Yesterday, the keynotes talked about customer experience management and big data; this morning, we continued on the big data theme with John Shewell of McKesson Enterprise Intelligence talking about the issues in US healthcare: costs are increasing, and are far beyond that of other industrialized countries, yet the US does not have better healthcare than many other countries: it ranks 50th in life expectancy, and 30th in infant mortality rate. Most of the healthcare spending is on a small percentage of the population, often to treat chronic conditions that are preventable and/or treatable. Some portion of the healthcare spend is waste, to the tune of an estimated $700B per year, some of which can be eliminated by ensuring that standard procedures are followed by hospitals, physicians, pharmacies and other healthcare professionals. McKesson, as a provider of healthcare information and systems, has systems in place with hospitals and physicians that can collect information about healthcare procedures as they are executed, but the move to electronic health records is still ongoing and a lot of the data is fairly unstructured, presenting some challenges in mining the data for opportunities to improve procedural compliance and the quality of care.
Historically, healthcare data was in silos, making it difficult to get a holistic view of a patient. In the US, the only place where all the data came together was at the health insurance company (if you had health insurance, of course), and that might be several weeks after the event. If follow-up care was required after a hospital visit, for example, that information didn’t pop up anywhere, since it fell through the cracks in responsibility. One change that can improve this is to align incentives between the provider, payer and patient, so that it’s to everyone’s benefit if the patient is not readmitted due to a missed follow-up appointment. It’s also important to manage patients earlier to detect and avoid problems before they occur. Big data can help with all of these by detecting patterns and ensuring procedural compliance. In closing, he pointed out that this is not a government issue: it needs to be fixed by the industry.
We moved on to the social collaboration theme, with Ram Menon, TIBCO’s president of social computing, talking about tibbr: as an enterprise social networking platform, this is positioned as a “social bus”, much like TIBCO’s earlier technology success is based on the enterprise message bus. In 18 months, tibbr has grown to be used by over a million people – more than half using smartphones – in 104 countries. TIBCO’s heritage with events and messaging is essential to this success, because tibbr isn’t just about following people, it’s also about following physical devices/items, business processes, files and applications. Earlier this year, they launched tibbrGEO, which has physical locations pushing information to people who are nearby, based on their profile.
Menon was joined briefly by Hervé Coureil, CIO of Schneider Electric, then Jay Grant, Secretary General of InterPortPolice to talk about how they are using tibbr for social networking within and across organizations. He then announced tibbr 4, to be released within a few weeks, with a number of new features:
- Social Profile – presenting a view of yourself to your colleagues (think LinkedIn)
- Peer Influence – the impact that you have on the things with which you interact (think Klout)
- tibbr Insights – social analytics, showing a summary of what’s happening in your social network, including both activities and requests waiting for action
We saw a demo of tibbr, which presents a Facebook-like interface for seeing updates from your social graph, but also allows something very similar to Facebook pages for other entities, such as customers. From a CRM standpoint, this allows all information about the customer to be surfaced in one place: a single pane of glass through which to view a customer.
tibbr 4 also provides a social graph API allowing that social graph being collected within tibbr to be accessed from other applications, as well as provide add-on functionality to tibbr, and a marketplace for these applications that allows tibbr users to add them to their own tibbr environment. They have some new partners that are offering applications right now for tibbr: box for cloud content storage and sharing; Wayin for surveys and sentiment analysis; Badgeville for engagement through gamification and incentives; and several others including Whodini, ManyWorlds, BrightIdea, Teamly and FileBoard.