing is about people – and it’s about implementing technology that best looks after them.”

The post Thames Valley Police: A force for automation appeared first on Tech For Good.

Semtech: Sensing a future of sustainable IoT

Ben East — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 11:54:34 +0000

The Internet of Things is here and it’s changing the world. Making it environmentally sustainable is vital. Semtech’s low power, long range LoRa networking platform is a very large part of the solution. Tech For Good speaks to President and CEO Mohan Maheswaran.

Exponents of the Internet of Things (IoT) have long touted its potential to transform the way we live and work. Today, the seeds they have sown are bearing meaningful fruit. Standards have been established and an increasingly vast network of connected devices is ubiquitising the collection, processing, analysis and exploitation of real-time data. From homes and factories to farms and hospitals, the advent of edge computing, WiFi 6 and 5G connectivity is supercharging the engine of IoT’s progress.

But with all that data comes an insatiable thirst for the energy to power it, be that end devices or the data centres that serve them. While IoT offers the prospect of driving much greater efficiency into the workings of industry, it must be powered sustainably so as not to undercut its environmental and societal benefits.

“Sustainable IoT is a massive opportunity for the world,” says Semtech CEO and President Mohan Maheswaran – a man who knows more about it than most.

Maheswaran has been president and CEO of Semtech for 17 years, a company that has spent the last decade investing in the growth of its proprietary technology, LoRa – the now-de facto wireless platform underpinning much of the Internet of Things world. The company creates the LoRa chipsets that now sit at the heart of hundreds of millions of devices, all running on the LoRaWAN networking protocol.

Semtech has been developing LoRa technology since 2012. The name LoRa is derived from ‘long range’ – its devices leverage spread-spectrum radio communication techniques to transmit information wirelessly over a typical range of up to 16km, while using tiny amounts of energy. Transmission distances can be much higher, though. Data sent from a small sensor attached to a high-altitude weather balloon travelled 832km in 2020, before another was bounced off the moon the following year.

A non-profit organisation, set up in 2015, called the LoRa Alliance functions to maintain the open LoRaWAN standard and grow its adoption, and runs a certification and compliance programme to ensure interoperability. It now boasts more than 500 members, including many of the largest technology and telecommunications companies in the world.

Maheswaran says the ultra-low-power, long-range capabilities of the LoRa platform are essential to ensuring our journey to a data-driven world featuring trillions of talkative sensors is a sustainable one.

“That’s got to be the end game. When every city, every enterprise, every building is using sustainable IoT to make smart choices about their energy and resource use,” he says.

“Organisations, even whole cities, have put in sensor technology and loads of electronics without ever thinking about their power budgets, and they’re probably already energy constrained anyway. I have examples of cities that have had power outages because of this. So, you actually have to be smart about smart technology. And that’s where Semtech can play a huge part.”

Sustainable IoT is a massive opportunity for the world.

While Semtech’s LoRa technology is inherently low-power, enabling a ‘fit-and-forget’ approach to deploying low-cost devices whose battery lives are long enough to sustain them, an ace up LoRa’s sleeve is its ability to turn itself off when not needed. Other forms of wide-area networking might be always on, needing to be connected to a power source and nearby WiFi hubs.

“The beauty of LoRa is that the sensors essentially go to sleep; they don’t try to communicate until something happens,” says Maheswaran. “So maybe the temperature goes up in an environment where it needs to be low, in food production or storage for example. At that point the sensor wakes up and talks to the network via an unlicensed spectrum.

“Where I live in California, we have big issues with drought. One leak and you’re just wasting water. With sensors, you can add intelligence at the edge or pass that data into the Cloud ready to be acted upon. The point with LoRa is that you can proliferate low-power sensors cheaply and sustainably – the battery doesn’t have to be changed for ten years.”

Originally from Luton in the UK, Maheswaran’s long tenure in the technology space – and now at the helm of a company with a 60-year track record of its own – has exposed him to a lot of potentially transformational tech and LoRa really excites him.

“It really is an ecosystem of companies and players out there now,” he says. “Cloud companies like Microsoft and Amazon, systems companies like Cisco and IBM, sensor companies like Schneider and Honeywell… they’re all using LoRa. The technology was developed and is managed by Semtech, but we are very much proliferating around the world, making the concept of sustainable IoT a reality.”

The sustainability message is key to LoRa – not just in terms of the low power it uses but the capability it gives cities, businesses and organisations to operate in a more sustainable way. Maheswaran cites its work in India, where it partnered with a company called CITiLIGHT to keep street lights connected, monitored and used efficiently in real time – rather than to a set schedule. Automating streetlights in this way has saved 1.29 billion kWh of energy so far – the equivalent of $260 million, or 424,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.

“Power outages are a way of life in some Indian cities,” he explains. “They just carry on and hope they come back. But the key with LoRa and sustainable IoT is that you can add smart technology that not only runs the system more efficiently but does it in a way that doesn’t add a huge energy budget to the city. That’s critical.”

There are just amazing use cases out there that I couldn't have even imagined.

Such work in smart cities is proliferating all the time, but Semtech initially proved its worth in the countryside, installing sensors to help with irrigation systems and soil monitoring. Maheswaran explains that most irrigation still takes place on a schedule-based system, whether the land needs it or not, but LoRa-enabled devices offer real-time insight into the health of crops and moisture monitoring. A project in India resulted in a reduction of farm water and electricity use by 26 per cent – and other installations on commercial farms have achieved a 50 per cent water reduction.

“Smart agriculture has been one of the predominant uses of LoRa,” he admits, “mainly because if you have millions of these sensors on the farm or in the soil, you want them to connect over quite a long range – you don’t want to have gateway infrastructure everywhere.”

The agriculture use case extends to cows. A collaboration with an Australian company saw cattle GPS-tracked using LoRa over a huge area, not just to see where they were but to provide operational oversight into their water usage, where electricity needed to be used in fencing, and so on.

And cows are just one form of smart asset tracking, another field in which LoRa has already made a significant impact. Whether it’s pinpointing a wheelchair in a hospital, a shopping trolley in a mall or, on a wider scale, pallets of goods throughout a supply chain, if they’re tagged with a Semtech LoRa Edge chip, a client can immediately see where they are on a LoRa Cloud Locator. LoRa Edge adds satellite-scanning geolocation and WiFi on the same chip as LoRa to provide a comprehensive tracking package for logistics use cases.

“It’s just a perfect use case for LoRa,” adds Maheswaran. “The next interesting possibility for that technology is to make it solar powered.

“If I was going to look forward ten years from now, there’ll be a proliferation of energy-harvesting sensors that don’t need batteries to be replaced at all; they can recharge and continue connecting to the network using LoRa.”

LoRa can have a real effect much closer to home. Maheswaran didn’t initially think the LoRa platform would be that beneficial for smart buildings or smart homes. The clue is in the name; it’s designed for use at long range rather than short ranges inside buildings. But the more people began to use smart technology in their daily lives, the more it became clear that LoRa could actually be a solution.

“There is so much waste today; lights left on, energy left on, air conditioning left on, heating left on. Even water taps left on. You can of course use WiFi or Bluetooth to connect your smart devices up, but the range is so short you often need repeaters everywhere. They’re also expensive technologies to use. But with LoRa I can have one gateway that connects everything. Even a security camera; video streaming images is high bandwidth, but in that case LoRa plays a different role: it acts as the control panel, telling the camera to wake up and send the data when it detects motion. That’s why I feel LoRa is going to be used everywhere, eventually.”

Sustainability is clearly the key driving force for Semtech and LoRa – but it’s interesting that from those initial aims other uses and benefits have revealed themselves as the technology has matured. LoRa-enabled devices have become increasingly important in manufacturing environments as a means by which efficiencies can be made.

“The sensors are essentially providing any manufacturing or industrial environment with intelligence through data, which means you can then start predictive maintenance,” explains Maheswaran.

“So a sensor tells you there’s something inefficient going on with your gas supply. You want to be able to shut that down and fix the issue before there’s a big gas leak or an explosion. Same thing with a machine in manufacturing – you want to be able to see that something isn’t working efficiently and predict that something is wearing out before it actually fails.

“You could save billions of dollars across a company by being clever with your low-power sensors – and that efficiency is linked to sustainability – as energy availability comes down, finding these efficiencies will become vitally important.”

LoRa is going to be used everywhere, eventually.

Smart metering has become one of the biggest areas of interest for LoRa devices. Many domestic consumers are all too familiar with smart meters ticking away reminding them just how expensive their energy has become. The irony is those meters need to be continuously powered, connected to always-on WiFi. It needn’t be the case with LoRa, while utility companies themselves can affordably arrange hundreds of thousands of low-cost, battery-operated sensors connected over long distances and harsh environments to optimise billing systems and provide insight into supply and demand.

The value of LoRa is clear, and Semtech is constantly building out new features to expand its capabilities. The use of Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum techniques now allow for greater bandwidth and a larger number of connected devices, as well as enabling LoRa devices to communicate with satellites in orbit.

In 2023, Semtech completed the acquisition of Sierra Wireless, which brought together the ultra-low power benefits of LoRa with the higher bandwidth capabilities of Sierra’s cellular Internet of Things.

“There are just amazing use cases out there that I couldn’t have even imagined,” says Maheswaran. “Especially with our acquisition of Sierra, there’s the opportunity for customers to dream ‘Hey, what if I could do this with Semtech?’ And that’s really what Semtech is all about, innovating together to create technology platforms for sustainability.”

Maheswaran talks about leaving a better world, and though billion-dollar acquisitions like that of Sierra Wireless don’t happen without a focussed business objective, Semtech applies its ‘Smarter Planet’ message to all its activities.

“When you talk about IoT, sustainability and Smarter Planet, you’d hope that everybody has an interest in that,” he says. “I think the reality is that much of the world’s deployment of technology is driven by very big companies talking a lot about sustainability, but not necessarily putting it into action. But there is pressure on them now, and they are engaging with LoRa.

“With digital transformation, the world will change. It will improve. I’m excited for my grandchildren and the positive impact these billions of sensors can have on their world. It’s the reason I do this.”

The post Semtech: Sensing a future of sustainable IoT appeared first on Tech For Good.

3M M*Modal: Voice-activated healthcare

Ben East — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 11:18:45 +0000

AI and natural-language processing present a dramatic opportunity for stretched healthcare systems to transform their clinical day-to-day. 3M Health Information Systems’ M*Modal platform is busy doing exactly that.

The sheer weight of numbers is staggering. More than seven million people across England are waiting for NHS treatment, with nearly 400,000 of these waiting for over a year. Average waiting times are over three months. When patients do see a clinician, they’re likely to encounter someone grappling with incredible demand, doing their very best for their patients, but having to work long hours just to make a dent in the administration of their caseload.

No wonder, then, that a SKY News analysis of NHS data revealed it lost 10,000 staff due to work-life balance issues last year alone – with work-related stress, sickness and burnout contributing to a worrying 175,000 working days lost to the NHS… in one month.

Such pressures are replicated in health services across the world. In the United States, 3M Health Information Systems (3M HIS) asked physicians what their issues were and found 60 percent felt bureaucratic tasks contributed to burnout, with nearly half of their working days spent managing Electronic Health Records (EHR) and other administrative tasks. Tellingly, only 27 percent of their total time was spent on direct, clinical, face-to face time with patients.

It might sound counterintuitive, but for 3M HIS, the answer to humanising the whole healthcare process is technology.

“As we try and address these challenges, the key enabler is digital transformation,” says Erik Van Hoeymissen, Vice President, Global Business Development at 3M HIS. “Digital transformation has the potential to make healthcare more proactive, decentralised, personalised and value based.”

3M HIS’s ethos behind its work is centred on developing tools that create “time to care”. The idea is to create platforms and software that allow healthcare professionals to concentrate on what they’re good at – looking after people. 3M’s M*Modal platform has already begun to have a huge impact on healthcare systems across the world.

Using conversational AI and ambient listening, the real-time speech recognition engine allows physicians of any medical speciality to conversationally create, review, edit and sign clinical notes directly into the patient’s EHR, automating their clinical documentation.

Meanwhile, 3M M*Modal’s computer-assisted physician documentation (CAPD) engine analyses and monitors the clinical narrative, nudging medical professionals for additional information and even suggesting courses of action to improve the quality of care and record keeping.

“Rather than using a keyboard and a mouse, clinicians can use their voice to create medical documentation, which is a lot faster and more efficient. Typically, a user can speak three times as fast as they can type,” says Van Hoeymissen. “That’s great because 3M M*Modal can, through real-time natural language understanding, interpret the meaning of the words.

“But I think more importantly, it changes the whole patient experience. All of a sudden, the doctor doesn’t necessarily have to look at the screen anymore, they can fully focus on that conversation with the patient, which allows doctors to be more empathetic, have a deeper conversation, or gain real understanding of what’s going on with the patient.”

"In creating time to care - in automating the documenting process in a much smarter way, in prioritising healthcare analytics and population health management - we know that we can significantly shift the needle when it comes to the way we manage our health.” - Erik van Hoeymissen

Of course, doctors using dictated notes is not in itself new. Alec Price-Forbes is a consultant rheumatologist and Chief Clinical Informatics Officer for Coventry and Warwickshire Health and Care Partnership ICS. He remembers beginning his clinical journey unspooling analogue tapes of his correspondence, which would then get dictated. He asked for a digital dictaphone, and “the rest is history,” he smiles.

“The biggest bugbear for me as a clinician is documenting and dictating. It’s something I’ve never liked, despite the fact that my whole digital transformation journey started with a dictaphone,” he admits.

“With 3M M*Modal, no letter I’ve produced after consulting with a patient – virtually, or face to face – has needed transcription. And, historically, they’d have been outsourced; I would dictate, I wouldn’t be able to see what I had dictated, it would go off to somewhere in the world to be transcribed, and then would come back as an electronic document, be matched up with the patient demographics, and then presented to me to verify.

“That was all a paper process, by the way. Now, I can see a patient, I can dictate my letter using the 3M M*Modal platform, and the voice recognition software means I can read what I’m dictating at the same time and make any corrections if required. And I can verify and send that in real-time to the patient, their GP, or any other clinician that’s required. And I can do that from anywhere in the world.”

“These are hugely powerful tools that I think are game changers for the health and care system.” - Alec Price-Forbes

Price-Forbes calls this a reimagination of the whole healthcare process, using voice to automate interactions with the EHR system. And the reason M*Modal is so interesting for people like him is that its back end is clinically-focused. While natural-language processing applications are becoming increasingly common, the requirements of such systems in a healthcare context are an order of magnitude more complex.

“You might get, say, an Alexa-style voice recognition system, but does it know how to embed its technology into the workflow of a clinician? Can it group clinical data to come up with meaningful diagnostics and analyse risk?” says Van Hoeymissen.

“In order to train these algorithms that will understand both the voice of the doctor, but also understand the meaning of what is dictated, there’s a lot of data you need to train the system with. You need a cloud-based solution to do this, and we’ve now accumulated 20 years of medical knowledge and clinical expertise to deliver this system.”

“You need to know how to make this work in the day-to-day life of clinicians without changing the workflow they are familiar with – win their hearts and minds – so they can be confident that they can automate. That’s definitely our USP.”

3M HIS has set about its task of creating a system laser-focused on the needs of clinicians by employing them directly to help develop 3M M*Modal. Van Hoeymissen admits there’s no point in digitally transforming anything if you’re just adding more processes into the day; the story of 3M M*Modal is not just about leading-edge natural-language processing in a clinical context, it’s about ensuring it adds the measurable “time to care” that is so important to 3M HIS’s vision.

That means 3M HIS actively partners with big EHR vendors such as Epic, Cerner, System C and Meditech – as well as more bespoke solutions – to smooth integration with existing systems rather than bolting on yet another management platform. With customers, too, 3M HIS will proactively map out how clinical documentation workflows are organised, identify choke points, and use automations to unblock them.

“Then, when a solution works, we scale it up,” says Van Hoeymissen.

And part of the battle for hearts and minds is reassuring people that such automations aren’t there to threaten the jobs of those who administer existing documentation processes.

“I see 3M’s toolkit supporting health and care providers by repurposing staff who are doing tasks like transcription,” says Price-Forbes. “Medical secretaries have a pivotal role in being patient navigators. My secretary does an amazing job in helping patients work out what needs to happen next. There’s always been this concern around the use of these technologies, that they would somehow replace a secretary. I see it very differently. It’s not about losing people, it’s about changing their job profile so they can really support patients going forward.”

M*Modal is just the beginning for what 3M HIS aims to achieve with voice-based AI and automation in healthcare. Van Hoeymissen talks of the ambient technology used to capture clinicians’ notes also being used in the future to input patients’ own understanding of their conditions onto their EHR.

“Imagine,” adds Price-Forbes, “if a patient can also capture in real-time what problem they are experiencing and flow it into their patient record. By the time their clinician sees them, there’s insight and data in there, which is far more powerful and credible.

“If you actually stop and think about it, at the moment we have someone with a health or care problem which builds up over a period of days, weeks, months, often years. They’ll then come along to an appointment and try and summarise everything that has happened to them in one go. With ambient listening technology, you’d already have an idea of what was going on. These are hugely powerful tools that I think are game changers for the health and care system.”

3M M*Modal’s technology can be applied to the structured data it captures to automate clinical coding, opening altogether new opportunities for data analysis. 3M HIS already provides population health management software, enabling better informed policy decisions.

“From our population health management solutions, we know that a large majority of the healthcare budget is spent on managing patients with chronic conditions,” says Van Hoeymissen. “Imagine if you could prevent patients from becoming sick, or if you could be much better at managing chronic conditions in a way that they don’t exacerbate. That’s going to significantly reduce the overall costs.

“We need to have much more emphasis on proactive prevention – and technologies like ours can use AI and machine learning algorithms to monitor or even predict conditions before patients even get symptoms.”

Ultimately Van Hoeymissen’s dream is that an empathetic conversation between a doctor and patient, powered by technology in the background, means healthcare systems will be taking care of the wellbeing of their patients, rather than simply treating them when they’re sick.

So, can technologies like 3M M*Modal really make us healthier?

“Well, the NHS definitely has the potential to leverage its data at scale, because it’s one national health system,” thinks Van Hoeymissen. “And if you enable patients to navigate the care system in a much simpler, easier way that is catered to their needs, then it empowers them to better manage their own healthcare.

“In creating time to care – in automating the documenting process in a much smarter way, in prioritising healthcare analytics and population health management – we know that we can significantly shift the needle when it comes to the way we manage our health.”

The post 3M M*Modal: Voice-activated healthcare appeared first on Tech For Good.

Amref takes a digital leap forward with GSK and Cognizant

Sam Jermy — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 17:11:55 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the challenges to healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. Amref Health Africa was already digitally astute, but now its capabilities have leapt ahead thanks to the combined support of GSK and Cognizant.

Amref Health Africa has been working for more than 60 years to advance access to quality healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. They partner with communities in 35 countries to sustainably strengthen health systems and improve access to vital care and services. This work is at all levels; from the grassroots with communities on the ground to influencing policy at the highest levels of national government and in global policy spaces. They enrol and train thousands of community health workers, establish health facilities, deliver treatment, direct investment in health infrastructure, and engage with health ministries throughout the region to drive progress.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, exposed the scale of the task they continue to face.

“The pandemic reminded us of the challenges that were already existing,” says Amref’s Diana Mukami from the organisation’s headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. “One of them is in terms of access – whether that’s basic awareness of healthy living, affordability, facilities and infrastructure, or to health workers delivering good services.”

A perennial challenge facing health systems in the region has always concerned its healthcare workforce, a fact exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Mukami says that most nations within Amref’s reach fall a long way short of the World Health Organisation’s minimum recommended ratio of health workers to population size.

“How do you get the right number of health workers, even with a growing population in Africa? We have about 1.4 billion people currently, and that’s projected to double in the next couple of decades. So how do you actually make sure that you have enough health workers and how do you make sure that they have the right education and training? How are you going to determine what the right education and training is?” she adds.

“And then there’s the management. You have hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers in a country – how do you measure what they are doing and if they are deployed in the right place?”

As Digital Learning Director, Mukami has witnessed a transformation over the last 10-15 years in Amref’s ability to leverage rapidly expanding mobile connectivity in the region. Amref has achieved notable success with three digital platforms that together have helped them overcome issues of a lack of physical training facilities. Jibu (meaning ‘answer’ in Swahili) is a training service delivered to smartphones. Leap is another, but geared towards the lower-end devices commonly used throughout the region; it uses SMS and interactive voice recordings. Finally, M-Jali is a data collection tool health workers use on the ground can use to patch information such as referrals into government Health Information Systems.

But as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020, Amref began to understand a vital weakness in its digital capabilities: none of its tools talked to each other. Essential data concerning the substance, quality and distribution of its training services was not integrated with healthcare data collected within the communities it served. As the outbreak stretched resources further, gaps in their knowledge became a pressing concern as they sought to target and measure the effectiveness of their activities and flatten the curve of the disease’s spread.

GSK + Cognizant

Biopharma company GSK has been a prominent supporter of Amref’s mission for more than 30 years. For the last decade, GSK have partnered with Amref and ministries of Health to train frontline health workers in prevention and treatment of infectious disease, immunisation, maternal and child health and hygiene/sanitation, connecting the often low-income communities they serve to the public health system. The arrival of COVID-19 hugely increased demand on Amref, so when it approached GSK for further support, the company responded to help find solutions.

While GSK’s pre-eminence is in developing and manufacturing medicines and vaccines, it focuses considerable effort on building the systems for their delivery around the world. As Fiona Smith-Laittan, Head of Global Health Strategy and Operations at GSK, tells Tech for Good, innovating treatments without thinking about how they get to the people who need them is “pointless”.

Upgrading Amref’s digital infrastructure to help it manage surging demand became an immediate objective. But, as Smith-Laittan readily admits, GSK isn’t a technology services provider: “It was clear to us that we didn’t have the capabilities to do this on our own. We are not tech experts. But we did know a lot of tech experts.”

A hackathon was organised by Amref and GSK to develop the problem and potential solutions further, and Cognizant, one of GSK’s longstanding strategic technology partners, took part. Its team would emerge from the exercise with a mandate to proceed on a basis much broader than the immediate priority of flattening the COVID curve. What they would go on to do would transform Amref’s digital capabilities for the long term.

Cognizant assembled a multitalented “A-Team” of product managers, analysts, and engineers who had worked on similar projects in the past, focused on the public good. They were led by Chief Architect Sathish Kumar Manickam.

“It was an interesting challenge that was thrown at us,” he recalls.

“The challenge was to flatten the curve of the COVID outbreak, but when we got closer to the problem we understood Amref doesn’t only take care of COVID. They work in the public health sector in 35 countries.

“They have a training platform, they have a service delivery platform that takes care of what they do on the ground, but they didn’t know what’s the demand and supply that they manage. All the tools they had were working in silos, so they weren’t able to correlate the data they had and make meaningful inferences and make better decisions.”

Cognizant’s team imagined a “single pane of glass” for Amref. A system that would integrate all Amref’s tools, but do so with a relentless focus on ease-of-use and cost effectiveness. Beyond the integration, Grafana was used as an open-source platform for data analysis and visualisation that would not burden Amref with ongoing technical or financial overheads, while engineered to provide the NGO with the intelligence they needed.

Impact

The work is already making a significant difference to Amref on the ground.

Radhika Ghambir, a key member of Manickam’s ‘A-Team’ at Cognizant, summarises what Amref is now able to achieve: “They can predict their training requirements, they can predict how well it will work. They can make more strategic decisions, which is driven by data now – they are solving various problems based on what particular communities really need, so they can have targeted volunteers working in the places that need them.

“The solution we have developed is scalable, secure and open source. So the platform can be rolled out in all the countries that Amref is operating in. It can be easily used to extend functionalities by whoever wants to do it. We hope it holds a great future.

Mukami is clear that the partnership between GSK and Cognizant on the organisation’s behalf represents a step-change in their ability to meet the many challenges they face. Now the platform is in Amref’s hands, onboarding by Cognizant has given them the tools it needs to extend it independently according to its evolving needs.

“What it has done is to create a one stop shop that’s able to tell us different things. We will be looking at taking those learnings to a level where we’re advocating with governments to influence policy and practice. For me, this is what I think is really exciting about the work we’re doing with Cognizant and GSK,” she says.

Cognizant’s single pane of glass brings together multiple forms of differently structured data into one dataset, accessible via a dashboard, closing the loop to tell Amref a powerful story about the effectiveness of training materials and how well they’re being used in practice at both the individual and national level. From that, Amref can glean best practices and challenges, and adapt training content, processes and systems.

The M-Jali household level data was integrated with government health information systems, adding enormous value in drawing insights at the individual health worker level, as well as aggregated, in real time. This feeds into planning for training systems, and project learning for the future.

The work represented a labour of love for Cognizant’s team, involving long hours working at a frenetic pace. “These are a talented bunch of people that I got to work with. I feel grateful and lucky I got to work with such a great team on this,” adds Ghambir.

It’s the sort of high-impact work that Cognizant is seeking to undertake on an increasingly significant scale, says the company’s Head of Life Sciences UK and Ireland, Rohit Alimchandani. He talks to Cognizant’s mission of – improving lives by engineering outcomes – and the fact a simple brief from Amref and GSK was developed and expanded into something with which his team could make a larger, lasting impact.

“When GSK approached us and said that this is a great opportunity for you to come in and engage and really make a difference in the world, we took on the challenge with gusto,” he says.

“That’s our focus – we work very closely with organisations and focus primarily on how we can collaborate to solve problems. And when you see what the team have done here, it’s mind-bogglingly cool.

“As far as I’m concerned, the team are now looking at how can we do more of this, and we certainly want to be engaged in healthcare,” he says.

Smith-Laittan sees the work GSK has done with Amref with Cognizant as a powerful testament to a purpose that is core to the company’s mission to “get ahead of disease”. GSK aims to reach 2.5 billion people over the next ten years, a very large proportion of whom are currently underserved in their communities.

Fiona Smith-Laittan, Sathish Kumar Manickam, Rohit Alimchandani

“At GSK we use our science, technology and people alongside long-standing partnerships to address the world’s greatest health challenges and improve health globally. We are very proud at GSK of our 34 year partnership with Amref Health Africa. Together, we have contributed to building stronger healthcare systems, training healthcare workers, and improving treatment and diagnosis of high burden diseases. But we’re always looking at ways of improving things and getting further ahead, particularly with the new opportunities now available through more improved technology,” she says.

“It was just a beautiful marriage I think – when the three organisations came together to do something pretty special.”

Mukami concurs: “This partnership is more than just about training health workers and collecting data. It is about the services that these health workers will provide to millions of people across the region towards our vision of lasting health change in Africa.”

The post Amref takes a digital leap forward with GSK and Cognizant appeared first on Tech For Good.

Powering digital equity in Philadelphia

Beatriz Valero de Urquía — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 01:47:00 +0000

The City of Philadelphia’s Office for Innovation talks to Tech For Good about how it was able to leverage the strength of public-private partnership to provide internet access to thousands of households and children, passing the pandemic test with flying colours.

At the start of 2020, digital access was a commodity. Less than three months later, it became a human right, without which many were unable to access vital resources such as healthcare, banking services and education. Aware of the difficulties that affected its most vulnerable residents, the City of Philadelphia set out to close the digital divide.

Faced with an inequality gap that threatened to set back a generation in the wake of COVID, the City of Philadelphia turned to its private partners to create a collaboration that would change millions of lives in record time. According to research conducted by the City’s administrators in 2021, 84% of residents stated they had wireless broadband internet access. However, only 63% of low-income families said they have access to a desktop, laptop or tablet.

“Governments were forced to innovate very, very quickly,” says Andrew Buss, Deputy CIO for Innovation at the City of Philadelphia. “A lot of private companies realised the significance of digital equity and felt that they had to become involved with some of that work, knowing that governments cannot do it all.”

A city for all citizens

Digital equity has been a priority for the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT) for over a decade. When the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to prevent a large number of children from accessing school resources, Philadelphia relied on its vast experience mastering the art of public-private partnership to help prevent that.

“Before the pandemic, nobody realised that we really needed to consider internet connectivity in the same way we consider other utilities,” says Juliet Fink Yates, the City’s Digital Inclusion Manager. “The internet is now as foundational to our society as electricity and heating.”

Although Philadelphia’s classrooms effectively transitioned to a virtual environment, many households were unable to follow suit. The City’s team quickly realised that, although most communities in Philadelphia had broadband access, they often did not have the means to sign up for these services and provide their children with the tools they needed to succeed in a socially-distanced world.

“The pandemic really brought all of these virtual activities into every student household, whether they were ready or not,” says Ashley Pollard, K-12 Digital Access Program Manager at the City of Philadelphia.

PHLConnectED was the City’s solution to the challenge. The program provides free, consistent and reliable internet access to pre-K–12 student households. To achieve this, the City brought in support from all fields, from ISPs to non-profit organizations, united with the goal of helping those most in need at a critical point in history.

It was an instant success. By the end of the first year, the City of Philadelphia and its private partners had enabled over 18,700 connections. Now, two years later, the program includes grants for schools, as well as digital skill classes and a multilingual 24/7 hotline that provides information about the initiative and conducts eligibility screenings. To date, this successful public-private partnership has enabled over 22,500 connections.

Ashley Pollard, Andrew Buss, Juliet Fink Yates

“Partnering with private companies is really necessary for governments,” Buss says. “We are often expected to do a lot of things, and we do not always have the expertise, the resources and the knowledge to do some of them.”

Philadelphia’s commitment to partnership has taken shape in the form of the Digital Literacy Alliance (DLA), a group of institutional stakeholders tasked with bridging the city’s digital divide. The initiative brings together non-profit organizations like United Way as well as industry partners such as Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, to provide funding and strategy for innovative digital inclusion projects programs across the region.

In the past six years, the Alliance has provided about $200,000 in yearly grants to fund innovative digital literacy projects. One of the most successful is the City’s Digital Navigator Program, where digital support staff provided one-to-one dedicated support to households around accessing and using technology. The City, through the OIT and the Office of Children and Families, has supported a public computer centre network which ensures residents can easily access computers all across the city.

“When we shrink the digital divide, we enable people to access all the benefits and services that the government and the community have to offer them,” says Fink Yates. “We know it has saved lives.”

The City of Philadelphia wants to ensure that no person is left behind in the transition towards a digital society. For this reason, it has crafted a digital equity plan that will provide residents with access to affordable devices, internet connectivity and digital skills. But achieving this ambitious goal requires the sort of extensive expertise and support that only the private sector can provide.

T-Mobile: Towards Ten Million

In 2020, having recently completed the acquisition of Sprint, as well as a $9bn investment into low-band 5G spectrum, T-Mobile was in a strong position to provide internet access to those in need. During the worst of the COVID crisis, the company was able to rise to the challenge posed to it by the City of Philadelphia: Make sure all the city’s children could attend virtual lessons.

“At the start of the pandemic, we knew that the communities impacted the most would be the ones that were historically underrepresented,” says Dr. Kiesha King, National Education Administrator at T-Mobile. “As a company, we needed to step in and take action right away.”

T-Mobile is no stranger to partnerships with public organisations. In 2016, the telecommunications giant collaborated with the Philadelphia Housing Authority through the ConnectHome program, designed to provide devices to 2,500 low-income families. That same year, T-Mobile launched a national initiative called EmpowerED, which offered funding and hardware to school districts. When the pandemic hit, the company knew it had to aim much higher, and pledged to invest $10.7bn to connect 10 million students across the country to the internet over the next five years, in what became known as Project 10Million.

To achieve this goal, T-Mobile and the City of Philadelphia set up distribution centres all around the city, where families could pick up Wi-Fi hotspots and instruction manuals in 11 different languages. Shane Brody, the company’s Senior Digital Inclusion Specialist, even turned his garage into a “hotspot distribution centre” for a few months. Once PHLConnectED launched, eligible students could continue to get a mobile hotspot through district distribution centres, their Charter school, or through a selection libraries.

“Everyone at T-Mobile was working extremely hard to help those that needed help the most,” he says. “We said: ‘Anyone who needs a connection, T-Mobile is going to support it, whether that be through a hotspot through an embedded Chromebook or a connected tablet. Within that a two-week timeframe, we rolled out thousands of these in Philadelphia alone.”

The City of Philadelphia’s Ashley Pollard celebrated T-Mobile’s commitment to ensure that the city’s children had the capacity and bandwidth to participate in online education. “The critical piece that led us to partnering with T-Mobile is that they had the best pricing for their hotspots that offered the highest data capacity, as well as unlimited data and access,” he says. “We didn’t want to run into issues of limited data or caps.”

However, education does not end with schools. Another one of the City of Philadelphia’s landmark digital equity programs is the Free Library, which loans hotspots via funding from the FCC and through the PHLConnectED programme, allowing residents to access the internet from anywhere in the city with the support of T-Mobile. To date, the program has enabled over 13,000 connections, helping residents access a variety of opportunities, from telehealth consultations to job interviews and skills workshops.

“Our work with the City is going to make sure that families don’t just have a network and a device, but they’re empowered to be able to use that to live a different life than they would have before,” says Dr. Jeff Carlson, K-12 Education Advisor at T-Mobile.

“It’s about making sure that, no matter where they are, Philadelphians have a network that’s going to get them connected to the world around them.”

Accenture: A for Access

When public and private entities work together, they can leave a lasting impact on innumerable lives. But materialising life-changing projects requires resources, something that was in short supply in the summer of 2020, when the City of Philadelphia was designing its ‘back to school’ operation. Enter Accenture.

“The pandemic has helped governments understand the importance of collaboration and partnership,” says David Davies, Client Account Lead at Accenture. “In a crisis situation, government needs to be able to request help when they need it.”

Accenture was especially well-placed to help the City of Philadelphia tackle the challenge of ensuring digital equity. The company had previously partnered with the Department for Labor and Workforce to redesign government services in a more accessible and user-friendly way, and its dedicated education practice of over 500 professionals has helped hundreds of clients across the world improve student outcomes and experiences.

“COVID-19 really disrupted education across the globe, and of course, across America,” says Sarah Amendolare, Strategy and Management Consulting Manager at Accenture. “Engaging with not only the schools, but the communities and, specifically, underserved communities was really critical to our strategy.”

Christiane Reinhold, Management Consulting Manager at Accenture, adds: “People have now gotten an idea of what they want from government: they want access, and it should be easy, it should be fast – the only way to do that is to bring in the private sector.”

Accenture’s main role within the City’s pandemic response was to offer program management and implementation support the PHLConnectED program. From developing a program management plan with ISPs to creating the necessary materials for virtual lessons, the Accenture team was part of every step of the project, becoming vital to its success.

“In two months’ time, we needed to coordinate multiple large institutional partners to develop and launch this brand new city-wide program before the start of a school year, and ensure that every student had a way to get access to the internet as quickly as possible,” says Fink Yates. “We could not have done it without Accenture.”

Ending the digital divide is a huge effort that requires early intervention. In addition to supporting the City of Philadelphia, Accenture is increasing the quality of education children in the area receive by partnering with schools that serve communities in need. The goal of this initiative is to launch innovative early-education centres throughout the Commonwealth that they hope will help break the cycle of poverty.

“To have opportunity to work alongside government to better serve their constituents is just really rewarding work for us,” says Kevin Brown, Client Account Lead at Accenture. “For me, it’s a joy to bring to our clients the best of Accenture, to give them the tools they need to better carry out the work they do, which is often essential.”

Verizon: a community-wide enterprise

Education is key in the building of a revitalised and more accessible society in the post-COVID world. However, it is not necessary to wait until today’s children’s become adults before promoting solutions that foster innovation and digital skills within a community – a lesson that the City of Philadelphia’s partners took to heart.

As one of the world’s leading providers of communications services, Verizon has been an active partner in policies that enable broadband expansion across the United States. During the pandemic, the company provided grants for small businesses, and promoted projects such as the Verizon Innovative Learning Program, that aims to train 10 million young people with new digital skills by 2030, allowing them to fully participate in society’s digital future.

“Participation in the digital economy is essential in just about every aspect of our lives,” says Pedro Romero, Verizon’s Director of Government Affairs. “We at Verizon continue to work on closing the digital divide by focusing on creating and making available world-class broadband networks.”

Due to their common commitment to fostering innovation and helping underserved communities obtain digital skills, the partnership between Verizon and the City of Philadelphia was a perfect match.

“We’ve partnered with Verizon to create an external innovation fund,” Buss says. “We are seeding ideas from outside city government, seeing how they work and then potentially bringing some of that technology inside city government.”

The goal of the Philadelphia Fund for Leadership, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (Philadelphia FLIE) is to become the missing link between public administrations and local innovators to help solve the city’s most pressing challenges. FLIE focuses on creating a dynamic ecosystem across the city where innovative ideas can be piloted, and founders receive the expert mentoring and funding they need to make their ideas a success.

“FLIE is a perfect example of how collaborations between city governments and companies can help local businesses,” Romero says. “This synergy between public and private partners creates the perfect environment for innovation within the public sector.”

As technology advances, it disrupts the job market. For a community to not only survive, but to thrive in the digital era, all of its members need to be able to access the internet, whether that is for healthcare, education or professional purposes.

In partnership with Verizon, the City of Philadelphia has also launched a project to redevelop the City’s traditional public computing centres to create public computer centres. From accessing school to taking consultations with doctors, these centres have been created as spaces that allow every citizen to be connected to the digital world through technological devices and high-speed connectivity.

“If you have access to a broadband connection, good things do happen,” says Eric Fitzgerald Reed, Vice President of State Government Affairs, Pennsylvania and Delaware at Verizon. “These centres provided a much needed resource at a time where people were just confused or intimidated by technology. They opened its doors to make sure that people felt included and had a place to go to for their connectivity needs.”

If the FLIE program provides the opportunity for entrepreneurs to collaborate, the City’s public computer centres offer venues where those ideas can flourish, transforming the city of Philadelphia into a place where innovation is not a privilege, but a norm – all thanks to the power of partnerships with the private sector.

Connecting the future

As society becomes increasingly complex and connected, challenges also become less siloed, and need to be addressed from multiple perspectives. When a global epidemic threatened the future of the millions of residents of Philadelphia, the City’s established relationships and willingness to collaborate kept the worst-case scenario at bay and helped prepare a generation for a digital future.

“The City of Philadelphia and the School District of Philadelphia are second to none when it comes to bridging the digital divide,” says Dr King. “What the city did is take their school district, non-profit organisations, companies, and bring them all together to create connectivity for all.”

“I’m not sure you can have a smart city without digital equity,” Buss adds.

During times of crisis, the desire to help the most vulnerable prompts governments and private organisations to take action. Thanks to the success of these partnerships, the residents of Philadelphia were and will be able to take advantage of the many opportunities the digital era provides. In five years’ time, the City envisions a scenario where no Philadelphian has to worry about whether they’ve got a device or an internet connection, and the country as a whole has embraced digitalisation in a way that is inclusive and accessible for all.

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Northern Ireland’s Digitally Enabled Pandemic Response

Beatriz Valero de Urquía — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 19:19:00 +0000

In March 2020, the world came to a halt. But when COVID reached the shores of Northern Ireland, it encountered firm resistance in the form of its resolutely dynamic healthcare system and technology partners Kainos and Microsoft.

Northern Ireland is no stranger to innovation in healthcare. It was the first UK region to put in place a longitudinal patient care record for its 1.89 million residents. Two years ago, faced with a sudden crisis, the Department for Health and Social Care Northern Ireland (HSCNI), relied once again on digital solutions to save lives.

“This is the most challenging public health situation that we have seen in a generation,” Professor Sir Michael McBride, Chief Medical Officer at HSCNI, tells Tech For Good. “We moved at a very rapid pace to put in place a series of mitigations to detect infection in the community, develop vaccines, and adapt the health service so that we could protect the public, particularly those who are most vulnerable.”

To respond to the demands of the pandemic, HSCNI embarked on the first major development of cloud technology into the NHS in Northern Ireland. From data analytics to COVID-tracking, it developed a series of citizen-facing digitally enabled services that became the backbone of the country’s pandemic response. Since then, Northern Ireland’s healthcare service has been transformed.

Tracing contacts

How do you contain the spread of an unknown, highly contagious virus?

Northern Ireland’s contact-tracing programme was hailed a huge success. It became the first region in the UK to release a contact-tracing app, which was praised for its interoperability and privacy features. But the app was only a small part of the huge range of systems that HSCNI developed to protect its citizens and track the progress of the pandemic.

“I take a huge amount of pride in our response and, by extension, the tracking system,” says Richard Pengelly, Permanent Secretary of the Department of Health, and Chief Executive of HSCNI. “If you’re going to battle a pandemic, you need to gather as much data as possible about its evolution. Track and Trace fundamentally allowed us to do that in real-time, so it was absolutely central to our response to the virus.”

When the pandemic hit Northern Ireland in March 2020, HSCNI’s digital team took on the task of building the tools that would become the basis of the country’s pandemic response. And thus, the first iteration of the Test and Trace programme was born and deployed in under a week. Since then, the system has been in continuous evolution, adapting to meet the changing demands of the virus and each of its variants.

“The digital Test, Trace, and Protect programme that we set up to support clinical colleagues was built at a level, at a scale, at a volume that was completely unprecedented,” says Dan West, Chief Digital Information Officer at HSCNI. “It was really important for us to embrace cloud in a way that we hadn’t done previously, because it allowed us to meet the needs of our public health colleagues at a rate that would have been very difficult to do with other technologies.”

Built on Microsoft Cloud products and solutions with Kainos’ support, HSCNI’s Test and Trace system was able to consume hundreds of thousands of test results from labs and hospitals across the country at record speed, triggering which citizens needed to be contacted by Test and Trace. Moreover, the system was scalable and interoperable, which allowed West’s team to integrate it with the government’s SMS notification system and data analytics platforms, something that proved vital to control the spread of disease.

During those months, every minute made a difference. The Test and Trace system was the start of a new way of working at HSCNI, one that was cloud-based and able to anticipate citizens’ needs as well as respond to changing circumstances at speed.

“We adopted very much an agile methodology,” says Eddie Ritson, HSCNI Programme Director. “It was a whole new way of working, trying to do a job which hadn’t been done before. The policy was changing rapidly, and we were having to keep pace.

“It felt like we were doing an important job. It felt that we were doing something which was very much at the centre of the public health response to a critical situation.”

Pete Struthers, Healthcare CTO at Microsoft Ireland, adds: “They achieved something that hasn’t been achieved in healthcare in Northern Ireland before. The speed that we had this up and running and we could start contacting close contacts had an impact on people’s lives.”

Alongside Test and Trace, HSCNI developed a whole range of services to support its contact tracing efforts. These included the symptom-checker CovidCare app and the proximity app StopCovid. The latter had the same architecture as the Republic of Ireland’s app, in what became a cross-country effort to protect the epidemiological unit of the island. In a time of tragedy, the systems provided citizens with a sense of control.

“The ability for people to use a series of digital supports to do their bit to reduce the chance of infection and to learn about the virus through interacting with the digital systems that we developed, I think was very empowering to the citizens of Northern Ireland,” says Professor Sir McBride.

Vaccinating a country

Six months after the first lockdown, hope arrived in the form of COVID-19 vaccines. However, it also brought forth a new challenge: the need to vaccinate almost two million people, all at once.

“The vaccine rollout programme was the largest and fastest vaccine deployment in the history of Northern Ireland, and, frankly, in many countries around the world,” West says. “The teams needed to embrace that new agile way of working to protect the population and in particular, clinically vulnerable individuals and residents of care homes.”

Given the success of the Test and Trace solution, HSCNI decided to use similar tools for their vaccine management system. It was composed of three overlapping major products: a public-facing booking platform, a clinical recording solution, and a data analytics database.

Since the system was to be used by thousands of clinicians in different locations, it had to be both simple and scalable. Initially, HSCNI designed different applications for GP practices, pharmacies, and trusts, but those have now been merged into a single application that can be accessed through a smartphone, a tablet, or a web server. The ability to have all that information in one place proved absolutely vital to the vaccination campaign, which has already delivered 3.75 million doses and immunised 70.5% of the country’s population.

“The vaccine management system has been a gamechanger,” says Claire Buchner, Assistant Director of Digital Health and Nursing, HSCNI. “The programme potentially wouldn’t have been as successful without it, and it’s due to the fact that we have all of the data in one place.

“It didn’t matter whether a GP, a pharmacist or a care home had given a vaccine. All of that data was in the same place, at your fingertips. We’ve been able to show people the advantages of recording at the point of care. It has been a real success.”

Making sure the data was entered correctly and the processes on-site matched what was designed in the user journey, proved to be more challenging than expected. However, the benefits of the digital approach soon became clear. Somebody could be on a shopping trip to Belfast and decide to get vaccinated, and the clinician attending them would be able to immediately access their medical history. In addition, the system also records data regarding vaccine batches and side effects to ensure that the rollout is done in a fast and safe way.

“The biggest benefit to the patient is, without doubt, the single view of the patient,” says Gillian Armour, Principal Delivery Manager at Kainos. The Belfast-headquartered organisation uses digital technology to help businesses overcome their biggest challenges, positively impacting millions of people across the globe. “It gives the patient choice, and it gives the clinician comfort. I think that has been quite transformative.”

Data was also vital to ensure there was equal access to vaccines. Through the Azure Synapse data analytics solutions, HSCNI was able to identify low-uptake groups, such as pregnant people and people living in low socio-economic areas and mobilise resources and campaigns to encourage them to get their vaccines.

“We had not done that in healthcare before,” says Professor Sir Michael. “I look at the vaccine management system twice a day, every day. We use it to interrogate where we’ve had low vaccine uptake, so we can put in place special arrangements and pop-up clinics. It’s been crucially important in determining how we ensure that there’s vaccine equity.”

A collaborative success

Technology has been key to the success of Northern Ireland’s pandemic response. However, none of that would have been possible without the people that worked incessantly for two years to make it succeed, both from public and private organisations.

“We have really talented people,” Pengelly says. “We can’t automate their brain out of our system. It has to be a partnership between the public sector and the private sector; and a partnership between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.”

The ecosystem created by HSCNI fostered an atmosphere of innovation and mutual collaboration, in which private organisations came together to respond to their community’s needs. Among these was Kainos. HSCNI leveraged its expertise to build the services in which the Microsoft stack was deployed, from the contact-tracing platform to the vaccine management systems, as well as providing advice regarding how to deploy cloud technologies and agile delivery techniques.

“For us to have developed the products we did in the time we did, required private sector expertise,” Ritson says. “Kainos responded quickly to our set of requirements, as did Microsoft. We deployed Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Case Management solution, and with Kainos’ help, we were able to change and adapt it to our own particular set of circumstances.”

West adds: “The speed with which we’ve had to deliver new technology solutions has been completely unprecedented. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without a network of partners who were absolutely committed to delivering what society here in Northern Ireland needed.”

It was the strength of Microsoft and Kainos’ long-standing strategic relationship that allowed both organisations to spring into action when HSCNI required technical expertise. Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and its Azure Synapse services were the basis of most of Northern Ireland’s pandemic response systems, from the Test and Trace platform to the vaccine management systems.

The project has been award-winning, receiving the Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for Healthcare in Ireland in 2020, demonstrating the strength of the Kainos and Microsoft partnership.

“We made a decision that the solution was going to use Microsoft technology so we engaged and worked with the Microsoft team from the very start,” says Adam Donnelly, Strategic Alliance Director at Kainos.

“There was a key moment for me when we were at a difficult time in a project, and I asked one of the senior people from Microsoft some questions. He said to me, ‘Whatever help you need, you will get it’. And, for us, that really summed it up.”

The future is data

All experts agree that the future will not only be digital but also data-driven.

A common thread through HSCNI’s pandemic response has been the role that data analytics has played in tracking the spread of the pandemic and transforming the organisation’s ways of working. As the world moves into the endemic phase of the virus, it is hoped that COVID will become a faint memory, but its legacy will be unforgettable.

“Our ability to analyse data has been critical,” West says. “We have been able to ingest different datasets and then use advanced data science to monitor the delivery of our services and understand the progress of the virus.

“In the future, we need to collect data once. And we need to use it relentlessly across organisations to ensure that we’re delivering the best possible patient services, personalised to the individual around their clinical needs. That’s a big journey, but it’s really exciting.”

At the strategic level, data analytics solutions were absolutely critical. HSCNI’s COVID dashboard allowed the organisation to access daily information about the progress of the pandemic. That allowed senior officials to calculate the R number and make decisions about the restrictions that were put in place to control the epidemic.

When vaccines were limited, data analytics solutions allowed HSCNI to look at the data regarding uptake rates and hospital admissions and deploy mobile testing units in the communities that were most in need. Moreover, HSCNI also took a risk-averse approach to the deployment of data analytics solutions with the goal of ensuring data safety.

“This is your data, and my data,” Professor Sir Michael says. “It’s hugely important that the public has absolute confidence that we respect that.”

Looking forward, HSCNI is working towards a future where healthcare systems are robust and data analytics are leveraged every day to provide patients with personalised care. From clinician burnout to mental health, healthcare services still have many challenges ahead. This is the reason HSCNI is embarking on a five-year portfolio of change, that aims to recognise how important digital, data and technology is in delivering the next generation of health and social care services.

“I think only the fullness of time will allow the story of Northern Ireland to be told properly,” Pengelly says. “It’s a magnificent story. In five years, people will access healthcare in a different way. They’ll look at records in a different way. I think we’ll see a noticeable shift in population health and maybe someday we’ll look back and think: ‘COVID was a difficult time, but it was a trigger point for some real qualitative improvements in healthcare.’”

The pandemic provoked a leap forward in the use of technology in healthcare systems. Now, the genie is out of the bottle. In the years to come, digital solutions will continue to help healthcare organisations provide personalised care and improve the quality of life of the people of Northern Ireland – and the world – creating a future where doctors and data are both fundamental in the fight against disease.

The post Northern Ireland’s Digitally Enabled Pandemic Response appeared first on Tech For Good.

Harrow: The Council of Change

Beatriz Valero de Urquía — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 11:28:00 +0000

Harrow Council’s IT team take Tech For Good behind the scenes of a digital transformation programme that is improving the lives of its workers and residents

As living organisms, boroughs are in constant change. In 1852, the city of Harrow had 141 residents. Today, its council serves a vibrant and diverse community of over 250,000 people, and it keeps growing day by day. Therefore, the borough is no stranger to introducing new services that will improve the lives of all its residents. The COVID-19 pandemic required local authorities to quickly adapt and Harrow wasted no time in stepping up to the challenge.

Two years ago, Harrow Council embarked on an ambitious journey to modernise all aspects of how it works. Its mission was to wholly transform its culture, policies, and estate to foster a more vibrant and agile working environment for staff. In turn, they would be better placed to move quickly and innovate in delivering enhanced, customer-centric and continually improving services to residents. To do this, transforming the IT systems was a foundational step.

Ben Goward joined Harrow as Director of Information Communication Technology in April 2020, during the height of the pandemic. When he arrived he found a council whose IT systems had been outsourced for 10 years, and that was struggling to adapt to the requirements of remote work. In order to improve the productivity of the council and the services that it provides to its residents during those trying times, it was imperative to invest in IT.

“When I joined, my priority was to respond to the COVID pandemic by rolling out devices that people could use when working from home, and to improve collaboration within the organisation as well,” Goward says. “Our IT strategy here is very much about moving to the cloud, and improving the agility and efficiency of the council.”

The council had built up a long legacy of old IT systems; all its IT services were on-premise and employees were using older Windows systems to store information in a single data centre located in the council’s Civic Centre – a building earmarked for demolition.

“We are redeveloping our main Civic Centre site into social housing,” he says. “That means we have to move our legacy data centre and all of our core systems into the cloud.

“One of the things I wanted to do with this change is alter the relationship between our service users and the IT department. We brought elements of IT back in-house, and we trained up our service desk and our frontline staff to be really focused on what the user need was and how we could best serve that as an IT team.”

In early 2021, the organisation began the migration of the estate to Azure, allowing in-house and cloud services to run in parallel, so the council could take advantage of the best of both systems. Catherine Little, Harrow Council’s Head of IT Operations, explains the benefits of designing a new hybrid model of work that will adapt to the changes that the council is undergoing and the challenges that come with a crisis like COVID-19.

“I’ve worked at Harrow for a very long time and we’ve always undergone lots of change,” Little says. “We’d outsourced our IT service for 10 years, so we wanted to look at how we could deliver those services slightly differently. It was about being able to adapt to fast-paced change and wanting to bring back control. We went for a hybrid model because we felt that was the best way to adapt and react to the requirements of the service. Now we’ve got some services managed by third parties, and some of them are in-house. We just feel that we’ve got that control and that say over how we deliver our services.”

Although the plan to make this IT transformation always existed, the pandemic forced the IT team to undertake the ambitious cloud migration programme in a very short time. During the last year, the council has migrated all of its infrastructure, including about 300 line-of-business systems, to the cloud. At the same time, it has introduced a new service delivery model, which has required its workforce to learn a new set of skills.

The council’s IT is changing and ways of working need to change as well. For example, the council has launched its own IT service management tool, which allows users to interface through a portal instead of email. The organisation has also introduced audio-visual equipment in offices to run hybrid meetings, and has rolled out Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 tools. These new tools have been fundamental during the last year, where most of the council’s employees have worked from home, allowing real-time communication and information sharing despite the physical distance between team members.

“The pandemic has changed everything,” Goward says. “It required IT to really step up, to make sure that our staff, when working from home, could still be productive and continue to deliver the services that we need to deliver as a local authority.”

The biggest symbol of change in Harrow is the closing of the local Civic Centre. Council staff will move into a smaller collaborative working space, much more geared towards new ways of working. In the new location, traditional desks will give room to café style working, where staff equipped with the latest technology will run hybrid meetings and develop projects collaboratively.

“We’re in the middle of a modernisation programme, which is about not just changing technology, but about changing the way that people work,” Little says. “IT obviously has to support that. We have to be able to adapt at very short notice and our users and our residents have to be front-and-centre of everything that we do, because they are the most important part. We shape our services around their requirements, rather than what we think that they should have.”

"The pandemic has changed everything. It required IT to really step up”

People are a fundamental piece of Harrow’s IT vision, from those that make up the council population to every person who works every day in the council halls, and now, remote working spaces. In order to ensure that users are able to adapt to the new technologies and that the council is introducing tools that actually make a positive impact in their day-to-day work, Little works with a dedicated technology adoption team, that is able to identify the tools that are being used and the aspects that people struggle with.

“We’re constantly trying to push the new technology and make people feel comfortable using IT because that is one of the biggest challenges,” she says.

“The engagement with everybody during the transformation was actually quite easy, because people were clamouring for something different, and they knew that some of the traditional methods had to go. But the transition from the traditional methods to new technology is an ongoing process, and we are just constantly looking for new things to do.”

During the last 18 months, Harrow has been working tirelessly to roll out new devices and operating stems and move its data centre to the cloud. In addition to more efficient working, the transformation has also allowed the council to cut down costs, as it only will have to pay for the services that it consumes, instead of paying for a core system to be hosted internally. A little over a year in, a lot of its core systems have gone live in their new cloud mode, to very positive customer satisfaction ratings.

Version 1

“The key benefits of moving to the cloud for Harrow are that we become much more agile in terms of how users access the core systems and data that they need to do their job,” Goward says. “Moving our systems into the cloud has made us more agile and efficient as an organisation.

“Top-level sponsorship is always very important in a project as on this scale, and we’ve been very fortunate in Harrow that the chief executive and the exec directorship team have been really supportive of the projects that we’ve been running. They’ve been willing to invest where we’ve needed to invest and they’ve helped us through the difficult times. It’s been a collective achievement.”

As Harrow Council has moved its systems to the cloud, it has increasingly become dependent on the expertise of partners, who are helping the IT team with the process of migrating its systems to the cloud. A critical partner in the journey is Version-1.

The relationship between the council and Version 1 began in May 2020 and remains strong today. The company has been supporting organisations through their digital transformation initiatives for the past 25 years. Version 1 worked alongside Harrow’s IT team to develop a plan to modernise its applications and migrate its servers to Azure. As the work has progressed, the council has leaned further on Version 1’s expertise to tackle additional projects that will further drive the council’s digitalisation journey.

Borough residents are Harrow Council’s most important concern. When looking for a partner to support its IT transformation, it was fundamental to Harrow that its partner in such a mission-critical exercise shared the same community-centric values.

In addition to supporting the council’s IT transformation, Version 1 has added social value to the partnership by actively working with colleges and other community groups in the area to offer tutoring, work experience, and apprenticeships. At the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, Version 1 worked to adapt its work placements to a remote footing, rather than reducing or cancelling them, distributing students across different teams to make sure they didn’t lose pace with a changing job market. The project has been an incredible success and has received very positive feedback from both students and local authorities.

“People are the most important thing to Harrow, and I think the way that Version 1 deliver their services and the way that we work collaboratively together, you can absolutely see that,” says Catherine Little, Harrow Council’s Head of IT Operations. “There are defined lines in the contract, but they go above and beyond that.

“An example is when we did some workplaces with students. They were meant to provide two or three workplaces and they ended up doing four or five. They’re very giving of their time. It’s 80 hours to support the students in their work and whenever I’ve gone to them I never hear ‘No’. It’s always ‘Yes’. They’re a great partner.”

Version 1 and Harrow Council spoke to Tech For Good about their social value strategy last July. Learn more about it here.

“Of the third parties that we use, Version 1 are probably the biggest supplier in terms of the breadth and the range of the services that they provide,” Little says. “They support all of our applications and hosting, and they’re absolutely front-and-centre of our cloud migration. They also do a lot around social value, which is really important to us as an organisation.”

Despite the challenges brought forth by the pandemic, both organisations have been working together remotely as one team. The key to success has been trust and a shared goal to improve the lives of the residents of Harrow – a key thread of Version 1’s mission statement is to transform lives as well as technology, and it is sewn into all its contracts.

“We’ve got a lot of big projects still to come with Version 1 and we’re confident they’re going to be successful,” Goward adds.

The ultimate beneficiaries of this transformation will be the people of Harrow, who are always at the core of every project the council completes. In order to ensure they have access to the services on which they depend, the council is now enabling browser-based applications. These new features will change the way residents interact with the council and create more efficient communication between the people of Harrow and their local authority. In the future, the IT transformation will also lead to automated and digitalised systems that will improve residents’ lives.

Minali Jones, Head of IT Business Management at Harrow Council, explains that it’s not about having the latest technology, but about having the technology that best addresses the needs of the residents.

“We’re not an IT company,” Jones says. “Our core service is to ensure that we’re able to provide an IT service to support the council services that we provide to residents. Migrating to the cloud has helped us in making sure that we don’t need to spend time looking after our infrastructure and we’re able to focus our efforts on supporting our council services.

“This will happen through better automation and improving mobile technology that we provide frontline services with, whether that be picking up the bins through to social workers going out into the community and helping our vulnerable residents.”

Recently, Harrow Council completed the cloud migration of its revenues and benefits system, which is a fundamental part of its services. The council uses this system to collect all of its revenue and to pay benefits for some of the neediest members of the community. The migration has been extremely successful, with users reporting that it’s performing better than it ever did on-premise.

The success of this launch opens the door to many more improvements in the months to come. Now that most of the systems are live, it is time for the Harrow team to take advantage of them, and use them as a base from which to build on future applications.

“The future of Harrow IT is going to be very much about exploiting the new technology platform that we put in place,” Goward says. “We’ll be looking to expand on the cloud systems that we’ve implemented and the use of data and analytics, and increasingly artificial intelligence and automation, to make the council even more efficient and responsive to our resident’s needs.”

Harrow’s IT transformation – as well as the makeup of the local population – will never stop evolving. Its transition to cloud-based systems has been a fundamental milestone on the Council’s modernisation journey.

Now, armed with these new digital systems, Harrow is a step closer to achieving its mission of becoming an agile, technologically driven, equal and diverse council that can best support its residents. Its grand modernisation vision aims to make a genuine difference to the working lives of its staff, and in doing so equip them to better serve the people that live and work in Harrow.

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Schneider Electric’s Smarter, Greener, Happier Future

Daniel Brigham — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 16:38:00 +0000

SUSTAINABILITY IS IN SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC’S DNA. WE SPEAK TO THE DIGITAL, ENERGY AND AUTOMATION GIANTS’ MEA REGION, WHICH HAS OVER 5,000 PARTNERS AND 6,000 ENGINEERS, ABOUT WHY IT BELIEVES AN ALL-DIGITAL, ALL-ELECTRIC WORLD IS REQUIRED FOR A SMARTER AND GREENER FUTURE

Sometimes, it is easy for companies to talk a good game about sustainability. They can reel off targets, throw about buzzwords such as green energy and net-zero, and give anyone listening the impression that their attitude to the environment, and the future of the planet, should be celebrated. But, look a little deeper at what they are actually doing, and all too often the words sound increasingly hollow: all style and no substance.

Some companies, though, are different. They back their words up with actions. Schneider Electric, leaders in digital transformation of energy management and usage, is very much in that latter camp. It talks a good game, and plays an even better game. It is proud of its commitment to putting environmental and sustainability considerations at the forefront of not just its own practices but all the activities of its customers and partners.

For Schneider Electric, its style is met with substance. In 2005, it was an early adopter in tackling environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, and since then it has reviewed and improved those ESG commitments every three years. In January this year, Schneider’s consistent adherence to sustainability goals was rewarded by research company Corporate Knights, when it named Schneider Electric No.1 in its annual index of The Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations In The World.

"Sustainability is everywhere when we work at Schneider, from our people vision to the core of our business. It’s a personal conviction and everyone is working hard to contribute to this fantastic journey”

Based on corporate sustainability performance, the award was testament to Schneider’s belief in a smarter, greener future. Corporate Knights acknowledged Schneider’s shift to leave high-voltage electrical distribution behind, to focus instead on data centres, off-grid solar storage, decentralised distribution and smart solutions. “The firm is at the heart of a megatrend that will define the global economy for decades to come,” they wrote.

We spoke to Amel Chadli, Vice President Strategy & Digital Energy for Middle East & Africa, and Aimen Abd-El-Azim, Digital Energy Channel Sales Leader, to talk about Schneider Electric’s sustainability values, why the future is all-digital and all-electric, the importance of being committed to Africa, and why the company should be the digital partner of choice for sustainability and efficiency.

Schneider's sustainability values

Earlier this year, the company unveiled its Schneider Sustainability Impact (SSI) programme, which will span until 2025 and accelerate its own targets. It deliberately aligns with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and is an addition to the work the company has already done over the 15 years since it first launched the Sustainability barometer. In the time since 2005, Schneider says it has saved its customers 120 million tons in CO2 emissions and given around 30 million more people much-needed access to energy.

The SSI has six long-term commitments across environment, society and economy. These six goals are backed up by 11 global targets as well as accompanying local targets. As part of its six long-term commitments, Schneider has set itself several major targets, including: saving 800 million tons of CO2 emissions for its customers, helping 1,000 of its suppliers to reduce CO2 emissions by 50%, and ensuring 80% of its revenue comes from green activities, providing 50 million people with access to green electricity and training 1 million underproveleged people in energy management.

Chadli: “The goal of these commitments is to respect the SDGs that were defined by the United Nations. First of all, we have to act for a climate-positive world by continuously investing and developing innovative solutions for decarbonisation. The second target is to be efficient with resource by behaving responsibly, and making the most of digital technology to preserve our planet. The third commitment is to live up to our principles of trust. We really want to build an environment where the trust is at the centre, with the highest social governance and ethical standards.

The fourth commitment is to create equal opportunities. That’s for all generations, and also between communities and between all people – no matter their beliefs, their religion, or their sex. The fifth commitment is to harness the power of all generations, and we want to invest in order to integrate the younger generation. We really believe that the young generation is very innovative, and they can help us in our fight against carbonisation. And finally the sixth commitment is to empower all local communities. We are present in more than 100 countries, where we employ from the local communities. We are working towards being the most global local company.”

Abd-El-Azim: “Now we move forward to achieve our targets, keep leading by example, with our own operation and ecosystem, and we work to be part of the solution with our partners and customers. And other large companies need to do the same as they will be key for improving awareness and for global collaborations. This is how we will succeed in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals for a better future.”

AN ALL-DIGITAL ALL-ELECTRIC WORLD

Artifical intelligence, IoT and Big Data are changing the way we work and live together. From homes to commercial real estate, Schneider Electric’s vision for the Buildings of the Future has sustainability at its core.

Chadli: “We have smart homes, smart buildings, smart manufacturing, smart infrastructure, and all of these are leading to smart cities. We are seeing a lot of development with new technologies.”

Abd-El-Azim: “Digital enables us to do more – much more – with less. It allows us to be more flexible, agile, inclusive, and resilient. Buildings of the Future depend on an all-digital, all-electrical world. It ramps up our interaction with our partners and increases the efficiency using digital tools, providing remote support to the end users through augmented reality tools.”

"With the onset of big data, the IoT and artificial intelligence, we might find our cities begin to think like a human brain”

Chadli: “We are deeply involved in carbon neutral buildings. They are, for us, one of the pieces of the puzzle, because buildings currently account for around 30% of global emissions. So we are putting in place the Buildings of the Future, which will be more efficient, more resilient, and more digital and far more customer-centric.”

Abd-El-Azim: “With the onset of big data, the IoT and artificial intelligence, we might find our cities begin to think like a human brain. Right now we are entering a new, all-digital, all-electric world, which enables us to rethink the entire building infrastructure and transportation life cycles for both old and new buildings. It gives us the foundation we need to create and retrofit buildings and infrastructures of the future that are sustainable, resilient, hyper-efficient and people-centric. So cities in 10 years will be bigger, more connected, all-digital, all-electric, and we need a greater end-to-end efficiency and sustainability.

At the centre of this is electricity. As the world is seeing unprecedented demands placed on traditional grids, Schneider is already armed with solutions. From microgrids and electric vehicles, to data centres and Buildings of the Future, Schneider’s priority is ensuring green energy is the future.”

Chadli: “The microgrid will help in this disruption, and won’t only be for remote communities. We will see it power hospitals, malls, other major buildings and even data centres. We are also in the electrical vehicle sphere. We already have a fantastic charging product, and we are working towards an electrical fleet. All of this disruption and all of these innovative solutions will contribute to making the world more electric.”

Electrifying Africa

A report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that, as of 2020, 580 million Africans still didn’t have access to electricity. While those numbers were down from 610 million in 2013, it is still a terrifying number of people who can’t rely on access to something that much of the world takes for granted. It gets worse, too: the pandemic, plus a growth in population, means the IEA estimates those numbers won’t improve across the next decade – unless access to electricity becomes smarter. This is where Schneider comes in.

Schneider has worked within Africa for several decades to bring electricity to the people who need it most. There is, clearly, much work to be done. But through decentralised, decarbonised grids of the future, and more digitised operations and maintenance, Schneider is determined to bring mass electrification to Africa, and is committed to ensuring a smart and green future for the continent.

Chadli: “Schneider’s role in Africa is really important, and we have always believed in the potential of Africa. There are more than 500 million people in Africa that don’t have access to energy, and we really believe that access to energy and access to digital is a basic human right. The number of Africans without access to energy will only increase with the rise of urbanisation, so the goal is to help Africa to strengthen and to bring new ways of empowering the people. We are introducing the technologies that will help bring it: smart grids and renewable energies, which are known to be cheaper, and can be deployed quickly.

Recently, in Kenya, we were able to build a solar and storage microgrid at a hospital. And it was really successful. So smart grids can be a real solution for Africa, because it combines a range of innovative tools and practices supported by a new business model and regulatory framework to help to ensure better electricity in the continent. We are also powering the critical buildings like airports, hospitals, data centres, and we are in all other segments: in oil and gas, in water, in mining, and in education, where we are working with the universities.

We are present everywhere, from the remote village where we work with our partners to install microgrids to supply local communities with renewable energy, to the big cities where we are working with governments in order to build smartgrids and integrate renewables. We are really omnipresent and we believe in Africa and will continue to invest deeply in Africa.”

"There are more than 500 million people in Africa that don’t have access to energy, and we really believe that access to energy and access to digital is a basic human right”

The Ecoxpert Ecosystem

Schneider Electric can’t change the planet on its own, of course. Creating a greener world requires collaboration and partnerships across industries, nations, and governments. But Schneider is doing what it can in its own sphere of influence, creating an EcoStruxure to ensure it partners in everything it does in order to, as the company says, “co-innovate and co-create the future of our planet”.

Schneider’s implementation arm of its EcoStruxure is its EcoXperts, a partner programme that offers collaborations between Schneider Electric and a global network of solution providers across power and energy management and building control. To be a Schneider Electric EcoXperts means holding the same vision for a greener future, and the means of creating it through intelligent and sustainable solutions. Currently, there are almost 5,000 EcoXpert partner companies, across 79 countries.

Abd-El-Azim: “GAMA Engineering is a unique and loyal partner of ours offering multiple solutions for Schneider Electric under an umbrella for greenfield as well as brownfield markets. They bring excellent technical and project management skills to execute our solutions to customers. They have always maintained a high customer satisfaction level in their business verticals. Apart from new assets, GAMA Engineering is very active in upgrading existing assets for clients, helping them to realise significantly higher value for their old installations, seamlessly. They have been instrumental in implementing our EcoStruxure-based sustainability solutions in various segments, like hotels, banks, manufacturing industries, largely developers and so many others.”

Another EcoXpert is Koneltek, a Turkish company that provides home automation and smart home systems, climate control, energy monitoring and much more.

Abd-El-Azim: “Koneltek’s perception of future is parallel with Schneider Electric’s vision. We have very strong commitments for sustainability and the future of our world, and so does Koneltek. They follow every action that we take and adapt their way of working. They take place in green building projects using our product and software that helps us to lower carbon emissions and also provide energy saving.Their area of working is so wide, from building management to electrical vehicle chargers, that they can positively impact the environment much more than a standard system integrator. They started working with us on a light and room control EcoXpert, but in the following years they have added critical power EcoXpert, which is about energy efficiency, and then building management systems EcoXpert, on top of their previous expertise. Koneltek has a team full of excellent engineers, and they also invest in R&D, so much that we get very valuable feedback from them about our products and software. This topic also makes Koneltek very special not only for Turkey but also for Schneider Electric globally.”

Schneider Electric's Future Vision

When you talk to Schneider Electric about the future, three key areas emerge. First, infrastructure of the future: IoT-enabled transportation systems for better customer experiences across rail, airports, ports, and urban transportation, and the company sees eMobility as the most scalable opportunity for a green future. Secondly, as previously covered, Buildings of the Future: sustainable, resilient, hyper-efficient and people-centric. Thirdly, data centres of the future: the heart of the digital world, providing sustainability, efficiency, adaptability, resilience and state-of-the-art technology.

All three, Schneider Electric believes, will combine to create a greener world. The company is leading the way in its industry, and is well on its way to meeting its objective to become carbon neutral in its operations by 2025. With its partners, Schneider sees itself as more local, more efficient and more sustainable than ever before.

Chadli: “Electric is a big disruption. Why? Because electricity is the greenest energy. We know that we will move from fossil energy resources to solar and wind energy. Electric creates a future which is much better than the one that we have today. Electric will bring us to a smart and green environment. The transformation has already started, with microgrids, net-zero buildings, electric vehicles.”

Abd-El-Azim: “All of us – customers, partners, suppliers, government, individuals – can make the planet hit the UN sustainability goals, and I am confident about it. Sustainability is not a fancy word anymore. Today, it is a mainstream priority. And at Schneider Electric we have a long-term commitment, not only with our employees, but including our partners, suppliers and customers. Innovation is a key for change to happen. We recently launched our switchgear innovation, combining pure air and vacuum technology. Our SM6 AirSeT has already been recognised by industry experts within the Industrial Efficiency Awards category by phasing out SF6-potent greenhouse gas from all products by 2025. Schneider Electric will prevent the equivalent of over 4 million tonnes of co2 emissions per year. And that’s how innovations for an all-digital and all-electrical world will enable us to deliver more, with zero waste, zero emission, zero carbon. Hence we create a greener world.”

The post Schneider Electric’s Smarter, Greener, Happier Future appeared first on Tech For Good.

Creating A Pathway To Hope

Daniel Brigham — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 15:49:00 +0000

HIV prevention drugs have helped reduce infection rates globally. Now Gilead Sciences has rolled out its digital platform, PrEP Hub® , in the US with a mission to help improve access to drugs and reduce stigma among the communities that most need it. We find out why it’s a gamechanger in the fight against HIV.

On June 5, 1981, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report that described a rare lung infection in five young, healthy men in Los Angeles. The men also had unknown infections that were causing the immune system to malfunction.

That article, published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, would become the first official record of what was later named Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome – AIDS. Sadly, all five men would die of the virus and, by the end of 1981, there had been 331 reported cases in the US.

In the 40 years since, AIDS – discovered in 1984 to be caused by HIV – remains one of the planet’s most serious public health issues. According to research by HIV.gov, around 1.5 million people acquired HIV in 2020, with 37.6 million living with the disease. There were 690,000 deaths – 690,000 devastated families.

There is hope among those terrifying numbers, though. There has been a 30% drop in new HIV infections since 2010, and a decline of 61% in deaths since the global peak of the epidemic in 2004. Although there is still no cure for HIV, better understanding of the virus, improved treatment and an emphasis on prevention means that those numbers are declining.

It is a similar picture in the United States. HIV.gov estimates that 1.2 million people in the US have HIV, but new infections are going in the right direction. Again, progress is relatively slow, but it is real, hopeful progress nonetheless.

We’ve made tremendous progress over the last 40 years and Gilead has been right at the forefront of those advances

A leader in HIV care has been Gilead Sciences. Founded in California in 1987, six years after that article appeared in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, and just a few months after the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first AIDS medication, Gilead has grown into one of the most important forces in the global resistance against HIV.

It currently has 11 HIV medicines on the market, and is committed to halting its spread and, ultimately, finding a cure. Its focus is global, working both in countries that most need access to treatment, as well as using innovative techniques in communities within the US that are disproportionately impacted by HIV.

“Gilead has been at the forefront of advancing the care of people with HIV,” says Cristina Carlis, Vice President of Digital Innovation at Gilead. “When you think about the early days of the epidemic, patients were taking a handful of pills a couple times a day – as many as 50 pills per day – to live for two years and the quality of life for those years could be detrimental.

“But look at where we are today. We have a single pill that really helps you manage your condition, and has really turned HIV from an acute infection into a chronic disease that is manageable and allows for a normal lifespan. So we’ve made tremendous progress over the last 40 years and Gilead has been right at the forefront of those advances.”

A significant milestone in HIV prevention was when the first PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) drug was approved in the US. It is designed for communities disproportionately affected by HIV, given to people who don’t have HIV in order to reduce their risk of acquiring it if they are exposed to the virus.

While PrEP changed the landscape, the uptake could still be higher in communities that really need it. This is where PrEP Hub comes in.

PrEP Hub was rolled out in the US by Gilead in June 2020. It is a digital platform that delivers tailored pathways for people who may be at risk of HIV, at different stages of their PrEP journey: from people who’ve not even heard of PrEP to those who use PrEP but need access to more information, and for those who may have been on PrEP but have since come off and are thinking about starting again. The idea is to make the process of receiving PrEP simpler and more accessible, and allow people to find out details in private.

“PrEP Hub really came about out of the notion that there’s still a lot of stigma when it comes to PrEP,” says Carlis. “So using technology to provide information about access to that care to raise awareness about PrEP, and really provide the tools for consumers to get information relevant to them in their PrEP journey, was really, really important to us.”

Creating PrEP Hub started with asking the right questions: who are the consumers? Who could benefit from PrEP? How do you communicate to a community that someone should take a drug despite being healthy? What are their specific needs based on their place in the PrEP journey? From that, Gilead created a digital navigator, accessible on phones, that allowed users to understand why they might need PrEP, why they might be at risk or how they might benefit, and then provided options on how to find healthcare providers, testing sites, pharmacies, and home delivery options.

Jared Baeten, Vice President, HIV Clinical Development, joined Gilead a year ago after a career in academia working on HIV prevention globally. He was part of the scientific development of PrEP, working on early clinical trials that showed it was effective. But any medicine – including PrEP – is only effective if it reaches the right people, and that’s why Baeten believes PrEP Hub is an important step in the fight against HIV.

“The challenge that PrEP Hub is trying to address is not all individuals who might benefit from PrEP have yet been able to take it up,” he says. “That could be because it’s not resonating in their lives, it’s not part of the conversations in their peers, their family, or their community. Maybe they don’t feel that it’s right for them. So PrEP Hub gives them that entrée about having to have a discussion, wherever they are across the spectrum, from ‘I’m ready to use today’ to ‘I haven’t really even thought about this much yet but tell me a little more’. So to be able to say ‘let’s give you some information and help you work through whether this is something individually for you’ is vital.

“It’s person-centric: meeting people where they are, to try to get towards that community-level impact that we’re all looking for in HIV prevention. And doing that over and over again.”

Boston Consulting Group

A platform like PrEP Hub, with so much at stake, had one core principle when it came to product design: it had to be easy for the user to navigate. That might sound simple, but when you consider the complex journeys that can be taken, and the varied information that has to be delivered to the consumer base, it was a task that needed an innovative product team.

Gilead partnered with Boston Consulting Group’s Digital Ventures (BCGDV) team. With a focus on healthcare, BCGDV specialise in innovative product design, engaging individuals more efficiently, and providing a differentiated customer experience. In what was traditionally a patient-physician environment, PrEP Hub is a reimagining of that relationship, shortening cycle times through digital engagement. One critical aspect was ensuring it was rich with data, and therefore rich with insight.

BCGDV helped Gilead engage with the PrEP digital community and derive actionable insights from the online interactions, understand how it should be engaging with users, who it should be engaging with, and how to make the most of the insights it gained. As well as traditional management consulting, BCGDV comes with cross-functional digital and data capabilities. The combination means, together, Gilead and BCGDV can be agile with PrEP Hub.

“A well-designed product in the technology sense helps with prevention, in that it can make a medicine so much more accessible,” says Carlis. “You could have the correct medication, but if a consumer or patient doesn’t know how to get it, or access it, the outcome will be sub-optimal. So having these types of tools that are complementary to your medicines is really important in advancing the cure.

“With Boston Consulting Group, we had a really good partnership and a great understanding from the beginning. We were both working together to ensure that we could galvanise a community, and get the insights out of this community, so that we could create the right solutions for the right consumers. And I think their knowledge, and their work in this space, was instrumental in accelerating some of the work for us. I’m very grateful for the partnership and the investment that they put into PrEP Hub.”

As world-class as Gilead’s scientific knowledge is, and as excellent as BCGDV’s technical expertise is, in this instance it takes three to tango: engaging the communities most impacted by HIV meant it was crucial to work collaboratively with people with experience in serving those areas. As Baeten says, “It’s important to remember that PrEP exists because of collaboration from scientists, from clinicians, from community members in society and advocates from across the world.”

Without buy-in from the communities, PrEP Hub would have been a non-starter. So Gilead has a network of local community groups it works with across the US, including My Brother’s Keeper (MBK). A non-profit, MBK’s mission is to reduce health disparities in the US by working with and enabling minority and under-resourced populations. A lot of its work is focussed on HIV prevention.

MBK’s CEO, June Gipson, works closely with Gilead and participates in a number of their community advisory groups. She has worked in HIV prevention for 20 years, and is an advocate for the power of good that PrEP can have. MBK started offering PrEP in 2013 and, although the uptake was slow, it now has over 400 patients on PrEP across Mississippi.

“PrEP Hub is a great platform,” says Gipson. “It provides the information without having to search everywhere. So with PrEP Hub, individuals who are interested in PrEP can go in, put in their information and do the survey, and then they’re provided with information – regardless of where they are in the country – about clinics, and community-based organisations, that can provide PrEP services.

“Tools like this give a person the opportunity to pace themselves; to learn what they need to learn, to have a resource that actually gives them a guideline for what can happen. I think that that’s very important.”

Baeten sees working with communities as a way to help address disparities in PrEP use. “In many places where PrEP has had traction it hasn’t had full traction in every community in these areas,” he says. “To be able to provide tools, to be able to make those connections easier for individuals in disproportionately affected, disproportionately burdened by HIV communities, is particularly meaningful because in order to be able to talk about ending this epidemic in a real way we have to talk about really ending it for everybody.”

Gipson believes the COVID-19 pandemic has hastened the acceptance of PrEP Hub among communities she works with. The response to Coronavirus has shown that digital platforms can be an effective way of helping an individual’s healthcare, and also provides the comfort blanket of privacy.

“When you think about PrEP and the sensitivity of it – you’re talking about someone’s sex life, you’re talking about someone’s medication – PrEP Hub gives them the opportunity to learn more on their own,” says Gipson. “Genetically, we’re self-directed learners. And as self-directed learners, we want the opportunity to be able to go online, find what we need, and understand it from our perspective so that you can be more learned in the process.

“PrEP changed how community-based organisations had to work. It changed not only the community’s perception of how we prevent HIV, but it also changed how we decided how we could prevent HIV, and what type of entity we needed to become to be able to do this from multiple angles.”

The pandemic has shown that giving a patient the ability to monitor their own health isn’t the scary process that many assumed it would be. It empowers patients, keeps them informed, offers the protection of privacy while also providing access to face-to-face appointments with physicians or doctors.

Similarly, PrEP Hub has shown that well thought-out online platforms that can engage communities are an increasingly effective tool. In the year since it was rolled out, PrEP Hub has already been a success, with thousands of users across the US.

“I think when it was first introduced there was some hesitancy around it,” says Gipson. “Everything used to be so face to face, everything was so predicated on the person that you spoke with. But now this is the future, this is how they’re going to communicate. It’s easier on the patient, it’s also easier on the staff.”

With Boston Consulting Group, we had a really good partnership and a great understanding from the beginning. We were both working together to ensure that we could galvanise a community, and get the insights out of this community

Carlis sees the future of HIV medicine as hybrid: tools that can give a patient as much information as possible, alongside access to a physician. “I think we’ve learned so much over the pandemic, that it’s not one or the other, but really the benefit is that sweet spot in the middle,” she says. “Having tools to help bridge the gap of being able to get to a physician is terrific, but there are times when you do need to have that physical interaction with the physician.

“You can actually communicate with a healthcare provider via text; you can communicate in a way that you’re not putting yourself out there if you don’t want to. But, at the same time, you can get the help that you need in order to prevent HIV. I think that’s terrific.”

While PrEP Hub is helping people in the US, Gilead remains committed to reducing HIV globally, with huge resources poured into some of the world’s worst-affected countries. It has helped bridge the technology divide in lower-income countries, while also remaining mindful that simply handing over a phone or tablet to someone in certain communities could signal that they are a participant in an HIV trial.

HIV remains one of the world’s most pressing health issues. A cure remains the holy grail – and Gilead, like many others, is dedicated to that pursuit – but prevention has started to turn the tide. Cases are falling, and there is hope for the future.

“Our goal – our ultimate goal – is to not work on HIV anymore,” says Baeten. “Our intention is to work as hard as we can to do what we can to help end the epidemic. We at Gilead are one part of that, but it is a global endeavour and we all have to do our part. But we have the solutions on hand and the innovations that are coming, and the commitment and the energy and the vision. We as a world have that. I am optimistic. Every single day it drives me forward.”

“We still have work to do, but we have come a long way since 1987, when Gilead was started,” says Carlis. “And I do see Gilead being a core contributor to help end the epidemic for everybody everywhere: with our medicines, with our access programmes, and with our concern for the communities where we work and live.”

The post Creating A Pathway To Hope appeared first on Tech For Good.

Delivering One Version Of The Truth

Beatriz Valero de Urquía — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 09:11:00 +0000

DURING AN EMERGENCY, RELIABLE DATA CAN SAVE LIVES. TECH FOR GOOD SPEAKS TO THE LEADERSHIP OF THE EAST OF ENGLAND AMBULANCE SERVICE ABOUT HOW A DIGITAL DATA LAKE CAN HELP MANAGERS MAKE BETTER DECISIONS, AND ACHIEVE FASTER AND BETTER PATIENT CARE FOR THE SIX MILLION PEOPLE THEY SERVE

The phone rings. “999 what is your emergency?” If the situation is life-threatening, an ambulance is expected to have reached the patient within eight minutes after receiving a call. In these cases, every minute counts and having accurate information about the emergency is essential.

But when patients welcome the ambulance services, they don’t want to repeat to the clinicians the same story that they’ve just told over the phone, and do it all over again once they reach the hospital. They don’t want to have to recall their medical history and previous treatments when they’re in a state of stress. Healthcare providers are aware of this, and that is why the East of England Ambulance Service (EEAS) has embarked on a journey to create a digital data lake that will store all of this information, saving time, and lives, in the process.

As one of the largest ambulance services in the UK, the EEAS NHS Trust provides urgent care to six million people across an area of about 7,500 square miles that spans over six counties in the east of England. EEAS attends over one million emergency calls a year and transports nearly two million patients to and from routine hospital appointments in various methods of transportation, from cycles to fast response cars and frontline ambulances.

A year ago, EEAS got started on a path towards digital transformation that included the creation of a data lake where all the information about its patients and systems could be kept together, breaking the organisation’s data silo. In short, creating one version of the truth. EEAS’ CEO, Dr Tom Davis, and his team brought Tech For Good along on this journey. “One of the challenges for the NHS over many years has been the need for individual organisations to work more collectively as partner organisations to make sure that we join up the care for our patients,” Dr Davis says. “And, obviously, communication and access to data are really important aspects of that.

“The benefits of having one version of the truth is that it makes decision-making much easier on an individual basis, but also a system basis. For our individual patients, seeing all their data in one place allows us to make the best decision with the best available data specific to that patient. And then, as you expand that across the system, we can start to identify areas of inequity, which can help us learn from today’s patients to make sure that tomorrow’s patients have a better experience.”

A fundamental piece of EEAS’ digital transformation project is its data strategy. It will see the creation of a data lake, where all the information from the ambulance service’s different systems will be put together, allowing both analysts and clinicians to reach accurate conclusions and make better decisions. The process, which began a year ago, is set to be completed within the next 12 months and Stephen Bromhall, Chief Information Officer at EEAS, is the man tasked with leading its success.

"The benefits of having one version of the truth is that it makes decision-making much easier on an individual basis, but also on a system basis. This can help us learn from today’s patients to make sure that tomorrow’s patients have a better experience"

“We were able to look at what was good in the commercial world, and how that could help us as a provider of services to six million patients in the East of England, to look at how we drive transformation and use leading technologies for the benefit of patient care,” Bromhall says. “We also wanted to make sure that our staff have the technology they need to do their jobs, not just for the frontline, but also all of the support services that keep our paramedics going on a daily basis.”

Similar to the situation of many healthcare providers, EEAS’s data was stored in many different unconnected legacy systems. Crews would have to look into one application for one part of the patient journey and then jump into other elements as they analysed the care pathway. This took time that could be better spent, for example, saving lives. EEAS’ strategy is to bring together all of this information into one single location to provide faster and better patient care.
“What our patients don’t want to do is have to keep telling us the same story over and over again, during a very challenging time,” Bromhall says. “We want to capture that information in one place and be able to use it to pull further information about that particular patient; perhaps their long-term conditions or their medication, so that our crews have more time to spend focusing on the patients, rather than trying to find data about them.”

That way, when the ambulance crew arrives at a patient’s home, they already have an understanding of the situation and the patient’s medical history. But the data journey does not end here. Once the ambulance service has taken the patient to the hospital, EEAS wants to be able to give that information to the hospital workers who will be treating them.

“For us, that’s what this project delivers: that one version of the truth that we can then store in our systems, but also make available to other partners through the ecosystem of healthcare to speed up care throughout the whole system,” Bromhall says.

Version 1

In order to bring together the information from all of EEAS’ systems, Bromhall’s team devised a phased approach, which accounted for the different metrics and characteristics of each of the systems. The first phase has already been completed, and it is related to one of the most important systems of an ambulance service: rostering.

“Rostering is vital for the ambulance service, or any organisation, because it is used to actually look at what our demand is,” says Caroline Jones, Head of Rostering at EEAS. “It looks at how many vehicles you might need to put on at a certain time for a certain day and then allows us to actually make sure we’re providing a safe level of cover with people so that they are where they should be and where we actually need them.”

Jones describes the previous rostering system as “very manual”, explaining that users had to go to the software and individually run all of the reports, export them to Excel and give them to the relevant people. In contrast, the new data lake, created using Microsoft cloud technologies, updates automatically every 10 to 15 minutes, combining all the sources of information to an accurate and almost real-time picture of the service, that users can access at any time, from anywhere.

“I’d say the majority of people are now using it and loving it,” Jones says. “It’s not just about improving our team and the information, it’s actually about helping managers to do their jobs more efficiently. Rather than having to filter through lots and lots of reports, data and information, they now can actually go away to do more staff support, more training and make better decisions.”

"For us, that’s what this project delivers: that one version of the truth that we can then store in our systems, but also make available to other partners through the ecosystem of healthcare to speed up care throughout the whole system”

One of these employees used to be Zoe Collis. She joined EEAS as a 999 call handler when she was 18 and is now the Head of Information and Analytics for the organisation. During her career, she has seen EEAS and the wider NHS and the growth of reporting and dashboards within healthcare. The data lake is just one more step in this transformation.

“We are enabling more data structures to be fed into that ability, more information to be visible, and making work more efficient across the organisation,” Collis says. “We’ve now moved on to the patient transport services data feed, which is just coming to a close in the next week or so. And again, they had daily refresh rates, which are now every three hours with the aim to move to 15 minutes before the end of this month.”

The rostering system was the first system whose data was put into the data lake, but it won’t be the last. The next phase of the project is critical, as it relates to the 999 call system, including all the information from the calls received, as well as the telephone and patient-care records. EEAS takes an average of 3,300 calls a day. As a result, the 999 system is the one that holds the majority of the organisation’s data, and therefore the most complex step of the digital transformation.

“Once the transformation is completed, we will create a data dictionary which will identify the definitions for each of the metrics included, and give the organisation consistency across all of the reports,” Collis says. “This will enable the paramedics to see the critical areas of focus for the day on their personal issue devices across all of the systems, which is something they do not have access to currently. They will be able to see the pressure points and then perhaps divert patients to another hospital, giving them faster and better care overall.”

But EEAS has not been on this journey alone. The ambulance service’s data lake project has been developed following a competitive process with Version 1. With over 20 years of experience and over 1500 team members, Version 1 helps customers navigate their way through shifting IT landscapes. The company also has a history of working with both government and private sector agencies, as well as with other health service agencies in both the UK and Ireland.

Mary Kearney, BI and Data Analytics Project Manager at Version 1, explains why the company was best suited to support EEAS’s transformation. “We are an IT company that recognises the value of data,” she says. “We pride ourselves in being very much a customer-focused company, and making a real difference through long-term outcome-focused relationships with our customers.

“Everybody is aware of the fact that data analytics is ‘the next big thing’. But that move from seeing data as something that’s used as part of your operational processes, to something that there’s real value in can be difficult for companies. This is because the operational systems were designed to solve operational issues; they weren’t designed to allow the kind of data manipulation that is now expected. It’s a question of getting the right work in the right systems. That’s why moving the data into one platform where you can do that reporting is just much more beneficial to the individual companies.”

"It’s not just about improving our team and the information, it’s actually about helping managers to do their jobs more efficiently”

With the new data lake, all of EEAS’ information will be held in one single place. There’ll be no more gaps or mistakes on the reports because of contradicting or missing information. And all of this has been developed in record time, using an agile DevOps approach to address each business area individually and bring the data together as quickly as possible. The result is obvious: an easy and faster decision-making process for everyone involved.

But technology is not the reason why digital transformation happens; people are. And this is why the collaboration between the EEAS and Version 1 teams has been a fundamental element of the ambulance service’s digital journey.

“One of the key reasons for the success of this project is the partnership with Version 1,” Dr Davis says. “The relationship definitely hasn’t been one of provider and customer. It’s been absolutely one of collaboration with both teams using their different expertise to ensure that the product that we are ending up with is the very best. It’s a great example of how the public sector can work with the private sector because, ultimately, we’re all aiming for the same thing, which is that one true source of the truth, and a better outcome for our patients.”

What does the future hold? Once EEAS has gathered information, it plans to put it to use.

“Currently, the tech that we’re using really just sits within our data lake,” Bromhall says. “As part of the long-term journey, I want to start to consider machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing.”

“This [system] will enable the paramedics to see the critical areas of focus for the day on their personal issue devices across all of the systems, which is something they do not have access to currently”

That vision might not be too far down the road. The data lake that EEAS is currently building will allow for those layers to be added on top and the organisation has recently hired its data scientist, who will soon start looking at ways to utilise the information held in the data lake. In the future, data analytics tools might be able to predict what would happen in specific situations, such as a bank holiday weekend, a bad storm or another COVID-19 wave, and how it would affect an ambulance service such as EEAS. Moreover, these technologies could also suggest solutions about how to best manage the available resources to be able to respond adequately to crises.

According to Bromhall, EEAS could start its first wave of machine learning and artificial intelligence applications before the end of this calendar year.

“This is the new ‘What if?’” Bromhall says. “The data is never leaving our data lake. It’s not like there’s a worry that the data is going to be exploited for commercial purposes. We’re inquisitive about what that data tells us. What does that mean? How can we use it differently? It’s effectively an untapped asset that we, as an organisation, want to use going forward. And that’s really what this journey is about, which is controlling our data and being able to use it for our benefit, and for the benefit of our six million patients.”

The post Delivering One Version Of The Truth appeared first on Tech For Good.

JPMorgan: Walking The Walk

Daniel Brigham — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 18:50:00 +0000

JPMorgan Chase & Co’s Tech for Social Good team is celebrating 10 years of doing good. We spoke to four of its leading voices to find out how it has positively impacted thousands of nonprofits, as well as empowering its own workforce.

This is a story that connects sustainable fishing in dangerous seas, phone connectivity in disaster zones, and dogs using iPads to help owners with sight issues. It is a story that brings together a mass volunteering programme and coding hackathons, and a story that is tied together by the collaborative desire to use technology to make the world a better place to live in.

You may be surprised, then, that at the heart of this story is one of the world’s biggest banks. But JPMorgan Chase isn’t your everyday banking institution. In fact, JPMorgan Chase prides itself on being more than just a bank.

It’s no use just talking the talk, though. An organisation has got to walk the walk if it truly wishes to make a positive difference to the communities it serves. And this is where JPMorgan Chase’s Tech For Social Good programme comes in.

We began to change the dialogue about how to engage employees in skilled-based volunteerism

Ten years ago, Ali Marano made a decision that would change her life. She was working for an organisation that provided technology assistance to nonprofits in the social good sector. The recession made the work tough: getting large corporations to provide funding to help her organisation deliver needed tech assistance became increasingly difficult, so Marano changed tack. Rather than asking for financial support, she started pairing skilled volunteers from her corporate funders with nonprofits in need of technology assistance.

“We helped the nonprofits frame what their challenges were, we helped the skilled volunteers articulate what they were able to offer, and this allowed all parties to have a productive relationship leading to impactful solutions,” says Marano.

One of her biggest clients was JPMorgan Chase, and Marano had an epiphany: “What if I did this from the other side?”

“One day I sent a message off to one of the senior leaders at JPMorgan Chase in technology,” says Marano. “And said ‘I can help you rethink the way your staff volunteer their tech skills to nonprofits and this can have a tremendous positive impact not only in the communities where you live and work, but amongst your staff as well’.”

To Marano’s surprise, the exec responded by saying, ‘Ok let’s meet to discuss’. And the rest, as they say, is history.

“Ten years ago we began to change the dialogue about how to engage employees in skilled-based volunteerism to ensure meaningful results on both sides of the equation,” says Marano. “For JPMorgan Chase this work has always been about lifting up social Good organisations and their ability to serve their constituents.”

Efforts at JPMorgan Chase to engage their tech workforce in the social sector began slowly. But 2021 is the 10th anniversary of Tech For Social Good, which Marano is head of, and it has grown beyond anything anyone ever thought it would. It now helps hundreds of organisations every year, providing them with tech expertise and the opportunity to scale.

Tech For Social Good’s stated mission is to lift up communities around the world through the power of people and technology. This is how it works: Through skilled volunteerism, it uses JPMorgan Chase staff to work with students and nonprofits to meet their needs around technology. It does this through several programmes, including: Code for Good, a hackathon which brings employees and external candidates together to ideate on how tech can solve a problem a nonprofit is facing; Force for Good, which connects employees with nonprofits to build sustainable tech solutions; and Youth Programmes, which address the tech skills gap through education and mentorships for people under 18.

The reason for Tech For Social Good is two-pronged: some of those bright candidates that JPMorgan Chase meets through Code for Good will end up being employed by the company, which means it can attract ready-made talent already familiar with them, while it also helps hundreds of social good nonprofits make the world a better place to live in. It’s a win-win.

“Tech For Social Good was developed to bridge the gap between the access to technology resources in the corporate sector, and the lack thereof of that same access to technology in the nonprofit sector,” says Madeline Hutchinson, Tech for Social Good Global Manager.

“The corporate world has really embraced digital transformation, and nonprofits are trying to go on that journey, as well. And I think as corporations, we have a responsibility to help nonprofits move along that journey and get access to technology that will help them scale their mission. And that’s really what Tech For Social Good was started as. We harness the power of technology and our employees and their passion for wanting to make an impact by using their skills to ultimately better uplift the communities where we work and operate.”

Tech For Social Good formalises its goals as ‘Innovate for the social sector’, ‘Build the workforce of the future’, and ‘Develop skills through social good’. Innovation is at the centre of it all, says Marano: “Everything doesn’t have to be done as it always was done. And it’s funny to say that from a company that’s over 200 years old, and has a deep, deep tradition, but the ability to innovate and think about how we can find talent in new ways as well is critical.

“Innovation can be defined in many different ways, and it’s not just about what a corporation might think about at an enterprise level, but innovation truly means your ability to serve your constituents in a greater and more impactful way. It’s enabled because of the work that we do with them. We start conversations not by saying, ‘What’s wrong with your technology and how do I fix it?’ We start conversations by saying, ‘Help me understand your mission and what you’re trying to do to serve your clients and I will talk to you about how innovative uses of technology can further that mission’.”

Let’s return to Tech For Social Good’s programmes; the heartbeat of its operation.

It starts young, with Youth Programmes attracting school-age children to think about technology. It gives JPMorgan Chase the opportunity to encourage and influence the next generation of technologists, and to help inspire schoolchildren about how technology can make a difference to the world. One of the youth events it runs is Generation Tech, where school-age students are invited into JPMorgan Chase offices to take on design challenges for social good organisations. They work in teams, with their goals aligned with United Nations’ sustainability goals.

Code for Good is for any external candidates looking for employment at JPMorgan Chase, and provides the company with a really meaningful way of recruiting talent. Again, they work in teams on challenges posed by charities, building out solutions to the problems. The events tend to involve four or five challenges being taken on by around 150 students – although that expands to over 600 when done remotely due to COVID-19 restrictions. The students produce proof-of-concept ideas and demonstrate how challenges can be overcome through the application of technology, and these ideas are carried through for the organisations. This is where Force for Good comes in.

Force for Good is for JPMorgan Chase employees. They work together in teams, usually over a multi-month period, to build out the solutions for the organisations. JPMorgan Chase steps back only when it is confident that the ideas can be adopted and utilised fully by the organisations, ensuring the process is sustainable for them.

“In our Youth programmes we start by working with youth who come from groups that are often under-represented in professional tech roles,” says Ed Boden, Tech For Social Good global lead. “Then we focus on inspiring and encouraging them to become technologists. Code for Good is a great opportunity to showcase us as an employer of choice, hoping that they might attend and join us. Not every candidate that comes does join us, but a number of them come back and do internships with us, and a number of those then subsequently join our company as a full-time employee.

“Once they join JPMorgan Chase, then they get the opportunity to work on the Force for Good projects. That is a great opportunity to feel they can give back in a very meaningful way to help the social sector. In many cases they get to choose the nonprofits they work with, so they can choose the mission that best aligns with their own personal choices.”

The organisations JPMorgan Chase works with are many and varied. Marano admits that when Tech For Social Good first started it was a tough proposition to sell to nonprofits: a well-known bank coming in and helping them improve the technical side of their operation seemed surprising: “Organisations expected us to help them with their finances, not technology,” says Marano.

Over time, Tech for Social Good has helped add to JPMorgan Chase’s reputation as a strong technology organisation that is also a bank. Now it can ensure that organisations selected to receive its services will be those it feels will most benefit and be able to translate that impact to better serve its communities and constituents.

“When I think about some of the projects I’m most excited about, there are so many to pull from,” says Marano. “One example is work we did with an organisation where we helped local, sustainable fishermen who would go out to sea and didn’t have high-end fleets or boats, which was a real challenge when going out in dangerous weather. So we helped them create a beacon technology that worked on their phones, which would send out a beacon if they were going to be lost at sea or were approaching a storm.”

Marano is also fond of an iPad application that assistive dogs can use in medical situations. Yep, that’s right: an iPad app that a dog can use. If the dog’s owner has a medical emergency, such as falling, it is trained to use its paw prints to send a message that its handler needs immediate help.

“One great one we worked with was an organisation based in the UK that focuses on disaster relief,” says Scott Malinowski, Head of Technology for Tech for Social Good. “And when there’s a natural disaster, they send volunteers and folks on the ground to help them distribute supplies, and really help the area that’s affected. They really need technology to do so.

“One of the big challenges in that scenario is there may not be cell phone connectivity. So we worked with that organisation to set up tools that they could use from their phones to help prioritise need, to help understand what inventory is available and distribute items on the ground to support people in those areas.

“What was really timely about that was we were focused last year on working with that organisation, when COVID started to spread, and they were able to pivot their mission to focus not just on international disaster relief, but domestically in the UK to provide supplies for people in need, who were struggling to get certain things, whether it be medicines or household items locally in the UK.”

A collaborative effort

Madeline Hutchinson, Tech for Social Good Global Manager, talks us through JPMorgan Chase’s Tech For Good symposium, which brings together some of tech’s biggest players to find common goals and ways to collaborate.

“Our goal for starting the Tech For Good symposium was an opportunity for us to really think about how we could collaborate across the industry to move the needle in terms of nonprofit technology.

“I think, for us, social good has always been in our DNA. The symposium gives us the opportunity to recognise that we aren’t the only player in this space; there are a lot of organisations doing great things. And we wanted to amplify our impact by working together with these organisations, and that’s a really important focus for us in the symposium.

“On an industry-wide level, a lot of organisations are pivoting to have social impact or tech for good programming within their cultures and we’ve found that now, more than ever, employees want to give back and use their skills for good. And we as organisations and corporations have a duty to be able to help uplift those communities where we work and operate.

“We want to find ways to connect technologies that some of our symposium members are building so that we can go deeper into providing a holistic solution to the nonprofit partners. I think in order to be successful at that, we really need to bring the nonprofits on board and think about how we can build with them, not for them. I think if we can do that, we will be able to scale the impact of tech for good globally and hopefully be able to solve some of the most pressing issues that face our world today.”

Malinowski heads up a tech team that takes both the skilled volunteers and nonprofits through the entire collaborative process. It trains and advises its staff and the nonprofits’ staff, and reviews all tech decisions to ensure the technology that is being built is both impactful and sustainable for the organisations.

The team monitors all data on each project to ensure they’re on track, provides infrastructure and tools for volunteers to build the technology, and manage risk and security for the nonprofits, as well as JPMorgan Chase’s staff.

It’s this level of detail and care, from start to finish, that has meant Tech For Social Good has been able to grow each year, and why social good organisations continue to turn to it for help. There is one big question, though, that needs answering: how on earth does the team at Tech For Social Good convince so many of JPMorgan Chase’s staff to volunteer?

“I don’t actually think about what we do as a volunteer programme, I think about it as social good initiatives,” says Marano. “And it allows us to really show that we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk. So when we say we care about the communities we live and work in, we show it. We don’t just show it by giving dollars which might be expected, we show it by engaging, we show it by giving up our skills, our time, and we do it in thoughtful ways.”

Not everyone is expected to volunteer – far from it. Tech For Social Good wants people to volunteer, not be “voluntold”. Those who do put their hands up – and there are thousands of them – do all of their volunteering within their work hours. Nothing is expected during out-of-office hours.

“Our role is about empowering our staff to be able to give back,” says Boden. “Giving them the opportunity to do more than just pick up a pay cheque every month. For many of our staff it’s vitally important to them that they can give back to all different sorts of organisations, be it working with charities, or be it working with school children.”

With 2021 being the 10th birthday of Tech For Social Good, it begs the obvious question: what will the 20th anniversary look like? Marano is keen to stress that nothing too bold needs to happen: what they’re doing is working. But data is becoming increasingly important. After a decade of Tech For Social Good, the team has a wealth of data that it plans to put back out to the communities in order to ensure social good organisations aren’t starting from scratch each time.

If a homeless charity, for example, comes to JPMorgan Chase looking for help solving a specific problem, Tech For Social Good can immediately share examples of other homeless charities it has worked with on similar issues. The goal is to create a self-help environment in which nonprofits and social good organisations can help and learn from each other to reduce the reliance on JPMorgan Chase.

There has also been an increasing realisation that the skills gap doesn’t exist only in coding. So Tech For Social Good has expanded its focus to take in data science and cyber safety, allowing its staff to give back in broader ways.

“I think in the next 10 years we’ll be looking at opportunities to support project models beyond just building technology solutions,” says Malinowski. “So in our 50,000-employee tech workforce, we have skillsets beyond just software engineers. We have project managers, we have people who handle change management, we have data scientists; a huge number of skillsets throughout the company. And when we talk to a lot of organisations, they have needs beyond just delivering a piece of technology.”

“We’re recognising that tech doesn’t happen in a vacuum and we need so many other skillsets and disciplines to truly make the impact that I would expect over the coming years,” says Marano. “We will have evolved and expanded our remit beyond technology.

“We don’t look at Tech for Social Good as a competitive advantage, we look at it as the right thing to do, we do it because we can and because we have needed skills that can better the communities where we live and work. We love it when peer companies across the world reach out to learn how to do similar work.

“The more focus we all place on leveraging tech in service of social good, the faster we can help address the issues the world is facing today.”

The post JPMorgan: Walking The Walk appeared first on Tech For Good.

Technology Driving Blood Supply

Ben Mouncer — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 13:47:00 +0000

THE WORK OF NHS BLOOD AND TRANSPLANT KEEPS PEOPLE ALIVE. WENDY CLARK, CHIEF DIGITAL INFORMATION OFFICER, AND DAVID ROSE, DIRECTOR OF DONOR EXPERIENCE, TELL US HOW NEW CONSUMER-FACING TECHNOLOGIES AND A DEEP DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AIMS TO HELP NHSBT DELIVER EVEN MORE FOR DONORS, EMPLOYEES AND PATIENTS.

NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) could, quite poetically, be described as the beating heart of the NHS. The source and supply of blood, organs and tissues is vital to meeting the needs of our hospital patients – and to ultimately saving and improving lives.

Every year, NHSBT collects up to 1.5 million voluntary blood donations in England. But guaranteeing the reliable delivery of this blood to hospitals country-wide represents a significant supply-and-demand challenge. On top of keeping this complex system running, NHSBT is also continuously striving to better its service; from improving a donor’s experience, through to getting the right blood components to the right patients more efficiently.

Technology is a crucial part of the puzzle for NHSBT and its dedicated team. Strategically, the organisation has put technology at the core and it has committed budget and people to a series of ongoing transformation programmes. In January 2020 it appointed Wendy Clark, previously a senior executive for NHS Digital, as its Chief Digital Information Officer.

“We couldn’t do what we do without technology,” Clark tells Tech For Good. “The logistical nature of what we do would make it impossible to try, and it also allows us to reach out to donors and attract them in different ways. Everybody who works for NHSBT touches technology in some way in order to communicate and collaborate.”
Clark oversees blood supply technology projects largely focused on two priorities: to enhance the donor experience end-to-end, and to extract NHSBT from legacy infrastructure so that it can maintain and improve its processes and services in the future. It is a mix of short- and long-term programmes which will collectively affect every element of the NHSBT operation. It is technology, coupled with amazing donors, driving blood supply.

Saving and improving lives through the right mixture of donor types is key for NHSBT, which is why a lot of tech focus is on the donor experience. The UK model of altruistic donations means extra care and attention is afforded to donors – donation in other countries can be based on payment to citizens. David Rose was last year appointed as NHSBT’s first Director of Donor Experience to align the organisation and its objectives in this area.

Rose’s background is in the private sector and he has led customer loyalty programmes for global brands such as Virgin Atlantic and Starbucks. He was recruited by NHSBT to drive a renewed focus on its donors and their experiences with the aim of building a donor base right for the future.

“PPE, masks, gowns – you can manufacture all of that, but no hospital or country can manufacture some of the life-giving elements of what we use in our bodies, such as our blood,” says Rose. “So today we still rely on the generosity of our donors to donate so that our hospitals can continue to treat patients.”

Donor engagement is a fundamental part of the donor experience; this covers everything from marketing campaigns for new donor acquisition to direct engagement with donors through NHSBT’s booking portal and app.

When it comes to marketing, NHSBT increasingly adopts a hyperlocal approach to target donors with in-demand blood types at donation centres where there are appointment slots to be filled. On the tech side a major investment underway is the upgrading of the portal and app that donors then use to book appointments. Over 75% of donor appointments are made through these channels. A new-look, improved service founded on a human-centred design approach will go live this year.

“The application will have things built into it like improved ability to book appointments and accessibility enhancements, and the whole design of the app is going to look and feel a little bit different,” says Clark. “The red and white colours that you see throughout all of our digital technology are great from an organisational branding perspective, but they’re not necessarily the most accessible when it comes to digital.

“We’re also replatforming the app on modern, scalable technology, so that when we get lots of traffic we don’t need to do anything – the platform will scale with no intervention from any of the tech folks. It will make a massive difference initially, but then it also will be the enabler for personalisation. If we want to send information out to our donors, we will be able to do that through the portal and the app. So it’s a real platform for lots of the improvements that will come over the coming years.”

Hippo Digital has been one key development partner in NHSBT’s Donor Experience Product Centre – the function where new products like the donor app and portal are created. Hippo worked with NHSBT’s internal development teams to define the project roadmap, deploying its own people-centred design methodology and supporting the replatforming of the technology.

Hippo Digital

“Hippo Digital has been instrumental in the delivery of both the app and changes to the portal,” says Clark. “Hippo has done this before, having worked across other areas of the NHS. It helps when you get a team of people who come on board and they know what good looks like in this space. It means we’re not having to set down standards and train people.”

As Clark highlighted, one ambition for NHSBT is to deliver a more personalised service to donors. The organisation’s current methods of managing its donor base are effective but donors are still often treated as a cohort, with the same messages sent out to large groups of people. The updated app and portal will go some way to offering personalised experiences but NHSBT is undertaking a broader piece of work it calls the “contact strategy”.

To get a 360-degree view of a donor and all the interactions with that individual, NHSBT is updating its CRM (customer relationship management) capability, aggregating as much data as possible from different sources. It also wants to reduce friction for users by offering automation tools and potentially chatbots, all of which plug into the system and offer a single “pane of glass” for NHSBT customer experience staff. Previously customer data sat in different locations and wasn’t utilised effectively.

"I’m particularly excited about the opportunity through online or mobile-based experiences, and the self-service element. In an ideal world for me and my teams, we almost want to take a step back - it’s the donors that do all this valuable work"

“Our donor carers, who do most of the legwork in the centres, taking your blood and looking after people, will be equipped to understand actually what the background of the donor is,” says Rose. “That means we can make sure that we have the right number of new donors throughout the day, because those first-time donors require a little more care and attention, and helped through their first steps in donation.”

Technology change is even improving the process of blood collection. NHSBT has 23 fixed donation centres across the country and 50 mobile blood collection teams who operate thousands of community-based sessions each year. Clark describes the technology used by donor carers as “archaic” but this is set to change with the implementation of Session Solution; a mobile, connected solution to increase efficiency and vastly reduce paper usage.

Session Solution has been piloted at three sites to great success and will be rolled out across NHSBT’s mobile collection centres before the end of 2021. Data indicates that Session Solution will cut most donor journey times and NHSBT believes its adoption will also improve front-line morale and increase donor satisfaction.

“If you’ve ever given blood, you’ve probably turned up and somebody’s had bits of paper and a highlighter pen, and that’s how you get checked into the session,” says Clark. “This will make a real difference to the way our collection staff operate. It’s a new, modern solution that they can use to check donors in.”

Gennaro, the software underpinning Session Solution, was coded by Savant, a long-term partner to NHSBT. Savant’s primary engagement with NHSBT is around PULSE, the control system for blood management which was first implemented in 1996 and remains a critical infrastructure for the blood supply process today. PULSE controls everything from the management and enrolment of donors to laboratory testing, labelling and stock tracking as blood is dispatched to hospitals.

Savant

“It’s a spider at the centre of a web of everything that we do,” says Clark. “What it actually is, is about 80 applications which sit on top of a database and various other bits of infrastructure. And Savant are the PULSE programme in some ways. They do all of the engineering around the application and the database, and we work with them on the infrastructure side. There would be no blood supply tech if it weren’t for Savant, and in many ways, Savant are almost part of NHSBT.”

NHSBT, Savant and other partners are currently working on modernising PULSE and the wider IT stack in what Clark says is the organisation’s biggest technology mission. The Blood Tech Modernisation programme, which officially kicked off at the beginning of 2021 and will take five years, is a transformation initiative to “deliver the stabilisation and security of blood IT” and lay the groundwork for a cloud-first future.

In building a modern IT stack, NHSBT is carrying out remediation work on its database, database servers and the PULSE applications themselves. It will also be changing the way it integrates with that system so data can be consumed from other applications and services more readily via an API integration layer, opening up NHSBT and its systems for wider benefit. A long-standing partner in this area has been Cisco, which in multiple ways has helped NHSBT move to a hybrid cloud model.

NHSBT uses Cisco’s Multi-Cloud Architecture, which is composed of Cisco ACI Software Defined Networking with Hyperflex HCI deployed at edge sites and inside two data centres. The solution is provisioned, managed and maintained proactively via Cisco’s Intersight software and provides an always on, highly available and easily scalable platform for critical NHSBT applications. The solution will also be used to provide an extension of Cisco resources into the public cloud.

“Cisco provides us with whole solutions rather than products, and that makes our job a lot easier because we have quite a small in-house technology services function really and anything that can make their products easier to work with is very helpful for us,” says Clark. “There’s really deep expertise you get from Cisco and we’ve got a good and solid account team, and they’re always very helpful at value-add.

Cisco

“Legacy technology is a problem for NHSBT, as it’s a problem for many other organisations. We find ourselves in situations where our data is in some ways trapped inside a monolithic legacy system and getting access to that data to use through other applications has been tricky. That’s why we have the Blood Tech Modernisation programme going, so that we can liberate that data and get access again.

“By the time we get to the end of this modernisation journey, we don’t want to invest in the infrastructure again. When we get to the next five-year upgrade, we should be able to easily move to infrastructure-as-a-service and continue on that journey and reduce our data centre footprint further.”

***

It is indeed a journey that NHSBT is on, to maintain and improve this critical national service for the long-term. The organisation’s work has been eye-opening for Rose – not only is he relatively new to his role, but he’s also new to donating having previously been unable to enrol because of the amount of travel involved with his work. Now a regular donor, Rose understands the sense of togetherness in the blood donation community.

At the final stage of the donor experience, when recognising and thanking donors, NHSBT is taking extra steps to build that community feel. A follow-up message to donors thanks them for their participation and lets them know which hospital their blood has been issued to. Notable milestones are marked, for example if a donor has reached their fifth, tenth or even their hundredth donation. Before COVID-19 struck, NHSBT ran events to get donors together and recognise their role”, and during the pandemic it has launched a series of popular virtual community groups. It is a wholesome mission to look after its own and attract the 135,000 new donors it needs every year to continue its work.

“It really is fantastic,” says Rose. “You’re part of this community; it’s not just you giving blood, it’s a group of fantastic people giving blood. And that’s really something that you’re very proud to be a part of. Personally, I like to make sure when I walk into work, or dial in to work these days, I’m contributing something valuable. And to know that my work has a social purpose, a contribution so valuable, especially in these times of the pandemic, is really, really rewarding.

“I’m particularly excited about the opportunity through online or mobile-based experiences, and the self-service element. In an ideal world for me and my teams, we almost want to take a step back – it’s the donors that do all this valuable work. They’re the ones that are helping the patients, we’re there just helping them do that. And so, the opportunity with digital experiences is really to empower our donors to do this themselves, effortlessly.”

Clark is equally enthusiastic about the work NHSBT is undertaking. She was recently involved in its efforts to collect plasma for clinical research into treatments for COVID-19, a huge effort that was able to progress at speed only because of NHSBT’s technology base. Clark is also encouraged by the organisation’s leadership and commitment to digital.

"In this organisation you’ve got people, altruistic donors, who are giving their blood, who are giving their plasma, who are giving their tissues, who are giving their organs, for the benefit of other people’s lives. Everywhere you look, there’s great people doing great things. You can’t buy that, can you?"

“Our chief executive [Betsy Bassis] is a real supporter of digital and technology, a real supporter of it,” she says. “She comes from the private sector and she’s seen the difference technology can make. I’m looking forward to the point where we’ve got a few more of these foundations in, and we can start lifting our heads up and being more experimental with what we can do with technology, because I have no doubt that deploying the use of things like artificial intelligence and machine learning can help transform the way this organisation runs.”

Clark previously worked for a number of years in national security, where the mission was very different: how to stop bad people doing bad things. At NHSBT, it’s about helping good people do good things. And it is that fundamental duty, she says, that motivates NHSBT’s staff every day.

“People come to work because they know they’re saving and improving lives, and that’s what keeps them coming. Many people probably could go and work somewhere else, and maybe get paid a bit more money sometimes, but it’s that real kind of mission of what we do that keeps people here.

“In this organisation you’ve got people, altruistic donors, who are giving their blood, who are giving their plasma, who are giving their tissues, who are giving their organs, for the benefit of other people’s lives. Everywhere you look, there’s great people doing great things. You can’t buy that, can you?”

The post Technology Driving Blood Supply appeared first on Tech For Good.

Driving a county-wide tech transformation

James Henderson — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 13:04:00 +0000

Norfolk County Council is driving ahead with technology innovation in every area it touches, all underpinned by one ambition – to become the UK’s best connected rural county. The organisation’s CTO, Kurt Frary, tells Tech For Good about his burning desire to leverage technology to improve the lives of every citizen and business in Norfolk

The East Anglian county of Norfolk in the UK might not automatically come to mind when you think of technology innovation. Sprawling over almost 1.3 million acres, it is the UK’s fourth largest county, with great swathes of rural land punctuated by market towns and boasting some stunning coastlines.

But while residents and visitors often delight in what can be a slower pace of life, the county’s largest public sector organisation is looking to catapult Norfolk into the technology fast lane.

With its HQ set in the county’s only city, Norwich, Norfolk County Council (NCC) is the top tier local government authority for its population of just over 900,000 people, providing vital services to citizens and businesses in the area. But behind the scenes, the organisation’s technology team is implementing a range of initiatives to turn Norfolk into a technological blueprint for other counties to follow.

Kurt Frary is Assistant Director of ICT & Chief Technical Officer and a key player in its technology transformation efforts. A Norfolk-native, he is acutely aware of the organisation’s responsibility to make the county more digitally connected.

“We’re on the journey to deliver the foundation of connectivity we need to provide digital services in Norfolk,” he says. “That includes improving broadband, which we’ve improved significantly across the region so people who live in Norfolk will have faster speeds in their homes.

“One of the challenges of living and working in Norfolk is that it is rural; you haven’t got connectivity, you haven’t got that foundation to access the internet, use digital services. We are cognisant that if we’re to help people in the adult social care arena, help people live in their homes longer, live independently longer, we need to use digital to enable that.

“In terms of businesses, if they haven’t got connectivity where they want to operate they’ll go somewhere else. So, we are keen as a local authority that we give businesses the foundation to digital services, which is connectivity.”

Frary’s teams work concurrently on any number of projects and initiatives, but they are all underpinned by a wider goal: to become the best connected rural county in the UK.

Central to that ambition is a £500,000 programme that kicked off less six months ago which is installing a comprehensive long range wide area network (LoRaWAN) made up of 220 Internet of Things (IoT) gateways, 110 in Norfolk and 110 in the neighbouring county of Suffolk – the largest of its kind in the UK.

“The IoT network will be free for people to use, whether you’re a private citizen, a business or public sector, which is an approach no-one else has taken across the country. It will be the largest in the UK, and we’re actually almost the largest already,” says Frary.

“It is a technology widely used in Europe; however when you look at Europe compared with the UK, we were behind a year and a half ago. We’re now catching up significantly and that’s because of the initiatives Norfolk has taken, and other people are following us.”

NCC is responsible for maintaining Norfolk’s 10,000-kilometre (6,200 miles) road networks and bus routes, and is leveraging IoT technology in built-up areas of the county to make better informed decisions and save the organisation significant amounts of money.

“We spend £3.4 million on gritting runs every year to keep the roads safe, protect people and make sure they’re not icy,” says Frary. “Each run costs around £25,000, so we’ve put sensors in the roads in both Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn. These are low-cost IoT sensors but they are able to tell us the temperature and that helps us grit when we need to grit and not grit when we don’t need to grit, which saves £8,000 per grit run.”

As a rural county, agriculture is hugely important to Norfolk, adding millions of pounds to the economy and supporting thousands of jobs. And now agritech firms are benefitting from NCC’s LoRaWAN IoT roll-out, with five farms in the county using the technology to monitor their crops and factors such as moisture levels and precipitation. Information is fed into a dashboard and an associated app is able to give farmers guidance on when apples need to be sprayed, for example.

Norfolk Trails, which provides information on the county’s walking, cycling and horse-riding routes, is also leveraging the network, tracking the most popular choices and helping NCC to decide where to place funding for the service.

“The most exciting thing about the project is every time we talk to anyone about it, another 10 use cases come out, so we have all of these use cases and we’ve had to slow it down rather than speed it up,” Frary comments. “Rather than deal with the 30 or 40 use cases we’ve got on the books, we’ve had to do two or three at a time and make sure they deliver, which is a very nice position to be in.”

The project is already benefiting a number of the county’s companies, and has piqued the interest of other local authorities in the UK, keen to take a look at how Norfolk is utilising technology to become a better connected county.

“Having a connected rural county is really important, especially for businesses,” Frary continues. “If we want them to come and start a business or move to Norfolk and run their business and help the economy, we need the right connectivity here in this region.

“We have taken strides to make that happen with our technology and the projects that we’re running, but we’re also doing innovative stuff that the rest of the UK isn’t necessarily doing. We’re getting eyes on us from all over the place, we have Leeds coming to see us, we have Leicester coming to see us, and they want to see how they can follow our strategy.

“And our partners, such as Capita, are saying: “Look at Norfolk, it is amazing what they’re doing, they’re doing things differently, they’re not the usual local public sector authority”.”

The network will give NCC a dynamic, real-time dataset, tracking a number of metrics across the county, which it will then be able to drill down into to derive meaningful insights and intelligence. With this trove of information at its fingertips, NCC will be in a position to make better informed decisions about spending, services and initiatives to improve the lives of its citizens and trading conditions for businesses.

We want to look at every single service, kick-start innovation and find out where we can change them and transform them, so we can deliver more for less money and actually make a difference to the people of Norfolk

Frary also has an ambition to publish large swathes of data as a public record, free for businesses and citizens to use as they see fit.

“We’re getting a lot of data and what is really interesting is putting that data together and making better sense of it and making better decisions,” he comments. “For instance, if we’re monitoring air or rainfall quality across Norfolk, other services can use it but so can other businesses.

“It means it becomes a public record that gives something back but also allows us to look across the county and become a real digital county, a smart county. Being a smart county, we have a dataset we can build on and the more data you put in the more better information you’ll get back. You can make really smart decisions if you have the data you need to hand.”

Frary is clearly passionate about the work the organisation’s technology teams carry out and mentions more than once the autonomy people are given to be creative and innovative. He is also quick to credit NCC’s Leader, Andrew Proctor and its other executives. “We have senior backing all the way to the very top,” Frary says.

“One of the things I’m really proud of is that Norfolk County Council is really different to other public authorities to work for. We’ve got a ‘just try it’ attitude. If it is low cost and you can try something and prototype it, just get on and do it, and if that is successful you can then initiate a project or pilot.

“Other authorities in the past have taken a view that they have to do 99% or 100% and work up all the details before they try something, which may have been wasted effort. We don’t do that here, we get on with stuff.”

In that spirit, Frary and his team recently sat down to brainstorm how they could verify the information they had about mobile coverage across Norfolk. The decision was taken to hire a private firm to drive across the county with mobiles fitted with the various network operators’ sim cards to see if the coverage matched up to the operators’ claims.

In some instances, the coverage was not the same as that claimed by the operators, but rather than castigate them, Frary and his team put their heads together to come up with a mutually beneficial solution.

“We’re not in the game of beating anyone up, we’re in the game of working together to improve things for the citizens of Norfolk,” he states. “We got the operators back in to discuss how we can improve coverage and bring in those gaps, and one of the stances we’re taking that is very different to the rest of the country is allow them to use our public sector buildings, but we’re not charging them for that, we’re allowing them to do it for free or the cost of the installation.

“That allows them to look at their commercial model and deliver something for us without beating them up and actually is quite a nice approach to it. We’ve seen some movement there and we’re getting better coverage in Norfolk as a result of the initiative.”

CAPITA

Working collaboratively with other organisations, public or private, to benefit the county is a theme that shines through when talking to Frary. Key to achieving the aim of establishing Norfolk as the best connected rural county in the UK is ensuring partnerships move beyond supplier-type relationships into deeper and longer-lasting affiliations with shared interests and goals.

One of the very best examples of this approach in action is NCC’s partnership with Capita, the internationally renowned consulting and professional services company.

Capita has supplied the council with more than 130 LoRaWAN gateways to support its deployment of IoT devices, while in February the two agreed a new contract to upgrade NCC’s fibre network and the extension of their existing deal for network and IT services. The fibre contract, valued at £6 million, involves an upgrade for the county’s existing hybrid network to a local full fibre network.

Frary is effusive in his praise for the partnership NCC and Capita have developed.

“If I reflect on the partnership and relationship I would probably say it is outstanding. I’ve managed many suppliers over many years in my roles in Norfolk and elsewhere and I haven’t seen any partnership like this working this effectively ever…ever,” he says.

“If you’d asked me four years ago were they playing in this game in terms of strategy I’d probably have said no. But I’ve worked very closely with our team of directors from Capita and their ambitions, and being very clear about what our ambitions are for Norfolk County Council, and they align and gel very nicely.

“We have spent a lot of time working through what we’re trying to achieve, they’ve spent a lot of time understanding us as a customer and now they put significant effort and time into achieving those things.”

Frary says that Capita has gone the extra mile with its relationship with NCC, “doing things you wouldn’t expect to see a supplier do”. Those things include attending events such as Norfolk’s County Show with NCC to speak to customers to get a better understanding of what they require, part-funding NCC’s Social Value Fund, and attending ‘Step Into Tech’ events where children are encouraged to get hands on with technology and understand how it can shape their future careers.

“I think some of the things we are delivering would not have been achieved without Capita helping us,” Frary states, simply.

With a number of the technology teams’ initiatives in full flow, the journey to becoming the UK’s best connected rural county is well underway, but, says Frary, in the longer-term that will be the foundation for even greater change.

He and his team are looking further afield, keen to explore how technology can help transform the services it is offering to its citizens – none of which are more important – as adult care.

“We need to be looking at how we transform our services and make them more digital. One really good example is how we are looking at Adult Social Care; as an authority we spend £1 million a day on adult social care and as a rural county we have a lot of migration from the older generation who are retiring, so that challenge is going to get bigger.

“One of the things we are doing with technology is to see how we can help people live independently longer. Some of it is around putting sensors in people’s homes if they are agreeable to it that monitor whether somebody gets up in the morning and makes a cup of tea. If they don’t get up by a certain time, with a certain tolerance, do we need to send a trusted neighbour around to take the strain off public services?”

Speaking more broadly, Frary concludes by saying that the ambition for NCC has to be to improve services through the innovative use of technology in every area it comes into contact with citizens and businesses.

“We want to look at every single service, kick-start innovation and find out where we can change them and transform them, so we can deliver more for less money and actually make a difference to the people of Norfolk.

“We also want to encourage businesses to start and stay in Norfolk and that relies on us promoting Norfolk as a good place to live, work and deliver services from. That means we have to deliver all of the work we’ve already done around connectivity.

“And finally, we want to make sure that we’re delivering services to the public so they can choose to create a business in Norfolk, upskill themselves and become better informed if they need to be, and can do the things you’d expect to be able to do anywhere else in the country.

“I believe Norfolk is leading the way on these things and I believe people across the country are coming to look at what we’re doing, because we seem to be doing the right things.”

The post Driving a county-wide tech transformation appeared first on Tech For Good.

Saving Lives With Technology Innovation

Ben Mouncer — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 16:07:00 +0000

HARTMANN GROUP HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF HEALTHCARE INNOVATION FOR NEARLY 200 YEARS. TODAY, TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION AND NEW DIGITAL BUSINESS MODELS ARE ENABLING IT TO “GO FURTHER FOR HEALTH”. Tech For Good MET WITH CIO SINANUDIN OMERHODZIC AND HIS TEAM TO FIND OUT MORE.

Take a walk around the entrance hall of HARTMANN GROUP’s sprawling German headquarters and you’ll quickly be immersed in the company’s long and fascinating backstory.

Inside the front door is a life-size image of Paul Hartmann Sr., the man who – in the middle of the 19th century – founded the Paul Hartmann Bleaching, Dyeing and Dressing Company, the forerunner to the thriving healthcare products and solutions business which exists today.

Further on, adorning the walls are timelines that stitch together multiple HARTMANN milestones and highlight the groundbreaking innovations that make up its history. From the very beginning, Paul Hartmann set his store out to engage the era’s leading medical minds and pioneer solutions to radically improve healthcare provision. In tandem with Sir Joseph Lister, the British surgeon who invented the first dressing with a germicidal effect, and Victor von Bruns, a German who designed groundbreaking dressing material using cotton wool, Hartmann helped revolutionise wound management, in turn saving millions of lives.

This quest for innovation remains hardwired within HARTMANN GROUP. Flash forward to 2020 and it is the rapid onset of new technologies that is remodelling how it operates, innovates, and delivers. Change has been a constant for HARTMANN over nearly 200 years and, today, technology and digital transformation are among the main forces behind its ambition to “go further for health”.

In the middle of HARTMANN’s Heidenheim base is a vast and somewhat imposing conference room. This is where the leadership team communicates its top-level objectives and strategy to the wider staff, making it one of the vital hubs on the HARTMANN campus.

Sinanudin Omerhodzic, HARTMANN’s Chief Information Officer, is one person who has regularly taken to the podium. Since joining three years ago, Omerhodzic has led the group’s IT and technical implementation initiatives and the shift to modern, digital-led business models. Last November, he was included among the top 10 large-enterprise CIOs in Germany by the popular magazine ‘CIO’.

“Innovation is key in the era of digitalisation,” Omerhodzic tells Digital Bulletin during a wide-ranging interview. “What we’ve seen in the last 10 or 20 years is a huge change in business but also in society, around how technology impacts our lives. This is a time where every function and business unit in organisations like HARTMANN gets impacted by technologies.”

The company boasts a broad portfolio of healthcare products and devices in its three principal business areas: incontinence management, disinfection management and wound management. Sold to hospitals, nursing homes and personal users in more than 100 countries worldwide, the products accounted for the majority of HARTMANN’s €2 billion+ ($2.3 billion+) 2018 revenues and are recognised as market-leading by patients and professionals.

But the healthcare sector, and as a consequence HARTMANN, is currently facing some steep challenges. Chronic, or noncommunicable, diseases are on the rise while ageing populations are putting strain on healthcare systems which in many instances are underfunded. How can organisations like HARTMANN help find solutions to these difficult problems?

Omerhodzic believes the use of advancing technologies will become more and more valuable and he cites a potentially transformative idea currently being explored by HARTMANN. Emerging from its infection management division, the pilot aims to tackle the spread of hospital infections; more than four million patients contract such infections in Europe annually, with around 37,000 mortalities.

“This is a huge issue on the one hand, but also on the other hand creates a huge cost for the hospitals in treatment for people who get infected,” Omerhodzic explains. “One of our products is called Sterillium, an alcohol-based disinfectant for hygienic and surgical hand disinfection and it’s been on the market for over 50 years, helping hospitals utilise liquids to disinfect hands.

“But now we are thinking of going even beyond the product. We are experimenting with how we could utilise artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT technologies to analyse the data available in hospitals and detect infections. For example, when the doctors are doing patient visits in the morning and creating the report – we should analyse and understand the data and then check medical libraries for potential patterns or indications of symptoms that were not discovered immediately. The software and AI can then map those patterns, maybe indicating potential infections.”

Siemens

Omerhodzic rates AI as one of the highest-potential technologies in healthcare and recent research appears to support this claim, with the ‘Global AI Market in Healthcare’ sector set to grow by 28% year-on-year until 2023, according to a report by Technavio.

On top of helping to identify infections, he sees AI, IoT and data analytics use cases in supply chain and manufacturing, where future demands could be predicted by analysing internal data, such as customer history, and external data, like weather conditions and epidemics. HARTMANN recently developed a smart fulfilment solution for a pilot in Spain, where if a product was running low on stock IoT sensors would detect that, automatically triggering an order. This helped optimise process efficiency and offer better customer service. Yet Omerhodzic sees AI deployments going even further.

“Let me mention another one which is a little bit more futuristic,” he teases. “In the areas outside of big cities, we see a shortage of specialist doctors but demand is increasing through demographic change, hence medical support and treatment is in danger. AI could help to make a first level of diagnosis so the patient won’t need to travel to the city to talk to specialists.”

***

In truth, the possibilities offered by technologies like AI are impossible to predict. HARTMANN is diligent enough to widen the scope of its analysis to other areas of innovation, including IoT (the Internet of Things), making its products ‘smarter’ – “it sounds very strange, but even a plaster can be smart” – and the modernisation of applications for a future where the entire ecosystem will be connected via one healthcare platform for a more seamless customer experience for institutions, professionals and patients.

In order to maintain HARTMANN’s position at technology’s cutting edge, Omerhodzic has rethought the role of IT to become more innovative – and central to this has been the creation of the Technology Leader role. There are three different Technology Leader roles: Technology Leader Process, Technology Leader Market and Technology Leader Scout.

These jobs are at the transformation coalface for HARTMANN IT. The Technology Leader Process takes charge of internal process efficiency, the Technology Leader Market focuses on customer-driven innovation, while the Technology Leader Scout assesses the viability of recently developed and emerging technologies. All Technology Leaders are supported by the wider HARTMANN IT team, which boasts deep expertise in every discipline.

“This is something that is very unique for HARTMANN IT,” says Alexandra Fibitz, Technology Leader Scout for wound management. “I am constantly screening the market for new technologies; AI, IoT and big data, for example. We adapt them to our HARTMANN work, include them in all of our projects where applicable and see where they fit our needs, and how we can integrate them in our solutions to help the patient.”

"I am constantly screening the market for new technologies; AI, IoT and big data, for example. We adapt them to our HARTMANN work, include them in all of our projects where applicable and see where they fit our needs"

Patrick Feil, a Technology Leader Market, adds: “This is a complete transition phase we are currently in, and we at HARTMANN IT don’t see it as a tremendously complex change process – we really see it as an outstanding chance. The changes in our organisation are not only related to roles, responsibilities and new innovative structures, it’s also about getting new technologies, methodologies and toolsets into our teams. This is exactly what we require to achieve the digital goals in collaboration with our customers.”

Feil is hinting at the wider overhaul implemented by Omerhodzic in his role as CIO. While innovation is supported by the Technology Leaders, efficiency on the corporate IT side is maximised through an agile, product-oriented structure that involves designers, developers and analysts forming teams in a new IT operating model that oversees the end-to-end delivery of products.

In contrast to the previous methodology built around project rather than product management, Omerhodzic believes this way of working lends itself to increased levels of teamwork, focus and knowledge-retention. It’s a foundational part of the ‘OneIT’ strategy at Hartmann – one associated IT organisation working across the entire business.

Subhrajyoti Bose, Director of IT Strategy and Architecture, has had heavy involvement along the transformation journey.

“Our IT strategy is to transform IT from being an operational support organisation acting on requests to one that is proactively watching the market for technology changes, and bringing in the best technologies and methods in the world to enable business innovation and the future corporate strategy at HARTMANN,” he comments.

“When we look at the markets, it is clear that the innovations of the future are not only centred around the product itself but also encompass integrating digital technologies into the products and deriving business intelligence and insights from the data to drive customer value.”

***

HARTMANN is pushing on all fronts to lead in the digital healthcare world of the future – yet, as with all industry players intent on bringing about effective transformation, the role of technology partners cannot be underestimated.

SAP has been a long-time technology partner to HARTMANN, with the two companies first collaborating in the 1980s when SAP – now a billion-dollar software corporation with tens of thousands of clients all over the world – made HARTMANN just its 37th customer. Over the years they have worked on a range of integrations and their relationship today covers a broad spectrum of services.

SAP

HARTMANN’s integrating S/4HANA, SAP’s most advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP) system yet, as the backbone for its internal systems. In addition, HARTMANN’s moving to cloud-based tools with SAP SuccessFactors, which delivers HR solutions, and SAP Ariba, the industry-leading procurement software. Each implementation is supported by SAP Services, guaranteeing the sustainability of every product and supporting HARTMANN’s data-led business models and digital transformation.

“SAP is going to be very key to us to move to the next area with S/4HANA and optimise and make our processes more efficient,” outlines Omerhodzic.

“It’s not just about SAP’s technology. On one hand we have a key technology partner, but on the other they understand and support our vision in healthcare. They co-innovate with us and support us as we evolve our products and services as we ‘go further for health’ and, in the end, save patients’ lives.”

That versatility applies equally to Siemens, another technology partner for HARTMANN. With its own expertise in the medical devices and healthcare segment, Siemens offers HARTMANN comprehensive services around product lifecycle management (PLM), including the management of product data, material data, variant management and data for regulatory compliance.

Due to new legislation in the healthcare market, internal processes at HARTMANN had to be adapted. Siemens has been chosen as vendor, and with its Teamcenter application suite it designed the internal processes in accordance with the new regulations. Omerhodzic believes that the partnership will continue as he is very satisfied with the cooperation.

“There are various opportunities because this [Siemens] is a very large company with a lot of competencies and a lot of experiences,” he adds. “So far we have been working very closely together on the PLM side, and how we document and digitalise the PLM process as such.

“But we are also thinking now to see other opportunities when it comes to Healthineers [Siemens’ med-tech arm] and to see how its ecosystem can collaborate with our ecosystem, and how we could maybe even get some more benefits.”

***

Every digital transformation story serves a greater purpose. For HARTMANN, that purpose is transparent: to improve the quality of lives and, ultimately, save them.

“I think this is a very rewarding experience,” Fibitz states. “If I’m sitting at my desk, if I’m having meetings, if I’m doing my work – I always know at the end that I’m helping the customer, who is for us the patient. So if I think about my grandparents, or about my parents, for example, they are getting older – that’s life – but I know that with our products, we can at least make lives easier and help them experience a little bit more confidence and convenience.”

Omerhodzic is now in a position to see the results from seeds sown over the last three years – but that doesn’t mean he or HARTMANN will be resting on their laurels any time soon.

In December, the company outlined its five-year transformation programme built around innovative strength, competitive strength and process efficiency, also promising further investment in its digital infrastructure. The end goal is international leadership in its three core areas of incontinence management, infection management and wound management.

“I’m 1000% committed to an organisation,” Omerhodzic concludes. “There is no 9-to-5 job in my life. But if you have a strong commitment, you need to also strongly believe in something, otherwise you can’t go the extra mile. That means you need to have a strong purpose, and HARTMANN has one.

“You, as an IT expert, really have the chance, working for HARTMANN, to help save patient lives and utilise its technologies. The company is very open-minded, is welcoming to people and is very culturally involved in terms of willing to make you think. That’s maybe the reason it has been successful for 200 years.”

If HARTMANN continues to wed its purpose, innovative spirit and technological knowhow to “go further for health”, then the industry is in safe hands for a few more centuries yet.

The post Saving Lives With Technology Innovation appeared first on Tech For Good.

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