Public service is more proactive in digital transformation than people think and typically uses three key pillars for change
Peter Rose – CIO of TEKenable
The advent of Covid accelerated the need for digital transformation across the public and private sectors where there was already a fast pace of change. We have worked with the HSE delivering contact tracing and the PPE ordering system (amongst others) but even before Covid, TEKenable worked with Dublin City Council to deliver Voter.ie providing online registration to vote, with An Post to deliver AD Mailer, a digital transformation of postal advertising campaigns and Mayo County Council to streamline recruitment, all based on the three pillars below.
Pillar One: Self-Service
If you are still requiring paper forms, you are accepting the responsibility and cost of correcting the inevitable errors and omissions. Providing online self-service capabilities to your patients/staff is a “no-brainer”. It ensures data quality at point of entry eliminating the chase process that are required to deal with errors on paper forms and enables the end user to engage at their convenience. We refer to this approach to data quality as: “Clean the river, not the lake.”
Pillar Two: Customer engagement
CRM is a bit old hat now; customer engagement is the new gun in town. Create an omni-channel communications hub including bots and personalisation, centralising customer data, integrate it with a workflow layer that spans siloed IT systems and crosses departmental boundaries, and you will deliver an optimum experience. Customer-facing staff will have full visibility of the customer and managers, a full view of the processes and any bottlenecks.
Pillar Three: Back-Office Process Automation
The Self-Service pillar removes some non-value adding processes from the back office, but it’s not the full story. Building on the customer engagement layer, back-office processes can now also span the artificial boundaries created by legacy IT systems and departmental structures. This delivers cost saving and improved patient experience through efficiency. By adding artificial intelligence and robotic process automation we can also remove the mundane work and reduce error rates leaving your staff free to deliver the real value-added services, those that need a human touch. Our experience has been that staff who are impacted by this type of change experience an increase in job satisfaction, patient satisfaction increases, and complaints go down.
LOW CODE PLATFORMS ENABLE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
With major change programmes commencing in many government departments, local authorities, and the public sector in general, there is a key differentiator between success and failure, the IT tools used to deliver that change.
We use low code platforms such as Microsoft’s Power Platform in conjunction with the power of Azure cloud to tackle in-depth and complex challenges, making application development much more efficient, flexible, and responsive to change.
Dynamics 365 and Power Platform from TEKenable can deliver Self-Service with Customer Engagement, can support back-office Process Automation and apply Advanced AI and RPA to improve efficiency with much of this not needing to be built, it is out of the box.
Talk to us if you are interested in seeing what can be done when you have the right tools!
The Health Service Executive (HSE) and Microsoft using cloud technology to develop rapid and innovative patient-centred solutions
Within two weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic hitting Ireland the HSE had developed a software tool to support patients, from initial contact with the health system right the way through to recovery. The Covid Care Tracker is one of several highly innovative and effective responses to the pandemic developed by the HSE in partnership with Microsoft, in addition to a number of partners including Sysco Software Solutions and TEKenable.
Other solutions included a chatbot to take some of the load off people working in the HSE’s Covid information call centre, and a data lake which is a key source for the statistics provided daily by NPHET and others.
Frank O’Donnell, public sector lead with Microsoft Ireland
“One of the most important things for us in Microsoft is the partnerships we build with customers,” says Frank O’Donnell, public sector lead with Microsoft Ireland.
“At the outset of the pandemic, and as people were looking at projections of where Covid-19 could go, we worked closely with the HSE to see how we might support their response, and provided tools to give the best insights to help inform decision making at senior levels – we wanted to ensure the solution would have the widest positive impact.”
The HSE wanted Microsoft’s assistance in building cloud-based solutions to help it meet the huge challenge facing the country at the time. “Our team worked with the HSE’s IT and clinical teams, along with other IT partners, to develop a solution in a timeframe never achieved before,” O’Donnell notes.
HSE interim chief information officer, Fran Thompson
“We always start with a model of care of how the HSE is going to clinically manage and support people,” says HSE interim chief information officer, Fran Thompson. “It puts patients at the centre and provides clinical supports to deliver the best possible care for an individual. That’s always our goal.”
Model of care
That model of care incorporates everything from initial contact with a GP, testing, community assessments, hospital care, ICU care, and follow-up care in the community.
We wanted a robust, scalable platform, that was highly secure
HSE interim chief information officer, Fran Thompson
“The model was developed by our Chief Clinical Officer and his team,” Thompson adds. “Our job was to put in place technology solutions to deliver and support it. While we had some solutions already in place, we recognised there was more to be done. We turned to partners for assistance and Microsoft is a key partner of ours.
“Time was of the essence, but there could be no compromise on quality. “We did not want to build from scratch, but we wanted a robust, scalable platform, that was highly secure,” he says. “It also needed to be extremely flexible.”
One of the first solutions developed was the health chat bot. “The HSE was receiving a significant number of enquiries from the public and the systems were highly challenged,” O’Donnell explains. “One of the measures we developed with the HSE was the health bot. This allowed some incoming queries to be handled using artificial intelligence (AI). The health bot was handling 30,000 enquiries a day within a few weeks of first getting up and running.”
That proved invaluable, according to Thompson. “When we set up the HSE Live call centre it was taking 120,000 calls in one day. That wasn’t sustainable. The nature and types of questions were covering all aspects of Covid, at this stage people had very little understanding of Covid-19. Using AI, the automated response system took a lot pressure off the call centre.”
The Covid Care Tracker
The Covid Care Tracker has been key to the overall response. “It is at the core of how we support the Covid tracking and tracing operations,” says Thompson. “We developed the software using the Microsoft Dynamics 365 tool. We worked with a Microsoft partner on that. It covers three big functions for us. It puts the patient at the centre throughout their journey and all of their interactions with the HSE; it interfaces with the existing and some of the new systems we have put in place; and it allows us to automate some of our interactions with the public. For example, the initial electronic referral from a GP system is automatically transferred to the HSE, that in turn is transferred to the contact tracing service, and all the contacts are then recorded on the system as well. Contacts are in turn referred for testing through the scheduling service.”
The system also manages the testing process. “If a person has had a positive test the system will prompt a call to inform them. It is also able to text a patient to let them know they have tested positive provided they have opted to be contacted in that way. The text will inform them that they should self-isolate and seek medical assistance if they feel ill. The system also prompts a follow-up call to elicit close contacts and relays the information to the contact tracing service. Recently we had 17,000 tests a day and the system can handle the weekly test numbers without any issues whatsoever.”
Reliability is a key feature. “One of the reasons we went with the cloud, and a tool as strong as Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, is so that the solution would be accessible to citizens at all times,” says Thompson. “Our reputation depends on it. We need a partner with a robust toolset that is totally reliable. We are now on the 25th release of the tracker software. We started with a minimum viable product (MVP) and we keep rolling out updates with additional functionality all the time. We will shortly add a feature to allow close contacts to self-report before they receive a call or text message.”
When we started the journey, we didn’t have this toolset and key to developing it was having partners like Microsoft
HSE interim chief information officer, Fran Thompson
“It took just two weeks to roll out the initial solution,” O’Donnell remarks. “We had daily meetings with clinicians to tell us what they wanted. It was vitally important to have the clinical experts in the room all the time.”
The tracker collects data from a variety of sources and that is being used to provide information and insights to NPHET and others. “We built a data lake in the cloud, on Azure, to manage the data and provide insights on dashboards for managers and others,” says Thompson. “A lot of the information we provide both internally and externally is sourced from this data lake. It’s a really strong end-to-end data solution.”
It goes beyond mere information. “We can look at hospital beds and roll up the numbers nationally or drill down into hospital group level or individual hospital. We can tell how many beds in any hospital are being used for Covid patients at any time. It can also tell us how many available ICU beds we have and where they are.”
“With the flexibility of the solution, we can integrate the data to provide real insights. We can look at the different Community Health Organisation areas around the country and drill down to get data for each one. That allows us to ensure that we can support the workload across the various hospitals and utilise metrics to manage the process. This level of data can help us decide whether to assign extra resources in certain areas if required. If we know there are areas where there is significant additional demand for testing capacity, we can deploy pop-up centres where necessary.”
The HSE response has attracted international attention. “We have had a lot of calls with national and regional health agencies overseas,” says Thompson. “They have been fairly astounded by what we have managed to achieve. Others have copied what we have done. When we started the journey, we didn’t have this toolset and key to developing it was having partners like Microsoft.”
“Microsoft works with health systems globally to help them digitally transform. Over the last eight months, we have seen how the HSE has led the way by implementing both an innovative and comprehensive solution to address the challenges of the Covid-19 Pandemic.”
Why Use the Covid Tracker App
COVID Tracker is a free and easy-to-use mobile phone app that will:
alert you if you have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 (coronavirus)
keep other app users safe by alerting them if you test positive for COVID-19
give you advice on what to do if you have symptoms
You can use the app to follow the latest facts and figures about COVID-19 in Ireland.
uSING THE APP ABROAD
The app also works in Northern Ireland, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Spain, Hungary and Latvia.
Microsoft Ireland customer success advent calendar– December 17th 2020
Independent Trustee Company (ITC) is one of Ireland’s leading providers of self-administered pensions with over €1.5 billion of client funds in 5,000 pension structures. Established in 1994 and employing almost seventy staff, ITC also acts as a trustee of self-administered schemes, private trusts and larger occupational schemes. In addition, ITC is among one of the founding members of the Association of Pensioneer Trustees in Ireland.
The Challenge
ITC realized that its existing legacy system was incompatible with new business needs. A dependence on spreadsheets had developed across the organisation, making work processes cumbersome and disjointed.
IT Director Eamonn King analysed and mapped a list of more than forty processes which needed to be digitised, ranging from complex scenarios like adding new customers, which required digital signatures and AML compliance, through to simpler processes like ‘transfer of funds’, where customers wished to allocate money between investments. Documenting these processes was an important step. It gave the business a ‘bird’s eye view’ of where the business was inefficient and allowed management to identify where processes could be improved. As a result, Eamonn King could draw up an initial Phase 1 of ‘quick wins’ and high impact improvements and a Phase 2 which further extended automation across the business.
A new platform was needed to make business processes more efficient and effective, without increasing headcount.
The solution
Eamonn King engaged TEKenable, a Microsoft partner and expert in the Dynamics ‘low code no code’ platform to deliver the new solution, known as ‘ITC Nexus’.
In Phase 1 of ITC Nexus, ITC successfully moved to processing all new customer business applications electronically. Instead of moving new applications through a series of word documents, excel sheets and emails, the company now manages this process using the Dynamics Portal and Model Driven Apps. ITC also brought big efficiencies to the Customer Service, Sales and Compliance functions. The company replaced spreadsheets and emails with one consolidated data store in Common Data Services (CDS) and migrated all the data from the disparate legacy systems to this central repository. The New Business Team could now track workflows with real-time dashboards to manage their daily tasks.
In Phase 2, which went live this summer, ITC administrative staff can calculate liquidity requirements before the investment is setup, manage investment options available to schemes and record investments against each scheme. They can also initiate a movement of funds request after reviewing up-to-date bank balances, track recent bank transactions and calculate liquidity against a baseline. Staff can also select beneficiaries from online bank profiles and request approval from an ITC manager to initiate a transfer from the customer’s bank account to other beneficiaries related to setting up or maintaining an investment.
The success of Phase 1 and 2 of this project is clear to all involved at ITC and work on Phase 3, which will extend process automation further across the business is already underway.
The solutions impact
Built using Microsoft Dynamics and the Power Platform, the impact of the Nexus Platform on ITC has been transformative. Processes like new customer sign-up which previously took weeks are now completed in a few days. Business managers can now track a customer application form when it enters the process to when an account is set up and can quickly intervene if bottlenecks develop. The Nexus platform is also highly scalable, allowing ITC to add new users as demand requires. Data integrity is greatly improved with all information sitting securely on CDS in the Azure cloud.
The greatest benefit of Nexus came when ITC decided to work remotely in March during the Coronavirus lockdown. Despite all staff being required to work remotely, work continued un-interrupted. This was a huge benefit to the company and allowed ITC to continue to service its advisors and clients.
When tendering out this project Eamonn King received proposals from six companies and went through a detailed evaluation process together with a formal presentation by each candidate.
Eamonn King emphasised that TEKenable and Microsoft Dynamics were the winning combination.
“In picking a delivery partner,” he explained “we wanted a ‘safe pair of hands’, a company who could deliver a first-class solution. I had dealt with TEKenable for more than a year prior to putting this proposal to tender and I was impressed with their professionalism and straightforward approach.
I also had a strong preference for developing a solution using Microsoft Dynamics and the Power Platform. Microsoft Dynamics is very powerful, it’s cloud based, it’s scalable and it integrates with Microsoft’s other products. TEKenable clearly understood Dynamics and they took the time to understand our requirements, so much so that they were able to offer a fixed price for this Dynamics implementation.
I also had a preference for ‘self-service’ allowing ITC to develop a Dynamics skillset thus allowing us to take feedback from our users and implement them quickly. This was a game changer for us and assisted in early user adoption and contributed to the overall success of the project.
Through the use of Dev-Ops, ITC has a more agile solution in Dynamics and accelerated our drive towards digitisation and investing in the future.
This de-risked the project substantially from my perspective. Subsequent events confirmed my opinion and I’m glad to say I’m still working with TEKenable, as we embark on Phase 3 of the Nexus Platform”
