Nothing is more fundamental to the organization than its data, and how it’s used to improve the business. These blogs address various business, data, and technology-related issues for the line of business and for technology leaders that are tasked with making critical strategic business and technology decisions for their organizations.

Technology Is A Tool, Not A Solution

Too often, technology companies put the cart before the horse. They develop a cool new technology and then try to adapt it to be what their customers actually need. The result may be interesting but not what matters to the customer. At this year’s InterSystems Global Summit, several of our customers shared stories of using the advanced technology inside our products to create immediate value for their customers and their organizations. Here are brief recaps on two of them, one focusing on natural language processing in behavioral health, the other in retail focusing on interoperability across a far-flung supply chain.

Netsmart Technologies provides electronic health record (EHR) and other solutions for the behavioral health, social services, and post-acute care communities. At Global Summit, Netsmart shared how it used the natural language processing (NLP) capability in InterSystems’ technology stack against the behavioral health record to help identify individuals who are at high risk of harming themselves or others. Given the amount of unstructured information in behavioral health records – it’s not unusual for a patient to have 10,000 progress notes – clinicians need help making sure they do not miss significant signals of risk and can act proactively.

Signals might include a visit to the emergency room where the patient was released or hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, an arrest, suicidal thoughts with intent and plan, attempted suicide, paranoia and delusions, and ownership of or access to a weapon. Netsmart used NLP technology to bring these signals to the surface from the ocean of text, visualizing them in ways that make assessing behavioral risks, and preventing problems, more efficient.

CFAO is a diversified international manufacturer, distributer, and retailer in consumer goods, automotive, construction equipment, and healthcare industries. The company is heavily invested in African markets, with the goal of providing an optimal consumer experience while delivering high-quality products at the correct price point. At Global Summit, CFAO shared how it uses interoperability technology to reduce the complexity and increase the efficiency of business operations over a supply chain that stretches from Japan, to Europe, to Africa, to remote island territories. The company uses the same interoperability technology in its African retail outlets to create an optimal customer experience – one that buyers can’t find elsewhere.

As a company that is powering some of the world’s most important applications, we believe strongly in developing technology that our customers can depend on. We know that technology itself may not be the solution, but we understand how it can be a key to overcoming a challenge or be the lever for a company’s overall business goals. Our software design philosophy is centered on a belief in simple elegance, where the technology isn’t the center of attention, because it just works the way it should. This leaves you free to discover needs, create solutions that solve real-world problems, and sometimes even change the world.

Photo Credit: https://toolstotal.com/