How can patient care be improved with Data Analytics?

Data analysis healthcare

Data analytics is substantially helping the healthcare sector in improving their performance by assisting physicians in making well-informed decisions, boosting patient involvement, and enhancing the quality of post-procedure care, making a tremendous impact in the field of patient care. Data analytics is also generating awareness on systemic misuses of resources, tracking individual practitioner performance, and even tracking the health of populations and identifying persons at risk for chronic diseases. 

Due to the benefits of Data Analytics, the government of Kerala has decided to start a centre of excellence for data analytics and artificial intelligence. This initiative of the government was proposed for Kerala Data Analytics development in the sector for information technology and management, Kerala. The Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala has already started a Data Analytics Programme.

Listed below are a few ideas about how data analytics can benefit the patient care industry.

  • Data analytics can assist health care providers in developing plans that are nearly flawless in the long run since they would have considered all aspects given by the diagnostic models.
  • Because of the large amount of data kept in individual practices and major hospitals, it will be possible to predict which patients may fall into vulnerable categories in the future. 

 

  • With the capacity to process big data sets, it would be feasible to benefit substantially from the valuable experience that is available in the form of clinical trials, case studies, research articles, and so on.
  • Data analytics would help a lot by examining vast amounts of comparable data and providing fact-based suggestions.
  • Case Managers can make extensive use of data analytics to assist their patients in meeting health objectives by designing innovative strategies through analysis of the current trends in the healthcare sector.

With the use of Data Analysis, the health care sector can better manage resources, allowing it to act aggressively in high-risk groups earlier and avoiding long-term systemic costs. 

 

Is it possible to bring down cart abandonment rate to zero?

Cart abandonment is a major problem in today’s volatile world of ecommerce. It is a phenomenon that plagues all industries and economies: on an average, about 77% of customers abandon their shopping carts instead of completing their purchase. This rate only seems to be rising with time. Businesses are at a loss to understand why only 3 out of 10 people complete their purchase—even if the businesses have followed through all the hygiene practises, such as page optimization, pricing strategies, search ranking, and perfecting their information architecture among others. No doubt, businesses are engrossed in deciphering why cart abandonment happens and how to recover abandoned carts.

A much discussed topic

Reasons behind cart abandonment have been researched, categorized, qualified, and weighed. The market too has been flooded with many tools and applications to automatically target abandoners by sending communications and employing retargeting tactics. Although the success of these tools and tactics continues to be debated upon, businesses need to evolve strategies to nip the problem of cart abandonment quite early in the shopping journey. In fact, it is actually the best starting place to demonstrate your core values to the cart abandoner, who has already spent time interacting with your site and putting an order together.

Reasons for cart abandonment are much more than forgotten passwords, payment issue, etc. A recorded customer session may not be the ideal starting point for devising your response. Businesses have to first visualize the journey by seeing it through the customers’ eyes and by optimising online experiences. In fact, businesses are losing sales due to poor customer user experiences online—with issues ranging from a complicated navigation and a problematic shopping experience to other difficulties. When businesses realize that customer buying behaviour drives revenue, data-driven customer engagement takes precedence over traditional retargeting or re-marketing tactics. This realization helps businesses to streamline the online experience factor and deliver better service.

Enhanced customer experience management

Bringing down the cart abandonment rate to nil is possible with the use of advanced customer experience management solutions. For instance, tools such as IBM Tealeaf Customer Experience (CX) focus on customer involvement, action, and choices to resolve roadblocks during customer journeys. By linking users’ actions to business results in real-time, businesses gain the much-needed visibility into buyer behaviour. Customer Experience (CX) management sums up all the experiences that a user had or currently having during the visit over a particular e-commerce application. It provides deep insight of your infrastructure and the much-need customer intelligence.

Businesses need to perform the following tasks to address issues relating to cart abandonment:

  1. Monitoring the KPIs of customer experience
  2. Proactively examining and responding to known technical issues
  3. Listening to customers
  4. Prioritizing customer experience issues based on business impact
  5. Qualifying and validating actual customer behaviour

By tackling the issue of cart abandonment head-on, CX is playing an important role in redefining the CRM function. Today, successful online retailers rely on using CX as a launchpad for CRM marketing programmes to support customer value growth, ensure retention, and foster loyalty.

Why Is Data Analytics So Important?

Data analytics (DA) is the qualitative and quantitative techniques and processes to enhance productivity and business gain. Data is extracted to draw conclusions about the information they contain and analyze behavioral data and patterns. It is widely used in commercial industries to enable organizations to take informed based business decisions. It is used by the scientists and researchers to verify or disprove scientific models and theories.

DataAnalytics

What is about data analytics?

It is primarily a business-to-consumer (B2C) application. International organizations collect and analyze data associated with customers, business processes, market economics or practical experience. This is then categorized, stored and analyzed to study the buying trends and patterns. It is a high-velocity data and it presents unique computational and data-handling challenges. The data is collected from a multitude of sources using Big Data management solutions and customer experience management solutions that utilize data analysis to transform data into actionable insights.

It involves asking questions about data crunching, question-answering phase leading up to the decision-making phase in the overall Business Intelligence process.

Who are the data analytics?
There are skilled data analytics professionals, who generally have a strong expertise in statistics and they are called data scientists or data analyst.

Here are the seven steps that remain consistent across organizations and their data analysis processes:

Recognize business handles
: The business should be willing to make changes to improve its key metrics and reach its goals as well.

Fix the objectives: 
It is extremely important to determine the objective like whether the business is progressing toward its goals; identify metrics or performance indicators early etc.

Data cleaning: Improve data quality to generate the right results and avoid making incorrect conclusions.

Grow a data science team: Include on your science team individuals with advanced degrees in statistics who will focus on data modeling and predictions, as well as infrastructure engineers and software developers.

Optimize and repeat: Perfect your data analysis model so you can repeat the process to generate accurate predictions, reach goals, and monitor and report consistently.

Data collection: In order to build better models and gain more actionable insights it is vital to gather as much data from diverse sources as possible.

Benefits of Data Analytics:

1- Data visualization: Graphical representations is more interesting and more insightful than columns and rows of numbers. It allows anyone to quickly grasp difficult concepts and identify new patterns within data without the need for complex analysis. They offer an immediate business advantage and effective storytelling and also can be a useful way of establishing best practice ways of looking at your data.

2- Data Diversity: More data often means more insight. But it isn’t always simple to obtain; data diversity requires tackling disparate sources, varied data sets and unstructured data. Unsurprisingly, many businesses have fallen at this hurdle. In fact, it shouldn’t matter where your data is stored – as long as you are employing the current wave of data blending tools, you can bridge the gap between all the sources. With a significantly improved delivery approach, you can create a repeatable process that takes minutes to refresh, not weeks.

3- Agile Analytics: Traditional business intelligence projects take years to come to fruition, and long-term breakdown often results in a solution that doesn’t fit the original requirements. With the advent of new tools, actionable business insights can be delivered in just months or even weeks.

4- Self Service Analytics: The rapid developments in technology the barriers have been lowered. Now, we all have the capacity to become data scientists. Every team within your business can get value out of data using widely available analytics tools.

5- Advanced Analytics: Advanced analytics is becoming increasingly prevalent, even for those without a PhD. Right now, we are working with FMCGs to automate assessments on forecasting processes, and with banks to create their own recommendation engines.

Many businesses use analytics to understand and learn from what has happened in the past. As data becomes more important to your organisation, you may move from ‘descriptive’ analytics to ‘prescriptive’, i.e. where should your business go next? 

However, in today’s business climate, it’s no longer good enough to make good guesses and hope for the best. Creating a company culture based on using business analytics throughout every department helps companies stay agile. It also helps them make smarter choices on where to take the business – and how to get there. But before embarking on this journey you need to ensure that you have the right processes and tools in place. Therefore it is advisable to start by becoming confident with your historical data first, before looking towards the future.

 

Know How to Create Remarkable Experiences for Your Customers

Maintaining a good customer relationship is a core function for any business. A strong customer relationship management takes care of smooth service delivery and helps you in maintaining valuable relationships with your customers. That’s why developing your company’s customer relationship management strategy is a top priority.

Know How to Create Remarkable Experiences for Your Customers

But managing a healthy customer relationship is a huge challenge and even big companies find it challenging from time to time. It is a major task to manage customer contacts when your sales cycle involves multiple touch points – and contact with multiple team members? With digital media making it possible for consumers to engage with brands across a multitude of channels, companies are faced with increasing challenges in maintaining consistency and streamlining the process of monitoring and managing customer relationships. In fact, in the digital world, traditional CRM does not cut it, and that’s the reason why over the last five years CRM has clearly sailed with the wind.

Customer Relationship Management is as old as commerce itself. However, in the last couple of decades, it has changed to CRM software. Initially, it was largely used by the big enterprises to have generally customer database only. However, with the arrival of newer technologies and concepts like Cloud Computing is catching up with the on-premise ICT solutions, especially Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Social Media integrations, even SMEs have started to take advantage of CRM.

In fact, cheap smartphones with more affordable mobile internet plans helped to take Mobile CRM to the next level. Mobile CRM has completely changed the way CRM is thought and used in India. Now it has become one of the biggest productivity tools for sales and service teams. With all this, CRM is accessible to almost everyone and everywhere in India.

Conclusion

So we have seen that CRM in India has a huge market and it is progressing at a fast pace but to sustain it needs to be customized to suit the Indian consumers.  We can’t simply deploy the arrangements intended for the western countries.  Therefore Indian companies need to have a CRM streamlined on the basis of Indian management principles and practices. Transparency is at the forefront of the changing CRM landscape. Despite a rise in the implementation of CRM in the Indian industries, there exists a further scope for growth.

Is Mobile Wallet the Future of Money?

Digital Wallet

In order to promote paperless economy, government of India has initiated Digital India which has led to the spread of digital payments on a large scale. In fact, post post-demonetisation, digital wallet became a necessity. Be it a mobile payment options, or something as basic as acceptability by merchants and consumers, mobile wallets in India got on an exponential rise. Though mobile wallets are still in a budding stage, there is wide acceptability, and the speed at which mobile wallets are rising is incredible.

By using a digital wallet, users can complete purchases easily and quickly with near-field communications technology. Countless people across the nation are becoming increasingly comfortable with making payments through their mobile phones. With a certain degree of comfort setting in, a phone turning into a means to transact is natural and will become second nature in a few years.

India has witnessed a gradual shift from cash to digital and the major factor that has been instrumental in this digital shift is the unparalleled growth of mobile and internet services.

As the RBI has been prompt in taking steps to support the use of e-money, most banks already have their dedicated mobile wallets.  Recently they have introduced support for money transfer between online wallets too.

Mobile wallets have evolved with time as now they are packed with user-friendly features, simple interfaces and attractive discount offers. They are more secure than carrying actual cash—an attractive appeal for the tech-savvy generation. To create this huge cultural shift, people were induced by various incentives.

Future of mobile wallets

The future of mobile wallets and other mobile payments solutions looks bright. All thanks to the number of internet users that is expected to touch the 650-million mark by 2020. The digitally-savvy customers are preferring the convenience of digital money.

Considering the current scenario, it is very much possible that digital wallets, instead of being limited to a simple, stored-value account, mobile wallet can evolve to be a complete financial management tool. Still there is a lot to be explored in this area because the digital payments scenario is still in its teething stage. The demand for p2p payments and e-commerce, among other factors, will continue to grow and encourage the increased use of mobile wallets.

In order to harness the potential of mobile payments, few key challenges have to be handled, tactfully. There is a requirement of creating a sustainable and reliable ecosystem that offers diversity in terms of payments, savings, insurance, credit and more. This technological paradigm shift needs to be pushed through promoting education regarding the advantages and convenience of digital wallet among people who are still not convinced. There is a need of a dedicated boost to support the financial inclusion factor of mobile wallet especially in remote places. A multi-pronged effort across the nation, needs to be implemented to make people understand the relevance of mobile wallets in daily life. After all consumer adoption and preferences reign supreme.

The key drivers of AR/VR adoption in India

You’re sitting on your sofa. You want to play a race game. You issue a command to the glasses you are wearing and a virtual road appears in front of your eyes. Welcome to the world of Augmented Reality (AR) where the virtual world meets the real world.

Virtual Reality

Arguments reality and Virtual reality is trending in India and it has impacted various industries in the country, such as consumer goods, retail, real estate, and automotive. The advent of 4G technology and high-speed communication combined with the increasing number of smartphone users has led to this revolution.

The availability of entry-level VR headsets in the market, a push from the mobile device companies have become instrumental in developing interest for VR gear among mobile users.

Here are few use-cases of digital reality across various domains

Retail– Even when you’re armed with precise measurements, trying to imagine exactly how that stunning new sofa will look in your living room is not an easy task. In order to make the task easy for the consumer a big retail home furnishing company used arguments reality. Through the use of AR, smartphone users can scan the catalog and open additional information about the product. A virtual version of the new sofa, desk or bookcase with the room in the background is shown onscreen to give them a fair idea how the furniture is going to look in their home.

Government services– AR enabled interactive training makes it possible for agents to simulate scenarios where trainees can see and interact with virtual environments.  VR and AR products and services is not just useful for entertainment sector but Government can make use of these for customs and border protection by making it easier to simulate scenarios for virtual training.

Education- AR/VR could witness high utilization in Edutech domain. It could be of immense help by employing virtual teaching, digital learning and development methods in schools and colleges.

Health– AR is one of the most promising digital technologies. It has the potential to change healthcare and medicine completely. In AR, users do not lose touch with reality and it puts information into eyesight as fast as possible. These distinctive features enable AR to become a driving force in the future of medicine.

Aerospace- Dangerous or difficult to replicate scenarios can be safely simulated with Augmented and Virtual Reality aerospace applications. This allows trainees to repeatedly practice crucial scenarios while preventing damage to equipment and avoiding bodily harm.

Overall, across domains, AR/VR is changing how products and services are developed and delivered, which is transforming into increased productivity and operational efficiencies. It has the potential to become the foundation of next-gen computing.

Progress Always Involves Risk, But Managing Risk Ensures You Lead

The outcomes of business activities always have some elements of risk. This includes strategic failure, operational failure, financial failure, market disruption environmental disaster or regulatory violation. Proper risk management provides a mechanism for identifying risks which represent potential pitfalls. There is a need to adopt holistic approach to risk management.

Enterprise Risk Management

Traditionally, risks have been managed in companies independently by respective functional managers. But this risk management fails to recognize that different risks can overlap and cancel out with each other or can even concentrate together to hinder achievement of organizational goals.

How Enterprise Risk Management started?
The Integrated Framework of the COSO Enterprise Risk Management in 2004 was a landmark in the history of risk management. This framework provided guidance to the management teams, to implement their risk management programs. Therefore in most organisations a new function called risk management was established which attempted to identify and mitigate risks, which were most often financial, operational in nature.

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) overcomes the problem by taking a broad, top-down, holistic and strategic approach to managing risks with a ‘portfolio view’. It incorporates risk management into all major aspects of an organization, be strategy formulation, reporting, compliance, or daily operations.

With globalization, more and more Indian companies are expanding their operations into newer geographies and are getting themselves listed in foreign exchanges. These companies are getting exposed to potentially newer and greater risks arising from different economic, political, cultural, and other global uncertainties. Indian companies these days are also enjoying funds from foreign investors and providing outsourcing services to foreign lands. This makes the foreign investors and foreign buyers of outsourcing services exposed to various risks, which they need to be informed about. Such developments have made adoption of ERM very critical for the success and growth of the companies in India.

Risk Management should not be viewed as a mere process, but as the culture, capabilities that help an organisation survive and thrive. So, the focus should be no longer only on identifying risks to executing strategy but to evaluate how strategy aligns to the organisation’s mission, vision, core values. This enhanced coverage of risk management should help in ensuring that stakeholder value can be created, preserved and realized.

The evaluation of strategic options would require that strengths and weaknesses of all alternatives are considered, including how the strategy aligns with the organisation’s mission. The risk profile of each strategy would have been thoroughly considered, before embarking upon the chosen one. Risk indicators and response can be thought through, based on the profile of the strategy. The organization is in a state of readiness to take on the uncertain times that we live in.

Thoughtful ERM programs help companies anticipate, adapt and respond to change. They also focus management efforts and resources on the risks and opportunities that truly matter in terms of their impact on strategy and performance harnessing the true value of Enterprise Risk Management.

India is adopting the culture of co-working space and startup venture.

Co-working spaces today are actively attracting startups, in fact, the real beauty of a co-working space is the community, it is a diverse environment that facilitates exchange of ideas and promotes collaboration.  Let’s delve deep into what exactly goes on within co-working spaces.

Co-Working space

People opt for co-working space due to high cost of real-estate costs and social entrepreneurs, freelancers, startups and small businesses looking for a footprint in big metros. There is no doubt that the Indian start-up ecosystem has come a long way, and is now being supported by a slew of initiatives, like the central government’s Startup India. Co-working spaces act as a fulcrum of this ecosystem. Aside from providing flexible, convenient and affordable space, co-working spaces provide ample opportunities for young entrepreneurs to learn, network and grow. Through targeted workshops, networking events, introductions and mentoring sessions; the co-working space acts as a hub for all things an aspiring entrepreneur needs to become a successful one. These collaborative communities reside in co-working spaces; no wonder co-working has become the new buzzword.

Digital/business nomads, expats and others travelling to India for work for a few months are also joining the co-working revolution. So are large IT & BFSI companies to cope with rising rentals and shortage of ready-to-move grade A offices in prime property markets across India. In fact, some companies now base their client project teams out of co-working spaces, to let them remain close to the clients. Making use of co-working space reduces about 30% cost of the company. Rising cost consciousness, new generation collaboration and delivery platforms, digital workflows, dependable tech infrastructure and a thriving start-up eco-system are expected to continue to boost the trend of co-work sharing spaces in the country.

International players starting to enter the Indian scheme of things which is a good development. With lot of customized events today taking place across India, entrepreneurs have lots to cheer about as far as connecting with the right resources and obtaining learning opportunities is concerned.

As far as co-working operators go, there are several who are following a simple rental arbitrage model – the old business centre/serviced office model. Although there is a market for this, I believe we are at the cusp of change. In every industry, customers now need to be engaged, not just sold to – they need to feel a connection with who they work with, and also where they work. Commercial spaces are going through this very change, and co-working is the disruptor that will bring engagement and sexy back to the commercial real-estate space.

Will 2018 be kind to startups in India?

Startups face a number of challenges when embarking on their entrepreneurial journey – according to NASSCOM data, the standard mortality rate is around 25%.

In 2015, about 140 startups shut shop in India; in 2016, about 212 startups closed doors—50% higher than the previous year; the rate for 2017 planed out to 25% as large-scale startup hubs, accelerators, and investors cropped up across the country. To help the sector, government went to the extent of redefining the meaning of a “startup” by raising the age limit to 7 years from the date of incorporation (10 years for Biotech firms). From linking villages with the Start-up India programme to mega-sized accelerators and spirited investors, a slew of regulatory changes, activities and initiatives helped the startup sector emerge as the next big theme for economic growth.

Today, India is among the top five countries in the world in terms of startups. Its consumer demographics and extensive urbanisation continues to channel large-scale investment opportunities. The number of tech and non-tech startups cropping up every year only continues to the rise, irrespective of the shutdowns. It is projected that by 2020 there will be over 12,000 startups in the country, changing the way the markets are perceived and work. Until 2016, it was a trend among investors to make an early entry, even before the start of a firm. However, 2018 started on a bleak note with the causality list taking on a more serious turn: a Hong Kong-based tech startup accelerator, Jaarvis, started writing off investments in its portfolio and shutting down its India operations. Other startup accelerators in India are not doing good as well and are taking parting shots in getting their business model right. All this begs the question: Is there a market for all these startups?

According to an analysis report of startup postmortems, the first and topmost reason for startup mortality was ‘a lack of market need’ for it. Most failed startups relied on perceived solutions to implied needs. Market research was comfortably ignored, placing the onus on VCs to do the due diligence. For many startups, obtaining the seed fund was an end in itself. As seven out of ten well-funded startups failed, it also debunked a major myth; Scalability. Most of the high profile startups that shut down shop grew too fast and expanded even faster, so scalability to meet the demand was not the problem. Soon, the reality struck.

India’s vast unorganised market was a logistical nightmare to even companies having a strong network and financial backing. High smartphone penetration seems to incorrectly warrant more tech solutions. However, tech solutions were considered low-risk by investors, only to have them make a hasty retreat within a year or two.

As Prime Minister Modi’s “Startup India” is nearing completion of two years, startups are already yearning for the magic of 2015 when they savoured being the flavour of the season, which saw the emergence of a number of home-grown unicorns across the country. However, a new class of investors are stepping in to bring about the turnaround. For instance, organisations such as Tata Trust are planning to help startups in India that are categorised as high-risk and have uncertain business models. This is a space where no angel investors or venture capitalists would put their money in. For a change, these investors are looking forward to support ideas having a social impact. As one official put it candidly – in order to have a deep and irreversible impact, one has to try different things, and not use the same approach again and again. The coming days will witness the funding companies taking the lead from the startups. But will it energise the sector? One only needs to wait and watch what 2018 holds.

Building a Knowledge City: Lessons from Melbourne

Striving for the label ‘Smart City’ or ‘Knowledge City’ is no longer a simple administrative prerogative. It involves a lot more than public will for a city to build capacities and generate the momentum required to gain visibility as a ‘Knowledge City’ in the region. What can be even more demanding are the accompanying proactive measures needed to ensure that such a city retains and strengthens its prime position among the comity of knowledge cities of the world.

‘Knowledge Cities’ base their ability to create wealth depending on these three factors: (i) capability to generate ideas, (ii) exchange ideas, and (ii) influence knowledge networks. Both private and public sectors play an equal and complementary role in valuing and nurturing knowledge, supporting knowledge dissemination and discovery, and harnessing knowledge to create products and services that add value. Many developed cities around the world are now moving towards economies that are predominantly based on their knowledge capabilities. San Francisco, Singapore, Manchester, Montreal, Helsinki, Birmingham… the list goes on.

Today, each state or administrative district in every nation has a city labelled as a Knowledge City. There may be reasons for such categorisation; for instance, robust economic performance in knowledge-intensive sectors, conditions conducive to innovation and entrepreneurialism, availability of a skilled workforce, and presence of knowledge infrastructure, such as universities, libraries and laboratories. The challenges faced by each of these cities may be unique to their region, but then the connected world poses a different set of demands that every knowledge city can ill afford to ignore. Some of the demands that knowledge cities have to reckon with include:

  • Integration with the globalised world
  • Growing global competition among ‘knowledge capitals’
  • Mobility of talent, firms and investment
  • Emergence of disruptive technology and its changing role in research, learning and innovation
  • A high degree of liveability – from infrastructure to cultural activities

The above unenviable set of challenges, along with a strong contention from Asian city economies, makes it worthy to observe how Melbourne strives to carve out a niche for itself and defend its position. In many ways, Melbourne’s challenges are not unlike our own Thiruvananthapuram’s, but there is one crucial aspect that makes a world of difference. Melbourne already is a burgeoning knowledge capital:  The knowledge sector contributes more than 50% its gross regional product, with the financial services industry being the largest contributor. The city’s action plan envisages different goals, roles and initiatives that help Melbourne contribute to the growth of knowledge-intensive activities. From retaining and attracting knowledge talent, firms and investment to achieving recognition of the knowledge sector’s strength and value, Melbourne’s action plan is a case study in how to deal with emerging realisations proactively.

 

image

Melbourne’s holistic strategy helps in creating a flourishing knowledge economy and in building an entrepreneurial culture that can transform local economies and put it on the global map. For instance, Goal #2 focuses on Melbourne’s strong arts and culture scene, which are attractive to knowledge workers and add to the city’s liveability quotient. This focused approach enabled Melbourne to win recognition as the Most Admired Knowledge City at the Knowledge Cities World Summit (2013). Every aspect of the strategy acknowledges the importance of collaboration and partnership between the city, the knowledge sector, and the wider community.