Leveraging Technology to Simplify Healthcare Processes

Open telecommunication architectures enable integration with leading healthcare application vendors. Architectures such as Avaya Aura™ enable electronic health record and revenue cycle management systems to be augmented with state-of-the-art contact center and telecommunication solutions, simplifying interactions between patients, business users, and clinical professionals. Their unified communication capabilities assure reliable and secure messaging across the user community regardless of an individual’s role or responsibilities.

What’s the difference between a data leak and a data breach? I think this is both a great question and an important distinction to understand in today’s climate, where instances of both are regularly making national headlines.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic right now. Unfortunately, when a topic is hot, I find that many people throw around the term without really having a good understanding of its details. That’s where our teams within ConvergeOne kick into gear, working to understand those details. As we researched AI, one particularly relevant use case became obvious: chatbots. In fact, Gartner calls chatbots the current face of AI and predicts that by 2020, more than 50% of large enterprises will use product chatbots. Let’s dive into the details of AI within the context of chat.

Gone are the days when the IT department was relegated to the bottom floor of an office to perform tasks that few in the organization understood. IT professionals today are the innovators, troubleshooters, cybersecurity watchdogs, data masters, and business process experts of the organization. The role of IT has become more critical and complex even as budgets have become compressed.

Today, closed-loop, synchronous communication solutions are increasingly used for notification, messaging, and information access. By assuring information is received and acted upon, they make an important contribution toward reducing revenue leakage and improving service delivery in areas such as:

Most data centers host hundreds—if not thousands—of applications that run business- and mission-critical operations. As organizations consider moving to the cloud, they are faced with questions on how these applications will fit into their cloud strategy and how they can migrate their workloads to a cloud platform with the least risk and disruption to their business.

In part one and part two of this blog series, we explored the reasons why customer experience and the role of the Chief Marketing Officer are evolving, and how you can respond to those changes. We'll now into the future of CX and marketing.

Marketing continues to be about brand and demand generation; however, data and changes in the way customers interact with companies have provoked a complete transformation of the function. Customers used to speak with salespeople or the contact center about product details and offerings, but all of this information is now available online. Customers are more resourceful and self-reliant than ever before. They are educated and oftentimes are simply seeking validation of their choices.

There are a lot of new terms these days around data center networking. Software-defined-this and that-as-a-service are among the leaders. Neither of these are new concepts in technology, but emphasize a new way of looking at how data centers work. Networks have already been “software-defined” and virtualized for an incredibly long time, but now the emphasis is on abstracting the intent from the configuration and treating the entire network as a system. Cisco’s entry into software-defined networking (SDN) is its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). ACI has a lot of new concepts and terminology, especially around the abstraction mentioned earlier, but that will not be our current focus.

I often hear from folks that in general, small and medium-sized businesses lack a strategy and proper controls, but the big guys have it covered. Well, it might surprise you to learn that 30% of large enterprises state they still lack an overall information security strategy – and we’re talking huge, $25+ billion companies. Overall, 44% of enterprises report they lack a fundamental strategy. I’ll tell you from experience that most companies overestimate their cyber readiness, which means that the real numbers are likely much, much higher than the reported ones.

Healthcare mergers and acquisitions are forcing providers to develop cohesive approaches to managing the patient journey. Attention is increasingly being given to ways in which seamless access to information for both patients and providers can be accommodated for the purpose of streamlining patient access services and care delivery processes. As the consolidation trend continues (healthcare M&A was at a record level in 2017 and continued through 2018), the need to establish highly effective patient/provider communication services is increasingly important – especially when you consider the amount of money that is lost due to communication inefficiencies.