Origins of the Species – Automated Intelligent Guidance in HealthCare (part 1)
The origins of Cincom CiBA in HealthCare stretch back to Grovewood Financial Management who were a UK based Independent Financial Adviser - and a customer of Cincom.
The problem for Grovewood was simple; how to advise their customers about Investment Products with a simple to follow guidance process on their website which would give personalised advice and then enable them to make the investment on-line. The system needed to be friendly and easy to follow and give consistent advice.
The solution was complex; first, at the time - early 2000, no other automated advice systems had been authorised by the UK Financial Services Authority for direct use by the investing public so it was necessary to develop a new and robust system which would give compliant advice which could also be easily and quickly updated to reflect the rapid changes in the investment market and get it authorised! And second, the software systems available at the time were designed for development by those with good IT skills; who were definitely not those with the specialist investment knowledge needed to advise investors. Configuration technologies seemed the most suitable; they had after all been used in complex manufacturing!, so Grovewood embarked on a development programme and about three months later were the first Investment Advisor in the UK to offer automated personalised investment advice on the web!
Wind the clock forward a few years (well 6 actually) and what is the problem in US Healthcare (well – actually one of the problems) – how to guide registrars through the many complex processes to accurately and quickly register patients while using both the Hospital Information System registration screens and the third party systems necessary to verify insurance eligibility, ensure the correct insurance identifier is selected and the patient is made aware of any payment obligations – probably needing up to 8 different systems.....................
Using our experience of guided selling of investment products on the web (the Grovewood Team (with some additions of the best talent in Cincom were by then a part of Cincom and called CiBA) we set about solving the problem. First we got a basic understanding of what Automated Guidance was needed by the registrars to enable them to do their jobs more easily and efficiently, with no errors, and then we got an understanding of who had the “expert knowledge” and how we would capture that knowledge and get it into the Automated System. The result was the development of a brand new technology suite for Cincom called “Cincom Knowledge Master................................. and deployed at our first customers.
For how the story unfolds look out for Origins of the Species (part 2)
Chris Woodhead.
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