This symbiotic nature of physical object plus internet connection allows for the collection and exchange of data, and finally, action based on that data, without need for human intervention. In many cases, several IoT devices (think smart speakers) can even link together.

Smart homes are just one example of IoT technology in action. Here are several others more germane to industry and business ─ including, perhaps, yours.

6 Ways the Internet of Things is Helping Industry & Business

While IoT can be used on a personal level, there are a number of areas in which it may be able to help your business organization, be it a startup or an enterprise. In fact, according to Frost & Sullivan, here are six of the top Internet of Things (IoT) applications, listed by general category:

1. Security and Surveillance
2. Industrial Automation and Smart Manufacturing
3. Process Automation
4. Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG)
5. Advanced Measurement Infrastructure/Smart Meters
6. Connected Consumer Electronics

As you can see, while consumer electronics may be used by businesses and industries, they’re far from the only IoT use case that you could utilize to improve how your business operates.

12 Specific Applications of IoT

Looking for specific IoT applications rather than categories of IoT use in industry? TechTarget offers the following as twelve of the most notable and important IoT applications and examples in business:

1. Self-Driving and Connected Vehicles: Autonomous vehicles use IoT technologies like AI-enabled cameras and sensors for safe navigation, with major automotive companies and startups alike developing these innovations. The market is expected to grow significantly, with both self-driving and conventional vehicles benefiting from IoT for performance monitoring and safety.
2. Logistics and Fleet Management: IoT enhances logistics with sensors and GPS for real-time vehicle tracking, route optimization, and predictive maintenance, improving operational efficiency across various industries including micromobility.
3. Traffic Management: Smart traffic management systems use IoT devices like cameras and sensors integrated with road infrastructure to prevent traffic jams, accidents, and ensure smooth travel, also facilitating smart parking solutions.
4. Smart Grids and Smart Meters: IoT enables two-way communication across the energy supply chain, allowing utilities to manage energy distribution more efficiently and consumers to monitor their energy use in real-time, supporting sustainability goals.
5. Environmental Monitoring: IoT devices collect data on air, water, and soil quality, as well as weather conditions, aiding in natural disaster prediction, environmental protection, and business planning around environmental conditions.
6. Connected Buildings and Building Security: IoT technologies make buildings smarter and safer by optimizing energy use and enhancing security through connected cameras, sensors, and smart systems for commercial and residential properties.
7. Smart Cities: Integrating IoT across traffic management, smart buildings, and environmental monitoring, smart cities use comprehensive IoT ecosystems for efficient, effective, and safer urban management.
8. Supply Chain Management: IoT modernizes supply chains with sensors and GPS tracking for asset visibility, condition monitoring during transport, and analytics-driven operational improvements.
9. Digital Payments: IoT plays a critical role in expanding digital payment systems, especially in increasingly digitally integrated cities, enhancing convenience and security.
10. Healthcare and Consumer Health and Wellness: IoT devices monitor patient health in medical settings and personal wellness through wearables, enabling real-time tracking and analysis of health data for better health outcomes.
11. Predictive Maintenance: IoT sensors in various mechanical systems collect performance data to anticipate maintenance needs, preventing equipment failure and optimizing operational efficiency across numerous industries.
12. Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Retail Management and Operations: IoT applications span from agriculture to retail, improving production, maintenance, access control, and customer experiences through automation, real-time monitoring, and analytics.

Start Your IoT Journey Today: Explore Our IoT Software Application Solutions

See how we helped Intent Solutions develop a connected smart medication dispensing device here. Looking for similar results for your healthcare business? Perhaps you are in another industry, like professional services, logistics, or private equity. Get in touch with us now to see how we can help you develop custom IoT solutions for your business’ most pressing needs.

The post 18 IoT Applications and Examples Relevant to Business & Industry appeared first on Digital Scientists.

This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence.

Today on This Week Health.

They call 911 because there is no way for them to get to the hospital, and so the only way is to actually get an ambulance and go to the ER. Like, imagine, what that costs. For that hospital Welcome to Newsday A This Week Health Newsroom Show. My name is Bill Russell. I’m a former CIO for a 16-hospital system and creator of This Week Health, a set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. For five years we’ve been making podcasts that amplify great thinking to propel healthcare forward.

Special thanks to our Newsday show partners and we have a lot of ’em this year, which I am really excited about. Cedar Sinai Accelerator. Clearsense, CrowdStrike, Digital Scientists, Optimum Healthcare IT, Pure Storage, SureTest, Tausight, Lumeon and VMware. We appreciate them investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

Now onto the show.

All right, it’s Newsday and today we’re joined by Dennis Joseph, Senior Director of Healthcare for Digital Scientists. Dennis, welcome to the show.

It’s been a while. We’ve got the end-of-year stories that are starting to pop up and some of them are pretty interesting. We got, doctor exits. We’ve got Walmart, friend or foe. We’ve got radiology and some financial things as well that I think are an interesting conversation.

I want to make sure we get to this last one, which is IT issues affecting health system financials. I think sometimes the IT stuff gets lumped in with significant financial implications, ramifications. So I think that’s going to be worth a talk, but we’re going to start with the AMA website.

40 percent of doctors? What can organizations do to keep them? Let me give you a couple of excerpts real quick. While many physicians retire due to age, others have chosen early retirement due to the current state of the US healthcare system. And too many young and mid-career physicians intend to leave their organization within two years.

With an ongoing physician shortage in medicine, finding ways to identify and address doctors’ intent to leave a healthcare organization is vital, and it may require smarter uses of technology. Between 2021 and 2022, when asked about the likelihood of leaving, obviously It’s going up. the finding comes from an exclusive survey by the AMA these are some of the things they’re saying we can do. Be smart with the use of technology. In her work with the U. S. Surgeon General’s Office, Dr. Shah said one of the things she noticed is that we have a lot of evidence-based tactics. But we’re really underutilizing technology. way to beat back EHR burdens is to deploy new tech. The next one is to let doctors be doctors. That is, let them actually do what they got into this to do. And then the third is to work as a team.

Let’s talk about the use of technology. Is the use of technology, do you think it’s increasing in healthcare? Or do you think we’re sort of stagnating? Or even atrophying a little bit.

Well, I think that the use of technology evolving , right? And obviously, as you think about

You have the old EHRs, you have the old diagnostic systems, you have the old medical devices. And now as you think about getting into spaces like clinical decision support where, it’s providing you information that speeds up. at least your early evaluation or assessment of the patient.

I think that definitely has a lot of promise, but I think the thing that we got to watch out is in the name of technology, right, people bring in a lot of these systems and solutions which it’s creating a barrage of information that they have to react to. So now they not only have to care about the patient that they need to assess and diagnose and treat, they also got to keep listening to the technology system that’s telling them 15 different things during the day.

I just think of all the alarms that they have to react to on a daily basis inside of an ICU, right? So there is a proliferation. I just don’t know if it’s meaningful proliferation, right?

Yeah, meaningful proliferation. That’s the rub. Yeah, meaningful proliferation is a that’s a good term.

I like that. What I find is there’s people that are Optimists, oh my gosh, generative AI, it’s going to change the game and ambient listening is going to change the game, so there’s the optimist. There’s the pessimist that’s like, look, we’ve been putting technology to work in healthcare for decades, and it’s not improved anything.

So you have the optimist and the pessimist. And that phrase. That’s where I find a lot of people, it’s the pragmatist. It’s the, hey, you know what, let’s do technology that actually works. Let’s make sure that we’re just not throwing technology at a problem. Let’s make sure that we talk to the clinicians, we understand what they’re trying to do, and we implement technology that helps them, I guess to the next point, let doctors be doctors.

Oh, I agree. The other thing that’s not talked about much is the whole concept of decision fatigue. Right? With the proliferation of technology, that also means that every time they look at a notification, look at an alert, they look at a recommendation. Okay, they’re still on the hook for the decision, right?

And that’s how they see their role, which is, hey, all of these recommendations are good, but I’m still on the hook for the decision. And ultimately, if I’m going to get sued, I’m still going to get sued, not the decision support system, right? Right. And so that decision fatigue hasn’t gone away, and that’s what’s wearing them down.

Yeah, it’s interesting you bring that up, it’s one of the things, as I talk to physicians, they want more transparency into these AI systems, because essentially these AI systems come back, necessarily, by the way, I mean, the amount of information that clinicians are trying to deal with is staggering.

So we want to put systems in place that are going to be able to digest a ton of information and then, essentially say, hey, here’s what I found, or here’s the summary, or here’s What’s important, but physician doesn’t want to take responsibility for that system worked appropriately because they’re now making decisions based on information that’s being put through a set of algorithms and then come out the other side.

And they’re saying, like, I need some transparency in order to have trust. In order to be able to perform my job effectively and provide the best care I need to know what happened behind the curtain.

That’s exactly right. They need to know the logic behind it because ultimately that gives them a rationale.

to drive that decision, right? But I do think, in all of this, there are some low-hanging fruits. You can’t deny that documentation being a big one, right? As you think about telehealth encounters and we recently created a technology that automatically transcribes the telehealth conversation, recommends, okay, here are some of the Diagnostic value that, that comes out of that telehealth encounter.

I think those are all low-hanging fruit where you can leverage technology, where the physician is focused on the patient, but at the end of the encounter, they’re reviewing their notes, they’re making sure it’s accurate, making minor modifications, and uploading that into the EHR or EMR.

So I think that there are definitely opportunities there. But there’s got to be a lot more effort to, address the underlying issue of that many doctors eyeing exits. That’s a bigger issue. And I think technology alone is going to solve just a portion of it. I agree. This problem is here to stay.

This clinician burnout and clinicians leaving the field. And so I think this is going to be a continuing conversation into 2024. Are we putting technology in place that is stemming this tide or actually exacerbating the problem? We do not have the luxury anymore of exacerbating the problem, which in many cases with the EHR implementations we did exacerbate the problem.

The next story is interesting. Walmart, friend or foe to hospitals. And it starts with talking about Sam Walton, who’s the founder. He had harsh words for hospitals. He said we’ve got to get hospitals and doctors in line. 30 years ago, I mean, this is before he died. So it had to even be farther than 30 years ago.

He was saying, we’ve got to get hospitals and doctors in line. He said this at a Walmart leadership meeting, they’re charging five to six times what they ought to charge us. We need to work on a program where we’ve got hospitals and doctors and workman’s comp and pharmacies saving our customers money and our employees’ money.

And so he identified healthcare. Pretty early on as something he wanted to address with their footprint across America and especially in rural America. And recently they partnered with Orlando Health. and a lot of the stuff around here is they’re saying, we’re going to be able to go farther and do more in partnership than going alone.

They compare it to One Medical which appears to be going it alone for the most part, and now they’re starting to talk about partnerships as well. And it’s also interesting to note that, yeah, they’re partnering, but they also have. Quite a number of locations, over 50 locations now where they’re providing primary, behavioral, and dental care across five states.

I’m wondering if health systems really see Walmart as a competitor or a foe, or if they see them as somebody who’s a partner in their communities to deliver better health care. And I think more of them view them in the latter category than the former category.

Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t care how they view it. I think there’s potential here, right? And when you think about the partnership between the two organizations, what was interesting about the partnership, somewhere in the article, they mentioned that there is there’s no money that’s, that exchanges hands between the two organizations.

So it’s not really transactional. They’re looking at it holistically in terms of managing continuity of care for the patients, which is a very interesting and a very foundational approach to managing those patients, which I think is different from the Amazon and One Medical collaboration. So to me, obviously, I don’t know all the details, but I think that to me is interesting because what they’re saying. is with, in partnership with the hospital system, in partnership with their facilities where they’re providing primary care, behavioral health, etc. They’re basically providing a holistic solution to the patient. Which is definitely important. The other thing that holds promise here is exactly what you said, which is Walmart’s real estate footprint is immense, especially in rural locations in the United States.

And so access, there’s a lot talked about access and COVID obviously brought that to light. And so this is, to me, one of the ways you could address it, right? So. Could you bring some of those basic health services to retail settings that already exists, but you actually have access to them and you know that these people are going to have to come into Walmart anyway for other requirements.

And so it’s almost like, as you think about the broader issue, the classic question of how do you eat an elephant? It’s one bite at a time. I think to me, that’s, this is one bite.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think this is the model this is a model for solving the challenge of access, especially rural healthcare access.

And a lot of times when I talk to people about this, They will say, oh, access to broadband and remote locations and all this other stuff. But I guarantee you, every Walmart has access to broadband and a significant amount of broadband. Because in order to function as a retail organization today, they have to have those kinds of connections for point of sale and for inventory management, supply chain, and all that stuff.

Distribution. Yeah, exactly. So, this is When I think about it, this is the kind of partnership that makes perfect sense to me. I mean, outside of going directly to people’s homes, this is the next level up. So we do want to continue to do this push towards people’s homes to the extent that we can do that.

Also, by the way, besides the footprint, keep in mind that they’re the largest employer in like 20 of 50 states. And if they’re not the largest employer in those other 30 states. They’re in the top 10 for sure, just because of the sheer number. You could actually partner with them as a branded healthcare organization, let’s say Mayo or Cleveland or Cedars or something to that effect or the UC system for that matter.

You could partner with Walmart. Go in with them in terms of the build-out that’s required in some of these remote locations and provide the services from your core campuses and your core locations to those remote facilities and even to a certain extent. Use those as facilities that you could send clinicians or even hire clinicians out.

And so those clinicians, this was the old CVS, what CVS was going to try to do, and it just sort of fell apart for whatever reason. And I think there’s a lot of reasons actually, but it just fell apart. I think this could work with a Walmart. I don’t see. Walmart getting into acute care services.

I don’t see them getting into specialty services, so that’s why I don’t see them as a competitor. That’s why I see them as a friend because of their overlap with the existing services that many healthcare organizations provide Today, it’s gonna be pretty nominal. I mean, that’s my thinking, but I think it’s good model to create access to the rural communities.

Yeah, I’m fundamentally excited about this actually because it goes back to the whole concept of extending reach, all of these acute care facilities. I was speaking with Centara Health a few weeks back, and they were telling me that, there are times where people in rural locations, they call 911 on very simple health issues.

They call 911 because there is no way for them to get to the hospital, and so the only way is to actually get an ambulance and go to the ER. Like, imagine, what that costs. For that hospital. so as you think about those primary services, I think it’s definitely a lot of potential.

The other is, if this model works right, how do you proactively keep this population healthy? in a way that you’re not expanding your own footprint, right? And you’re extending reach and you’re giving them proactive health. And so I think it also addresses the whole cost of care equation, which oftentimes is challenging when it comes to the rural locations.

 We want to thank you for a wonderful year. As you know, we have celebrated our five-year anniversary at This Week Health, and we are going to enter our sixth year of doing this. And we set out a goal to raise 50, 000 for childhood cancer this year, and you did not disappoint. We have raised close to 60, 000 this year for childhood cancer, and we really appreciate you.

We appreciate you. The community coming together. And we hope to do more of this next year. We hope that you’ll join us.

All right, we’re going to close this out talking about IT. We’re going to skip a couple of stories. I want to talk about these IT issues affecting health system financials, and I want to talk about how healthcare IT organizations approach technology, specifically with you, and just go back and forth a little bit.

This talks about HCA and Northwell. It says Northwell is pointing to IT investments, and it’s EHR, digital health systems, and telehealth as part of the reasons for operating expenses growing 9%. In a nine month period ending September 30th, I’d have to look pretty closely at those financials. I can’t imagine that unless they paid for their EHR upfront, because I know they’re doing the EPIC implementation, unless they paid a significant amount of front, that the previous.

Years results were hit by that much, but that’s that’s neither here nor there. HCA also cited it. Issues could affect future earnings. I’m gonna put you in the CIO role. You’re a CIO for, Northwell’s pretty big. Let’s give you, let’s give you something else. It’s not as quite as big as Northwell.

Let’s give you I don’t know, mercy Bonsecourse. We’re gonna give you Mercy Bonsecourse, Virginia area. Pretty good footprint, that kind of stuff. You’re now the CIO.

How much of your strategy is build versus buy? Platforms versus best-of-breed solutions? How are you approaching the technology?

Because a lot of times when you see this big hit It’s because they made bets that didn’t pan out, and now they have to pivot, and essentially they’re paying for something a second time.

Yeah, no, it’s a tough nut to crack. I think as it relates to decision-making, for me, the true north is going to be clinical workflow and patient outcomes, right?

And any and all combination of technologies that drives that is going to make sense because ultimately what you want to, what you want to see is.

Where the process is laden with either cost or delays, right? So, we talk about profit pools. I think about delay pools and cost pools, right? So, as you think about the overall hospital operations, you want to drive to a point where your workflow is streamlined, your workflow is not laden with unnecessary steps, and the other is you have a line of sight to the patient outcomes and how it’s improving.

The other piece is you just take a sample patient, right, and going all the way from admit to discharge and all of the steps in between, it could be admitted through ICU, step down and discharge. How do you make that the most efficient and how do you get patients out the door, which is throughput?

Those are all, I think, areas where if you can improve that. Then you’re looking at a more efficient footprint from a technology standpoint. where hospitals are running into problems with is the fact that these technology ecosystems just grow and grow.

It becomes more and more complicated, takes a life of its own. And now you have your staff trying to, they spend their entire day trying to figure out how to maintain the system as against figure out how to treat the patient, right? And so I think that’s probably where It’s going to be difficult, but overall it is a tough nut to crack, right?

And you still got to have an EHR. You still got to have some sort of a telehealth service, and some of the other ancillary services from a technology standpoint.

Yeah it’s interesting to me because the, you don’t get to do greenfield. More times than not, when you take something over, you inherit a bunch of things.

Now, it’s almost obvious to somebody now, it’s like, hey, you want to get to a single EHR system. Now, there were some health systems that tried to, Buck that trend for years and the largest of which that hasn’t consolidated on a single EHR right now is Ascension, right? you go into Ascension and you look at their EHR footprint, it’s all over the board and what their concept is Hey, we don’t care what you use to run the hospital, but we have to bring all this information back and be able to process the information, improve care, get the alerts out keep the throughput and all those things.

And so, obviously you’re not doing that in a region. If you have a region that’s trying to function together, you wouldn’t have two EHRs. But, when you’re looking at. Michigan and Texas, their concept is, look there’s not enough benefit for us to do this multi-billion dollar. EHR consolidation that, and they’re the largest one who’s decided to do that.

With that being said, most of the others have decided to consolidate and essentially have thrown up their hands and said, I don’t care what it costs. We’re getting on a single EHR. That way we can have a single platform from which to build and a single hopefully set of workflows. Now, we also know that’s not always the case, right?

Cause you go in and they say, well. We have five builds, or we have an older build, or we have a lot of customizations of a single EHR, which creates that disparity as well. So even if you get to a single platform, it’s not necessarily a guarantee that you have something that you can be agile on top of.

But it does improve it. like, I talked to Sophy Lu over at Northwell, and their move to Epic, is really around this whole concept of if we get to that single platform, now we can plug in a single telehealth solution across all of our system. And we can even do some custom development.

If you still decide to go in that build route for certain items you’re going to do it once and implement it across. The entire system. And that’s the hope doing platforms. And then you have that, you have your PAC systems, hopefully you have an enterprise PAC system.

But what I’m finding is more and more health systems, if you go in there, they have 10 to 30 PAC systems. And so the inefficiencies you’re talking about generally come about because you inherit, you’re not inheriting a greenfield situation. You’re inheriting a situation where either the system has grown by acquisition over time or it didn’t have good governance and it allowed different health systems, different hospitals to do different things.

And now when you get that job as the CIO and you sit there and you look at it, you’re going, wow, like this, it’s not easy to clean up and cleanups. sometimes can take five, six, or seven years to clean up.

No, I agree. I think the one thing I’m curious about is how do you know whether it’s working for you or not?

What are the metrics that these CIOs use to say, okay, you know what, I’m inheriting a system. Maybe it’s working fine because if I were to transition that from whatever I am to like a Cerner or an Epic or a Meditech, it’s like maybe it’s going to get worse. And so how do you measure that?

Right? And how do you know that it’s working for your organization? I think that’s the hard part. You are a pragmatist. That’s, I mean, that’s such a pragmatist answer. It’s like, but I’ll give you some of the metrics. I mean, one of the main metrics I looked at, and again, I was from outside of healthcare, what did I know?

But it was clinician satisfaction with the systems. And, they’re the ones using it, and they’ll let me know if, essentially, and so we did surveys pretty regularly with our clinician base to find out, hey, the systems working for you, that kind of stuff. And then you can look at things like quality of care delivered and throughput.

I mean, you can look at the objective the concrete metrics, if you will across the board, I mean, those, you can just pull out of the system and see what’s different systems and see what’s going on, because there’s the subjective and then obviously the quantitative kind of things, but then there’s the things that we don’t measure that I think have a significant impact, and those are the efficiency.

Thank you. Right? From an IT perspective, the health system doesn’t feel what I feel when they say, Hey, can you build out a clinically integrated network where we share the data across the board? And I go, yeah, yes, that’s going to be really hard to do, cost a lot more money than it should, and take a lot longer than it should, because we haven’t done this work.

We haven’t consolidated our EHRs, we haven’t consolidated our workflows, we haven’t created an integrated data-sharing platform. We haven’t figured out how we’re going to normalize that data. Like if that stuff isn’t done, then when they come to ask you to do something pragmatic or something that’s necessary, you just essentially sit back and go, yes, it can be done because the answer is always yes.

Its going to cost a lot more money or a lot more time than you think it should. I remember saying to people, Hey, that’s going to take three years and do this. And they just looked at me like, are you talking about? Like, we need this like in three months. And I would have to explain to them you’re essentially asking me to build a house with Lego bricks that has plumbing and electricity.

Well, that’s really hard to do.

And so that’s where it’s incumbent upon you as the IT leader to keep coming back and saying, all right, hey here’s what we have, here’s what we have to work with.

And sometimes it takes a hit like this, 8.9% that Northwell. talking about to make the turn. So, will see what happens. Dennis?

But scary territory, right? when you run into implementation issues and your financials are all over the place and now, oh, you’re looking at being in red versus in black.

Yep. And that’s part of leadership is to anticipate the needs of needs of the organization before they actually happen. And to make people aware of, Hey, I know we’re going, I know telehealth is gonna be huge in the future, and we don’t have the systems I know that we need to do online scheduling and digital scheduling across the board.

And we have not set up. I mean, that’s part of the. What the leader does is to say, Hey, I know these underlying things, these underlying capabilities are going to be important in the future and we are this far away from it and by the time you come and ask me for it, you’re going to want it in like this time.

So let’s get started on some of these core underlying things. Hey Dennis, I want to for coming on the show for the second time. Hopefully, we’ll keep in contact next year and run into each other at some of the conferences.

Yeah, I appreciate you having me.

 And that is the news. If I were a CIO today, I think what I would do is I’d have every team member listening to a show just like this one, and trying to have conversations with them after the show about what they’ve learned and what we can apply to our health system. If you wanna support This Week Health, one of the ways you can do that is you can recommend our channels to a peer or to one of your staff members. We have two channels This Week Health Newsroom and This Week Health Conference. You can check them out anywhere you listen to podcasts, which is a lot of places apple, Google, Overcast, Spotify, you name it, you could find it there. You can also find us on. And of course, you could go to our website thisweekealth.com, and we want to thank our new state partners again, a lot of ’em, and we appreciate their participation in this show.

Cedar Sinai Accelerator Clearsense, CrowdStrike, Digital Scientists, optimum, Pure Storage, Suretest, tausight, Lumeon, and VMware who have invested in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Thanks for listening. That’s all for now.

The post Leveraging Walmart’s Footprint, IT Strategy, and Doctor Exits appeared first on Digital Scientists.

This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence.

Today on This Week Health.

Do you want to be informed or influenced? But big parts of America don’t want to know. It’s a lot just to step on the scale. A lot of the hospital organizations are dealing with, part of the population that’s In denial   Welcome to Newsday -This Week’s Health Newsroom Show. My name is Bill Russell. I’m a former CIO for a 16-hospital system and creator of This Week Health, A set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. For five years we’ve been making podcasts that amplify great thinking to propel healthcare forward.

Special thanks to our Newsday show partners and we have a lot of ’em this year, which I am really excited about. Cedar Sinai Accelerator. Clearsense, CrowdStrike,. Digital Scientists, Optimum Healthcare IT, Pure Storage, SureTest, Tausight,, Lumeon and VMware. We appreciate them investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

Now onto the show.

All right. Here we are. It’s another news day, and I’m joined by Bob Klein with Digital Scientists. Bob, it’s always great to catch up with you. There’s a lot going on in the world of health care and AI. These days. So I think we’re going to hit on some of those stories that surprise you that we’re talking about I hear at the end of 2023.

No, there’s really nowhere. Nowhere to run. It sometimes just feels like a chance for us to put on our analytics hat. You know how to make sense of all that data that’s out there.

There’s a lot of positive stories. There’s a Stanford story. Just a couple of other things we talked about.

I want to start with this question. 3 and 4 Americans who believe AI is going to reduce the number of jobs, reduce the number of probably white collar jobs and jobs. You’ve been playing with it. I’ve been playing with it. Does that ring true to you that there’s going to be a reduction in the number of jobs?

I’m sure there’s a positive spin on this, but that’s the Gallup poll that’s out there.

Well, I think there’s, the jobs are definitely going to change. Right. And I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game for jobs. I think there will be, new kinds of jobs. I mean, new ways that we’re going to have to leverage it.

But it’s hard for me to say it will likely cause some dislocation and in a way I look at AI as bringing computing power to bear where it’s been hard to access, right? So sometimes in healthcare, you think that the only computing power is walking on two legs and has an MD, right?

So there’s a lot of computing power that’s out there that hasn’t been really brought to bear. But think it’s not going to be a replacement anytime soon for kind of high-touch interactions or for highly skilled, highly creative those kinds of areas and hopefully it’ll be freeing for people to focus on things where they can really excel, get rid of some of the drudgery – the data entry and things like that we really shouldn’t be doing.

Yeah. And that’s what I’ve been talking to people about. If you’re worried about your job specifically, it’s not stop focusing on the outcome of your job. Start focusing on how you do your job, right? So the way we interact with people, the way we rally people around a cause, the way we

Are we able to move problems through, there’s still an awful lot of things that AI in its current form is not anywhere near. And it’s that ability to rally people to, tell a story to bring things together. That’s one of the things I’m talking about, but the thing that I’m finding really fascinating.

Is the pace at which we are moving from AI being the purview of technologists to AI being the purview of the everyday physician or clinician or those kind of things. I’m looking at the new GPT stuff, so chat GPT, they have their keynote and they have these new things, GPTs, which are apps.

But essentially you could. It’s not a programming language. It’s just you in front of a computer with natural language saying, hey, I’d like to create this thing that has this special knowledge base. Oh, by the way, here’s these PDFs that have this special knowledge base and some other things.

And all of a sudden you’ve created this specialized GPT, which is what they call a specialized GPT. And I created one called Health System CIO. And I put a bunch of our, conversations and interviews and that kind of stuff. And I put all that stuff in there. And then I asked it a basic question like I’m thinking about doing an EHR implementation.

What’s the best process? And it spits stuff back to me. I’m like, That’s really good. It’s not like the computer is that smart. It’s just, that it’s pulling from this wealth of information that me without any programming just dumped into it.

I mean, I do think it’s going to be highly accessible and that’s why I was saying, it’s analytics and access, like how to make sense out of so much data.

Honestly, a lot of the data we get and very much so in healthcare. There’s no time or energy or none of people writing SQL queries. I mean, oh, my gosh, totally transactional. Like I said, for us to create data models for an individual or patient level, it’s going to take so much effort. And.

It’s going to be, it’s going to make it easier to do that. Right. And all the disparate data sources. It just feels like, this computing power is going to be available. And like you said, we’ve got, tools to make it easier for everyone. It’s not the purview of I. T. And honestly, a lot of times.

IT is too busy, keeping the network up and running and dealing with other kinds of security and, they’re dealing with a lot of other tasks. They would love to probably spend more of their time in this area. But a lot of times they don’t they just can’t, so it’s got to be made accessible and there used to be something called if this than that, or something like that, plug and play, you.

Precursor to plugins and stuff like that. But I think we’ve we’ve learned a lot in that area and we need people to experiment. I mean, basic clustering algorithms just again, it’s making sense of the data and even sometimes it’s just access. Question and answer.

I had somebody that was working on something around HSAs, trying to educate people about HSAs. You think, how much is there to educate about HSAs? But apparently, most people don’t know that it’s a decent investment vehicle and all this other jazz, but it’s all trapped in a book. It’s like, well, we want to be able to facilitate Q&A; against knowledgeable or qualified data sources.

So it’s. And it’s just what you have put together. So it’s gone really far in a single year. Never mind all the politics and the theatrics open AI just recently, but that’s still has a lot of promise. I guess the question for you is, I don’t know if health IT or the folks inside health organizations are going to have the wherewithal to actually create some of their own models, right, to create some of their own because I don’t see necessarily the funding, the training source, the resources internally, and the bandwidth to be able to do it , or enough training data, I would say.

I think it’s the bandwidth. Yeah. because this is so accessible to the everyday person within the healthcare organization. And they can start playing around with it recently, I was going back and forth with kids, literally like 16, 17-year-old kids who are training these models.

I’m going, oh, my gosh, like, now I know what it felt like when I came out of. College and I knew how to use a computer and the next generation was looking at me going, Oh my gosh, this kid wants to use a computer for this stuff. What is he thinking? That’s how I sort of look at these kids now are coming out and going, Hey, I trained my own model on this thing.

But I agree with you. I think there are some limitations in terms of really understanding the data that you do have and preparing that data. to be used by these models. But I think it’s the bandwidth that’s really going to slow us down. And that actually gets us to the first story is Stanford Health.

Uses AI to reduce clinical deterioration events. I think this is going to be a common headline next year. This is clinical deterioration events and for chronic conditions and those kinds of things. And it’s keeping an eye on the telemetry data and it’s using AI.

By the way, telemetry data is some of the cleanest data we have in healthcare. Cause it’s just. It’s a lot of data points, time series over a period of time, followed by things being logged in the EHR that say, hey, this happened, or this happened, or this led to an adverse event. And so we just have tons of this information.

It’s fairly clean, and it’s not surprising. that this is one of the use cases, but Stanford’s probably, to your point, Stanford has the resources, it has all of those things. And it’s important to note that I don’t, I don’t see Mike Pfeffer’s name anywhere in this article.

This is. This is some people within Stanford who are a practicing academic internist, a board certified practitioner. They’re leaning on some of the resources that Stanford has, but they’re not going to the IT department saying, Hey, I’ve I’ve got some ideas or some thoughts here.

And they might even tap into a third party or somebody else and bring them in and say, Hey, look. We have this concept for those who don’t have the resources and don’t have the bandwidth, think you’re going to need to keep up on this stuff. And I think tapping into those third parties, it’s going to be one of the ways you do it.

Do you think IT’s RPM finds its way into the hospital? So that mindset of everyone there actually in the organs, if you’re in a hospital bed, everything is being logged, everything is going into the EHR, at least there’s not this kind of lag, whereas if you’re, I almost think of it as like an RPM hub it’s very much of an outside-in thought process where there’s, inside of health IT, there’s always this process.

The idea of like, well, if it’s not in the EHR, it’s not real, or we don’t know what the hell to do with it. Right, but there’s, if you’re doing health at home, like, they’ve had to create this infrastructure outside of the EHR, or on top of it, where I’ve got all this physiological data, and I’ve got a hub it has to come to, I have to create a model to understand it, and I have, but I have the real-time access, and I can make real-time decisions.

Based on trending data, and it’s just that same model back inside the hospital.

Let me ask you this, remote patient monitoring, the data from a remote patient monitoring, which by the way, I’ve talked to physicians for years, and they just don’t want it. I mean, they want the clinically approved devices.

It’s not in the EHR, right? Right, they just don’t want it in the EHR. They don’t want to be liable for it and all that other stuff, but is that not the data? That, Google collected early on, like, number of clicks, number of searches, number of this, number of that, don’t you think long term it’s short-sighted to not want that data and that information?

Cause that’s going to lead to. Sort of an, if you’re, stay with Stanford, if I’m Stanford and I’m collecting all that information for a hundred-mile radius from around my campus, does that not give me a competitive advantage of looking demographically and geographically, all this stuff and slicing and dicing it and then delivering care in a different way over the next five years?

I have to think that data is as valuable as the data Google was collecting early on in the internet.

Absolutely. You need it all. You need it all, and you can’t you’re not going to get any smarter about an individual patient, or a population without it. Just be, whether it’s in the EHR or not, it doesn’t matter, and, they don’t like it because they can’t make sense out of it, and they’re asked to make decisions on too much data.

So that’s some of, That’s the way it’s treated, but it’s not that it doesn’t have value, until they use AI, there’s not the ability to extract the value. It just becomes, onerous because it’s not in the format that the providers want to see it, which is in the EHR.

But it doesn’t mean it’s any less valuable, and there’s more data just makes it more of a challenge to analyze. I do think that that’s some of the promise of AI is helping make sense out of it, and honestly, for the things that we work in, there’s a lot of data, let’s just say medical coding, for example, right, so, to get involved in some of these things, we’ve got to make sense out of for value-based care and accountable care organization you’re really motivated for typically a smaller population to be very smart about that person’s comorbidities, everything they’re dealing with, to keep them out of the emergency room.

And if you don’t do a good job at that, and you’ve got probably two years of flames data, you’ve got all their kind of their interactional data, you’ve got all their EHR data. And it’s your job to assess them for what is it, a risk adjustment factor, right? A RAF score. So… As this ship slowly turns, if you don’t take all the data that’s available to you and make sense out of it for an individual patient and by extension of a population probably of a, of, some similarity, you will lose money and you could go out of business, right?

If you’re running an ACO, it won’t make it. And I’m talking more from experience dealing with the Medicare population and they need more tools needs to end up in the EHR, but not everything is epic, right? So, I’m talking about Point Click Care (PCC) and the EHRs, there’s still a lot of different ones that still have to make sense out of it, but I think that’s the challenge AI has to help people make better decisions.

It makes sense out of huge data sets that are just overwhelming at the moment.

I’m wondering who is in the best position to take advantage of this. The payer, provider is it tech? I mean, is it Apple? Because Apple has collected a ton of this information over the years. Is it Apple?

Is it Amazon as one of the tech players? And that leads to, today’s headline, Cigna and Humana in Talks to Merge. Okay,

Yeah. Well, I mean, my gosh these what, UnitedHealthcare is what, 250 billion a year or something like that.

Cigna, Humana combined. I’m going to get these numbers wrong, but it has to be over 100 billion. ’cause I, Cigna at one point I think was 50 to 60. Humana can’t be much smaller than that. So this is, had, has to be a hundred billion. And just when you thought consolidation was done in the carrier space to have this come down?

I think it’s a I think it’s a major story. I think it, it just keeps, continues to show that the payers have done really well. through this last four or five years healthcare providers financially have not done that well.

No, they’re, I mean, is this the path to single-payer?

Yeah, well, yeah, the path to single-payer is eventually to be honest with you, I’m shocked that from a regulatory standpoint, it just continues to consolidate at this pace and no one seems to throw up their hands and, was it Teddy Roosevelt?

Who was the buster back in the day, the union buster. I, or not union buster, the monopoly, yeah, yeah. Trust buster. That’s what it’s trust buster. Yeah. I mean, I’m just shocked. I mean, these things are huge and they have. Multiple arms going in a lot of different directions.

By the way, the other story that’s starting to really bubble up is the number of providers that are saying no to Medicare Advantage. It’s really interesting. I mean, they’re pushing back and saying, look, it’s working well for you, but it’s not working for us.

Why is that, Bill?

Why is that there? I mean, is it the I mean, all I’m always trying to figure out, because I’ve got that decision around, straight Medicare versus Medicare Advantage and all the kind of supposed benefits, but a limited network access, those trade-offs, like how to, it always feels like.

This answer is going to get me, I don’t know the numbers well enough to be intelligent on the space, but I will say this. There’s been a number of articles that have talked about the amount of fraud that is associated with Medicare Advantage because it’s the coding that gets them, additional dollars based on the government payouts because it’s around Medicare, right?

So it’s a federally funded, kind of program. And so if somebody has certain codes and certain things. then therefore they generate more dollars for the payer. And so there’s a push to do coding in a way that, I mean, at least if these articles are to be believed and the, quite frankly, lawsuits that are following them there’s a fair amount of coding that is questionable based on Medicare Advantage and reimbursements.

Isn’t that Medicare’s fault? Like, I mean, I’ve looked at this where, what defines the truth? It’s the truth is what Medicare is willing to pay for, and if it’s been fuzzy and Unclear then people will test it and then for Medicare advantage is like, how do I make more money?

Well, here’s my understanding So you present you come to me as the doctor and I look at you and I say well, you know This is what you have, but I’m gonna code it this way because this will get us more money I mean, is that Medicare’s fault or is that sort of trying to game the system? I mean, if it is what you have, then by all means, code it that way.

But if it’s not what you have, then we’re just playing games to get more money.

there have to be tests. There have to be, analysis of what’s in there for assessment. But the same, I mean, you don’t think something similar is going on with…

The Cigna’s and Humana’s? I mean, that was mostly denial.

We talked about this last time, was the auto denial from Sigma, and they’re being sued in California, right? And it’s like, they shortchange the providers and say, no, we’re not paying for this. Or it’s honestly, the patients. even that challenge back and forth between, how do I prove that it’s proving you have the condition or the need and the claim even the rights to be able to appeal.

So it’s a mess of our own making, isn’t it?

Well, the biggest problem is you and me. It’s not IT, it’s the individual patient. We don’t know. So when they write the coding and put all this stuff in, we just sort of go, Yeah, okay. Yeah, that’s good. And I hear these stories after the fact, and I was talking to somebody who said, They did the coding for their father in this way.

And then when their father came back the next time for a visit, he couldn’t get something because of the way it was coded before. And it’s like, I don’t have that. I’m not a diabetic. I’m not like, why did you code me that way? And now I can’t do this. And they’re like, well, but that’s what the doctor who saw you, that’s what he coded it.

I can’t change that now. I mean, this is, so that’s now part of your record. But we as patients. We don’t have, we’re not engaged enough and we don’t know enough, to look at it and say, Hey, I’m not a diabetic. I don’t know why you’re coding me this way. Like, my blood glucose is, actually, the average person will not be able to tell you what a diabetic’s blood glucose is or is not. We just don’t know.

It seems like, the single pair we have is Medicare, right, is that there would be, rules in place for them to evaluate and I don’t know who at Medicare is making sense out of all their data and all their claims data and what’s actually getting paid, but if I said, Okay, Medicare and Cigna and UnitedHealth, that would cover a lot of it, and say come up with some definitions of what’s acceptable.

What if it’s… left up to I don’t know, it feels like the Medicare Advantage, it’s too fuzzy, right? There aren’t rules, and even if, as I’ve been looking at it, there’s like, what is the truth here? So, if it’s, there’s so much flexibility, and you know how it is, if it’s a computer program, if you leave it where there’s all these options.

People can choose, and they’re not technically wrong.

Well, we’re going into an election year, and next year will be interesting, because, I don’t know if we’ll have the policy debates we had four years ago, or three and a half years ago, or the four years prior to that, when Obamacare was such a mainstay in the discussion, in the conversation.

But now that is sort of cemented in our vernacular, I’m not sure if we’ll have those policy things, but… I think it’s hard to argue that healthcare is changing. This article here, to me, really encapsulates the change. And actually, the last two articles, Best Buy Health and Mass General Brigham, MGB strike landmark partnership to expand healthcare at home.

That’s one of the stories. And the other is improving rural access to radiology services. Is a key topic at RS& A. Healthcare is changing. This move to at-home, remote patient monitoring, as we talked about. There’s a reason that Best Buy Health said we are a healthcare company. Best Buy said we’re a healthcare company.

The people who sell us appliances are essentially saying. No. We’re a healthcare company. And they proved it by going out and buying Current Health and a couple other of companies that offer home-based devices. And then essentially turning around and training their geek squad to go into homes.

I don’t know if they’re still going to be called geek squads, but going. Why not? Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, but essentially. Help each slot? I mean, whatever. I mean, this is a big deal. Best Buy signing a deal with Mass General Brigham, it’s like the heart of health care and a very reputable organization to deliver health care at home.

This marks a significant change by the major players to say, no, home is going to be maybe not the locus of chronic care, but it’s going to be the locus of care going forward. And we want to establish our foundation for delivering care in this format moving forward.

It makes a lot of sense, for health at home, the consumerization of healthcare… nice to have the patient involved.

And the caregivers, and we know most of the care provided in the United States is actually done at home not in the healthcare organizations as we know. But from MGB’s standpoint, this is just smart because, wow, they don’t want to deal with the hardware. They don’t want to deal with people’s homes, their home networks.

You know how it is. You’re probably tech support at home, Bill. That would be my guess. They don’t want to deal with all that, but they need all the data and they need the security and it makes for a good relationship. And it does show Best Buy’s investment in this space. and the other thing that they have a handle on is logistics.

So, I’ve got to have the right product show up at the right time, at the right house configured properly and ready for returns and all that. So, they already do that. So, they’re they’re an easy add-on. And the question is, I don’t know if Best Buy gets all the data as well.

Who gets the data, and who gets to make sense out of it is, does Best Buy get to aggregate all the data from all their devices, regardless of whether they’re working with MGB or Cleveland or Novant Health or whatever? and I talked to med device makers and the things that drive them crazy is like dealing with the the patients and their products in the home and the idea that it has to work with the phone, right?

So the idea that the patient has one remote control and it’s in their hand all the time. They’re not interested in learning your product or anything like that. It just has to come into their home and be easily turned on and configured. They don’t want to learn your UI. They don’t want to learn whatever.

They know Android or Apple and that’s it. Those are your choices, right? So from a hardware device maker. It’s actually quite challenging, inside the hospital, I can tell Health IT this is how we run, we’re GE Healthcare, whatever, you’re gonna have to learn our device because we’ve sold it in, I have thousands of them, but you take a device and put it in somebody’s home, it’s a very different thing and it’s quite challenging for the med device space to deal with, and actually industrial designers hate it, but it’s like, it’s the UI that people know, and that’s the Apple advantage.

Let me control all these devices from my phone and take, what I want to, I need to understand this data as a patient. I want it in my app, the Apple Health app, as well, right? So this is some of the challenge for the health IT folks, is like, okay, how do I influence the patient? Because the patient has to keep all this stuff running.

Not just, Geek Squad comes and sets it up and puts it on the network. But who’s going to make sure it keeps running? Patient and caregiver.

Yeah, I think it’s, I think this does mark the change. I think it’s going to be a seminal event, actually, and I think people are just looking at it like, oh yeah, MGB is doing something with Best Buy, going to the home, it’s no big deal.

Mayo is already going to the home. Others are essentially trying to do home-based services. But this to me is something that marks the start of of really changing the locus of care and expanding, the number of beds, when you measure the number of beds based on the number of beds that are within your actual building, sort of like a hotel I think that’s a mistake moving forward.

I think it’s the number of beds that are within your actual building. that you care for and that number of beds needs to include the five or six beds that happen to be in people’s homes. And in starting to think it through a little differently

It’s throughput in it. I mean, it’s throughput.

It’s not, I had five surgeries that day or 20 or 5, 000 or, whatever and it’s also, that people are spending less time in the hospital. what’s odd is that it’s less expensive to have them recover at home. Yeah, well, the best by, I’m monitoring my blood glucose. I’m sure my listeners are getting tired of hearing about this, but essentially I put this little device on and it lasts for about a week and it gives me my information as I go along.

It’s been revolutionary for me from a health perspective to see, it’s I eat this thing, it goes into my body, it impacts my body in this way. Between that, my scale, and I’m trying to think if there are any other devices that I use. I guess my phone tracks my activity and my steps and those kinds of things.

I’m probably tracking, some major items in terms of predicting my health moving forward. The question becomes, who is going to be my trusted advisor with that data? Like, if I funnel them all my data, will they be able to get back to me? And this is where I think again, we come back to AI, machine learning.

I don’t think in healthcare, we used to always think of, well, we don’t have the manpower for this. And now I think the right players are starting to think we don’t need the manpower for this. I mean, a lot of this is just, hey, I see your blood glucose is spiking. Have you considered going out for a walk?

Have you considered eating more protein and less sugar? Have you considered, it’s like these things aren’t rocket science and if you asked a doctor, they’d almost be offended. They’re just like, it’s obvious. Like a computer should be able to spit out a message to let you know that and that’s true.

That’s exactly what AI machine learning could do or any algorithms for that matter. We just need to start thinking about it a little different and say no, it’s every bed in our community that we want to be caring for. And if you have health information, send it to us, and we will be your trusted advisor and help you make meaning of it.

Because if we don’t, somebody else will. Yeah, I mean, and for these devices, because you could build a model that took all these devices, these common consumer devices as input. So, Dexcom, Oura Ring. Withings scale, a couple, of things that are real-time or near real-time. You could have batch input of blood pressure.

Other things, also just regular survey data, and that’s the basics of RPM already, and so a lot of us are doing RPM just on our own, but we don’t, we have to go to these kind of proprietary, I got a customer portal here, and there, and I’m like, I don’t want all those, I just want one, it’s mine.

And multiple devices can enter into it, no one can own that whole ecosystem and it’s gonna, and I think this is some of the challenge health IT has because it’s going to be different devices, and it’s different physiological data. That you want, and a different model because based on age and population and weight and all these other things, but you can see there’s some similarities, and for a population that’s common, some of it’s like, just, we wear the sensor, do you want to know better? Do you want to be informed or influenced? But big parts of America don’t want to know. It’s a lot just to step on the scale. I think this is a lot of the health, the hospital organizations are dealing with, part of the population that’s In denial, right?

So they want to be rescued at, after a life of living really hard and not really caring maybe that much, a, that’s not a way to live a long quality life, unfortunately.

Yep. So I’m looking at Best Buy stock has jumped 6 percent in the last 30 days.

I think that’s an indication of what people think of this. If they can figure out a way to get per member per month kind of rates, if Best Buy can figure out how to tap into that on a national scale with partners like MGB and, obviously there’s big players out there still to be to consider this and move forward.

And I think your point of not reinventing the wheel and trying to understand how to deliver services in the home, not trying to understand, I mean, they come into our home right now and they install a sound system where they install a TV and that kind of stuff. we take for granted how complex that is to send a person that is employed by you into somebody’s home and to, do that work.

There’s liability associated with that. There’s complexity associated with that. and I can’t rattle off five companies that can do that.

I know, I think about Comcast. I mean, you think of Like Amazon doesn’t necessarily have that ability either. It has all the logistics, but not the kind of in-home, which is unusual.

And dealing with people in their homes. I mean, in their Wi-Fi, it’s, No one knows how anything works,

Bill. I know. That’s wild. They can’t remember their passwords.

None of that. Well, I’m looking forward to the day when we do not have passwords. I don’t know how we’re going to get there, but… I used to think it was gonna be by voice and it’s not gonna be by voice. ’cause they could replicate that.

I have no idea what it’s gonna be. Blood, maybe it’s gotta, might be blood.

Oh my gosh. Anything’s gotta be better than at last count I’m well up over 200 passwords because they don’t want you to reuse it on every site you go to. But still, it’s like, my methodology, look, if they cracked my methodology, they could figure out half my passwords. because I have to remember them. I can’t just have 200 out there. There’s got to be somebody, anybody, come to our rescue on this one. It would be great. I only have one password, so, I no longer dream them up.

No, yeah, it gets hard. Bob, I want to thank you I want to thank you for your time. As always, really enjoy our conversations. Thank you.

Me too, Bill. Thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it.

And that is the news. If I were a CIO today, I think what I would do is I’d have every team member listening to a show just like this one, and trying to have conversations with them after the show about what they’ve learned.

And what we can apply to our health system. If you wanna support this week Health, one of the ways you can do that is you can recommend our channels to a peer or to one of your staff members. We have two channels this week, health Newsroom, and this week Health Conference. You can check them out anywhere you listen to podcasts, which is a lot of places apple, Google, , overcast, Spotify, you name it, you could find it there. You could also find us on. And of course you could go to our website http://thisweekhealth.com, and we want to thank our new state partners again, a lot of ’em, and we appreciate their participation in this show.

Cedar Sinai Accelerator Clearsense, CrowdStrike, Digital Scientists, optimum, Pure Storage, Suretest, tausight, Lumeon, and VMware who have invested in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Thanks for listening. That’s all for now.

Contributors

Bob Klein

The post AI & The Job Landscape, ChatGPT’s Role, & The Future of RPM appeared first on Digital Scientists.

Kindly share your feedback on how GoodFirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.

Goodfirms has increased our visibility to companies searching for a team of experts to help build new products and platforms with a differentiated user experience.

Please introduce your company and give a brief summary about your role within the organization.

I am CEO and cofounder of Digital Scientists, an experience lab that helps clients accelerate their innovation efforts with a focus on business growth. I work with our product management, product design and development teams to support client engagements. We are a digital software services firm with a broad skill set for the design and build of complex digital experiences. We are an experience lab for hire.

What is the story behind starting this company?

My identical twin brother and I started Digital Scientists as a digital marketing firm in 2007. He came from a marketing background, and I came from an enterprise technology background. We quickly discovered that we were happiest being “makers”– designing and building new digital products and platforms.

We have always believed that a cross-functional team of designers, product managers and developers should work closely together to make the best product experience.

What is your company’s business model? In-house team or third-party vendors/outsourcing?

We design everything we build and only build things that we design. Our entire team is onshore and inhouse. We believe in the power of small, experienced teams working together with clients to build exceptional products and experiences. We don’t believe that innovation can be outsourced.

How does your company differentiate itself from the competition?

We believe that technology products need to solve fundamental user problems, so it is important to first understand the user’s needs, or jobs-to-be-done (JTBD), before starting any new product. We start with user research and believe in iterative product design and development with ongoing user validation. This approach is the key way to accelerate the innovation process while reducing risk at the same time. We are differentiated by our broad experience building a range of new products and experiences: mobile, desktop, IoT, AI, etc. We don’t build websites.

What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?

We don’t necessarily cater to any specific industry, but have touched many over the years. Our preference is to build a collaborative and lasting client partnership. Larger clients might work with us as their R&D or innovation team while smaller companies or startups lean on us to help them get their new product or platform launched to the market.

Please share some of the services that you offer for which clients approach you most often?

We typically work with product leaders (e.g., chief product officers, VPs of user experience, VPs of data science, etc.) in the following areas to quickly show our ability to make an impact.

These are the best ways to get started with Digital Scientists:

• Remote Design Sprints – Test your next big idea fast
• Minimum Viable Products – Launch a product in 3 months and run your market test
• Minimum Viable Models (AI & Machine Learning) – Define & test a machine learning model

What is your customer satisfaction rate? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?

We work closely with clients to make sure that we are a good fit for their needs. We are not a fit for every project and every client – as we prefer to take on difficult tasks that solve real problems for users.

We focus on delivering experiences, not just on software development. We believe in working collaboratively with clients.

What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?

We work closely with our clients in platforms like Jira and Slack to ensure regular communication as well as alignment on requirements. We’re committed to providing progress updates to our clients on a weekly basis.

What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)?

We generally create estimates based on two-week sprints. The team on a specific project or sprint may change over time, so the cost per sprint can vary, depending on the team size and the length of the sprint.

Do you take in projects that meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?

The minimum budget for an engagement is $30K. That typically would be a Remote Design Sprint or potentially a small R&D engagement.

What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2019?

Projects start as low as $25K and can range up to $1m+ depending on the requirements.

Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?

Digital Scientists will continue to collaborate with firms that need an innovation partner to help them build differentiated experiences for software users.

Want to learn more? Contact us today and let’s begin the conversation.

Contributors

The post GoodFirms interviews CEO Bob Klein appeared first on Digital Scientists.

We are proud to announce that Digital Scientists was just named to the Clutch 1000, a list of the top thousand B2B service firm on their platform. According to Clutch, “‘The accolade is reserved for companies that show a superior commitment to their clients.”  

Some of the specific categories on Clutch where we have been featured as a leader include mobile app development and IoT consulting. In addition to being featured as a top IoT developer (#31 of 100), our CEO, Bob Klein, also provided his expert analysis for Clutch research on the topic. You can read our blog post on the topic here.  We are committed to leveraging the latest frameworks, tools and technologies to improve the human experience.

We currently hold an impressive 4.8-star average on our client reviews. Check out an excerpt from one of a recent project for an airport parking app:

“Digital Scientists effectively implemented solutions that significantly improved our previous app. We’ve seen an increase in customer activity, downloads, and satisfaction overall. We’ve been very impressed with our project manager.

Their team is very proactive about taking thorough notes and documenting their work, checking in with us regularly.”

Clutch is the leader in mobile app development research and reviews. Their research can be found across the web on other leading platforms including The Manifest and Visual Objects. Our team is waiting to hear from you if you want to learn more about our award-winning services.

The post Digital Scientists achieves Global Leader Award appeared first on Digital Scientists.

Our marketing team immediately framed the project around an Art Meets Commerce point of view. Our design team relished the chance to show off their creative skills. The development team couldn’t wait to introduce the Contemporary to the world of Web 2.0.

We chose to let the art speak for itself on the bold new homepage.  Then we gave the rest of the site a minimal design treatment and layout.  Pages were created to be both visually stimulating and user-friendly. Content was kept to a minimum and folded into interactive elements.  This kept the look and feel of the pages clean, while putting important details within a user’s reach.  Exhibitions, Programs, and Support are now prominently featured and more accessible.  The addition of commenting and social tools, as well as a calendar, allows users to interact with site and share art, events and dates with their friends.  Users can now follow the Contemporary on Twitter and Facebook straight from the site.

We built the site around a robust content management system (CMS) that allows the Contemporary to quickly and easily update their site as programs and exhibitions change.  To save on editing time, we added PaperClip, a plugin, that automatically resizes uploaded images to fit the different pages.   The “Add to calendar” feature found on the Exhibitions and Programming pages is an example of the custom functionality we developed.  Additionally, jQuery makes the user experience a bit more enjoyable by providing image viewers, tooltips, hover effects, accordion sliders, and ajax functionality.

Whether it’s the sleek and modern look that makes the new site engaging for users or the easy-to-use management tools that lets the Contemporary focus on what matters most – art, of course! – the new site aims to please.

Visit the new Atlanta Contemporary Art Center website today.  Check out the current exhibitions or just browse the new scenery.bcbcbvcbnbvc

The post Digital Scientists launches Atlanta Contemporary Art Center website appeared first on Digital Scientists.

What does this mean?  For starters, you can’t bite our style.   It also means we are part of the fancy superscript club and can sport the little ® after our name, like so:

digital scientists^®

We also get this very official-looking document with gold foil seal. Behold:

We would like to take this time to point out a very disturbing trademarking trend.

Yes, I’m talking about the scamming practices of the Slovak Republic.

If you file a trademark application, you could receive a misleading letter like we did, charging you an “International Service and Trademark” listing fee.  This is totally fake (napodobnený in Slovak), and should be tossed…scratch that, recycled immediately.

The post Behold our awesome registered trademark appeared first on Digital Scientists.