Iroquois Healthcare Association Leverages Chrome OS to Keep Staff, Patients and Families Remotely Connected
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Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Eileen Murphy, Senior Director of Special Projects, and Andrew Nault, Director of Business Development, both from Iroquois Healthcare Association Workforce Investment Organization (IHA WIO). The health association represents 44 hospitals in 32 counties in New York State, providing advocacy, cost-saving initiatives, and business solutions. IHA WIO has provided its participating long-term care organizations with more than 5,000 Chromebooks to support 80 organizations in several ways, including training staff, connecting nursing home residents to their families, and helping administrative staff work safely from home.
Since early 2020, clinicians and staff at IHA WIO participant organizations have had to adapt to constant change—everything from implementing pandemic safety protocols to helping nursing-home residents stay in touch with families. We’re proud of the wonderful work they’ve done and continue to do.
During the pandemic, our use of Chrome OS and Chrome devices was expanded and changed to meet the needs of organizations dealing with an unprecedented event. Chrome devices were used to not only train staff but to enable remote work, as well as to connect residents to their friends and families during long periods of isolation. In the morning, a Chromebook could be in a managed guest session mode, helping a grandmother virtually attend her grandkids’ birthday party; at lunch, a nursing assistant could log in to her latest continuing education classes on that same Chromebook.
That evening, the Chrome OS devices could be found at check-in desks, helping visitors fill out a COVID-19 survey. All it took to change a device’s purpose were a few clicks in the Google Admin console, all of which could be done remotely.
Chrome OS for training
Most of our 5,000 Chrome OS devices came from a New York State grant to provide continued education training for long-term care organizations and its employees. We wanted to offer online classes, which meant we’d have to give people the technology to access that training. Our partner, CDW, recommended Chrome OS for us because it’s an operating system built for the cloud. In addition, devices running Chrome OS are easy to use, easily shared, and cost-effective.
Best of all, Chromebook Enterprise came with all the enterprise capabilities of Chrome OS unlocked. This allowed us to use the Google Admin console to manage our entire Chromebook Enterprise fleet remotely. We were able to set up one high-level organizational unit across IHA, with almost 80 organizational units for facilities and groups.
To support training, Lenovo helped us create a five-minute video that we added to our HealthStream learning platform so staff could learn the basics of using Chromebooks. This video was created because we didn’t realize there were people who have never touched a laptop before. The video and Chrome OS ease of use made it possible to get the folks who needed the most help up to speed quickly.
Chrome OS for connecting residents to loved ones
Once the pandemic began and people could no longer visit nursing home residents, the staff for one of our facilities asked about using a training Chromebook for video calls between residents and families. We loved this idea as it was still in line with our mission: to enable the workforce to provide higher-quality care.
With the Admin console, the process was easy. We changed the managed guest session to auto load, and changed what is populated on startup. With help from healthcare staff, residents were able to choose from several video apps including Google Meet, Zoom, and Facebook.
Chrome OS for remote workers
When office and administrative staff had to work remotely, Chromebooks again came to the rescue. Since staff could access all their work applications via Citrix—like Outlook, office phone systems, and other public documents—we placed the remote-work laptops in managed guest session mode and loaded the Citrix app at startup. All the employees had to do was connect to Wi-Fi and log into Citrix, and they were ready to work.
With our training program still running and virtual remote ability on the rise, we realized we would need more Chromebooks. CDW informed us that Chrome OS device supply was running low, but they located 1,000 Chromebooks for us and sent them to our home office in Clifton Park, New York.
Normally, the job of configuring and shipping 1,000 laptops would strike fear into the hearts of the IT team. Not this time: With zero-touch enrollment, all of the Chromebooks were enrolled in our high-level organizational unit before the boxes arrived at our Clifton Park office. We created a list of Chromebook serial numbers for each IHA location getting a shipment, then packed up the boxes. We never had to open a Chromebook box, or even turn the devices on before preparing them for use by employees.
Chrome OS for telehealth and clinic kiosks
There were more Chromebook transformations to come. In the interest of keeping residents and medical professionals safe, we enabled Chromebooks for non-urgent telehealth sessions. Doctors and nurses could see and talk to nursing home residents, using the same video conferencing apps that residents used to talk to loved ones. In these cases, we had PointClickCare, our electronic medical records app, loaded at startup on doctors’ Chromebooks.
We even turned a few Chromebooks into guest kiosks at IHA member hospitals that have walk-in clinics. If the clinics required visitors to fill out a COVID-19 screening form, the Chromebook, in kiosk mode, was stationed at the front desk. Once visitors submitted the form, a new blank form appeared, ready for the next visitor without any data stored on the device.
Chrome OS for whatever’s needed next
What’s amazing is that we could help people in all these different ways in just a few minutes—without visiting a nursing home, getting someone to ship laptops back to us, or loading software. Chromebooks are so versatile that sometimes they’re used in various modes several times a day. One user can log in, while another user can use managed guest sessions to login as a guest user. No matter what changes come to our healthcare association in the future, we’ll be ready.
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Quick Tips: How to Set Up a Business Without Investing Too Much
Running a business is everybody’s dream but only a few get to realize it. Among the many hurdles that entrepreneurs face, setting up the business with everyday tools like business emails, calendars, and finding cost-effective ways to collaborate are imperatives.
But it isn’t a struggle in the age of the cloud. Cloud computing takes care of infrastructure costs, breaks geographical boundaries, and makes collaboration across continents a walk in the park.
Google’s G Suite—a cloud-based collaboration and productivity platform—helps organizations achieve exactly that. G Suite is an affordable option to keeping your business organized. It’s the one stop shop for collaborating, creating consistency, and developing the professionalism your business needs.
What does that essentially mean?
Your marketing teams can create pitch presentations on Slides by collaborating in real time. All of them can work on the same version of the presentation all at once, ensuring everybody is on the same page.
Your finance teams can move over complex spreadsheet formulas and analyse costs just by asking—in words—Google Sheets to throw up answers to questions like: “What was our average spend last month?”
Your executive boards can meet on Hangouts from wherever they are, leading to faster decision-making.
Amber Hurdle, author of The Bombshell Business Woman, expands on the Tech Tools chapter of her book, by walking through how she uses G Suite to streamline her business.
How MobileOne Expanded its Stores by 340% in Just Three Years
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The mobile industry is extremely fast-paced. New smartphones arrive at rapid speed. Smartphone OS updates regularly add new features and capabilities. And by the end of 2018, 5G wireless, the game-changing successor to 4G, will begin to be available in some markets.
With more than 125 T-Mobile premium retail stores across the United States, MobileOne is at the forefront of the mobile industry’s constant, rapid-fire changes. The company is growing quickly, too, expanding its number of stores by 340% in just 3 years.
In this high-growth, non-stop environment, MobileOne’s mission is to keep frontline employees trained, informed, and updated at all times so that they, in turn, can serve as trusted experts to customers. Ultimately, the end game is to stay competitive by delivering the kind of positive experience that encourages customers to return, and to recommend MobileOne to friends.
But fulfilling this mission had become a major operational challenge for MobileOne. Information was typically created in the company’s productivity software suite and shared in emailed file attachments through the company’s on-premises email system. The method was slow and inefficient, and it could introduce errors if an outdated file was emailed.
In addition, there were no central, shared, easily accessible repositories of company knowledge. Thus, to find information shared a few months ago, team members might have to search their email archives for the appropriate file, and the search capabilities of MobileOne’s legacy email system were far from robust. Worse, a file that one employee suddenly needed may exist only on the hard drive of another employee who might be away on vacation.
“Without G Suite, I can’t imagine how we could keep up with everything.”
– Revel Stark, Director of Recruiting and Marketing, MobileOne LLC
MobileOne leaders recognized that a digital workforce transformation was needed to help the company stay focused on delivering excellent customer service. In response, the company began moving all employees to G Suite with the help of Suitebriar, a Google Cloud – G Suite Premier partner.
Sharing docs in seconds
G Suite applications help MobileOne team members collaborate, share information, and receive the latest training. G Suite also helps MobileOne move at an accelerated pace. For example, on a recent Sunday, Revel Stark, Director of Recruiting and Marketing at MobileOne, was on his way to the beach with his family when someone in the company needed a document from him right away.
“It took just seconds to launch the Google Drive smartphone app, do a quick search, and share the requested document,” says Revel. “Before G Suite, I’d have to start up my laptop, assuming I even had it with me, and search for the file. If the file wasn’t on my laptop’s drive, it might be Monday before I could have found and shared it. That just doesn’t work for us. Without G Suite, I can’t imagine how we could keep up with everything.”
Creating central repositories
“Now, with Drive and Sheets, everyone has access to the most recent, business-critical information at the same time. Having live spreadsheets helps us ensure that no important information gets lost, despite the rapid pace in which we work.”
– Revel Stark, Director of Recruiting and Marketing, MobileOne LLC
Drive, coupled with G Suite apps such as Docs and Sheets, streamlines document sharing at MobileOne by enabling the company to create central repositories of information that are easily accessible and, with Google search technology, easily searchable.
For example, the company used to track operations, growth metrics, and performance in its legacy productivity suite’s spreadsheet application. The spreadsheet files were shared via email. But given MobileOne’s rapid growth, the information in those spreadsheet files could become outdated quickly. And there was confusion at times about which file was the most recent version.
“Now, with Drive and Sheets, everyone has access to the most recent, business-critical information at the same time,” Revel says. “Having live spreadsheets helps us ensure that no important information gets lost, despite the rapid pace in which we work.”
MobileOne has set up a Team Drive for each of the company’s departments, too. “With Team Drives, department heads can make sure their department’s documents are well organized, up to date, and easy to find,” Revel says. “And they can give access only to the people who need it.”
Streamlining interview schedules
The thousands of apps in the G Suite Marketplace enable businesses to add even more functionality to the G Suite apps that their employees use every day. MobileOne uses a third-party scheduling app that integrates with Calendar to streamline the scheduling of job applicant interviews. “Job applicants can look at our calendar and pick an open slot to schedule their interview,” says Revel. “It speeds up the process by not having to go back and forth in email, trying to find a time that’s mutually agreeable.”
Simplifying admin duties
“Before G Suite, it was time-consuming to add a new user to our email system,” Revel says. “I’d have to ask our service provider, then wait for them to do it. But with the easy-to-use G Suite admin panel, we can add someone to Gmail ourselves in a minute or two.”
Receiving personalized service
To support the rollout, MobileOne worked with Suitebriar, a Google Cloud – G Suite Premier Partner. Suitebriar efficiently set up MobileOne on G Suite and now provides webinars and on-going support to help MobileOne users get more out of G Suite. “Suitebriar is incredibly responsive,” says Revel. “They know our business, they give us personalized service, and they get back to me quickly when I have questions, sometimes in as soon as 30 seconds.”
Driving new business with Forms
MobileOne uses Forms to help it organize public events and, in combination with Sheets, to measure the success of those events.
Last year MobileOne held 200 events across the company’s 125 stores and is planning to hold up to 400 events this year. The events are designed to connect MobileOne associates with local residents and bring people into its stores who might not otherwise visit.
“We developed a pre-event form that stores use to communicate with our corporate office about what’s needed to set up their event,” Revel explains. “And we have a post-event form that stores can fill out to capture what worked and what didn’t work at the event. The information in that form gets dropped into a Sheets spreadsheet, so we can track the success of events across all stores. It helps us focus on the events that drive the most traffic into stores, where we can connect with locals and show them how we can help them.”
Using Hangouts to train — and applaud
“When a team member in the field does something fantastic, we can gather a bunch of people in a conference room, get that team member into Hangouts, and give him or her a round of applause. It’s a great way to give someone a pat on the back.”
– Revel Stark, Director of Recruiting and Marketing, MobileOne LLC
At MobileOne, Hangouts is among the most used G Suite app. The company uses Hangouts to bring executives together in different locations for a weekly briefing. “Hangouts breaks down the barriers that geographical distances create, so that everyone gets quality time together,” Revel says.
Training is another key Hangouts use case. “Because keeping our people well informed is so important, we use Hangouts frequently to train team members,” says Revel. “We’re currently using Hangouts with a Hangouts Meet hardware in our corporate office for training, and we’re considering expanding that by adding 20 to 30 Hangouts Meet hardware in training rooms across all seven states where we operate.”
MobileOne uses Slides for training presentations, which are often scheduled using Calendar and presented in Hangouts. “Calendar makes it easy to set up training events and to see the availability of people you want to invite,” Revel says. When people find a time that works, they simply add a Hangouts link to the calendar event. Then during the Hangouts session, a presenter can launch a Slides presentation, and attendees can ask questions with Hangouts chat. All of this is easy to set up and the training happens in real-time, which gives it more of an impact.
The company is also leveraging Hangouts in a less conventional way. “When a team member in the field does something fantastic, we can gather a bunch of people in a conference room, get that team member into Hangouts, and give him or her a round of applause,” says Revel. “It’s a great way to give someone a pat on the back.
What Are India’s Biggest Companies Doing on Google Cloud?
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In the last year, there’s been an upward trend in cloud adoption in India. In fact, NASSCOM finds that cloud spending in India is estimated to grow at 30% per annum to cross the US$7 billion mark by 2022.
At Google, in our conversations with customers, discussions have evolved beyond cost savings and efficiencies. While those are still very relevant reasons for adopting cloud technologies, Indian enterprises are looking to Google Cloud to help them drive digital transformation, identify new revenue generating business models, reach previously untapped consumer markets, and build customer loyalty through greater insight and personalization.
Here are some companies and their stories.
Tata Steel: Mining data and maximizing its power
Tata Steel is a great example of an established enterprise from a traditional industry that is modernizing and embracing cloud computing. With an ambition to be a leader in manufacturing in India and a digital-first organization by 2022, Tata Steel believes smart analytics is key to enhancing operational efficiency and gaining business advantage.
To organize data from siloed systems across the organization and make it easily accessible to all employees, Tata Steel is using Cloud Search and plans to scale it to more than one million documents and 28 disparate enterprise content sources including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SharePoint. In fact, Tata Steel is one of the first Indian enterprises to harness the power of Cloud Search to meet some of the most aggressive ingestion demands, with indexing durations reduced from weeks to seconds.
They are also leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services like Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery to build their data lake and enterprise data warehouse so they can take advantage of advanced analytics and machine learning. Managed services such as AI Platform further enable Tata Steel to manage end-to-end AI/ML workflows within the GCP console. This complements their existing on-premise reporting and analytics tools, and brings data management to the forefront of everything they do—from forecasting market demand to predictive equipment maintenance.
“Digital is not just a goal, it’s become a way of life. We are digitizing everything from the deployment of factory vehicles to improving material throughput to marketing and sales. As a result, we have petabytes of structured and unstructured data that is not only waiting to be mined, but that we can generate intelligence from to create opportunities across our multiple lines of business using GCP,” said Sarajit Jha, Chief Business Transformation & Digital Solutions at Tata Steel.
Helping L&T Financial Services reach customers in rural communities
In rural communities, quick access to financial services can make a tremendous difference to livelihoods. L&T Financial Services provides farm-equipment finance, micro loans and two-wheeler finance to consumers across rural India backed by a strong digital and analytics platform. Their digital-loan approval app, which runs on GCP, makes it significantly faster and easier for people to apply for financial assistance to purchase important things such as farming equipment and two-wheelers. It also helps rural women entrepreneurs get quicker access to funds for their businesses through micro loans.
L&T Financial found G Suite to be a far better collaborative tool to help staff work together efficiently. Employees can interact with each other in real time using Hangouts Meet, and the task of information sharing is more seamless and secure through Drive. BigQuery also helps L&T Financial Services generate behavior scorecards to track credit quality of its micro-loan customers.
“Cloud is the technology that enables us to achieve scale and reach. Today there are countless data points available about rural consumers which enable us to personalize our products to serve them better. With access to faster compute power, we can also on-board consumers more efficiently. Our rural businesses have clocked a disbursement CAGR of 60% over the past three years.” said Sunil Prabhune, Chief Executive-Rural Finance, and Group Head-Digital, IT and Analytics, L&T Financial Services.
Creating conversational connections for Digitate’s customers
Digitate, a venture of TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), has integrated Dialogflow into its flagship brand ignio, an award-winning artificial intelligence platform for driving IT operations, workload operations and ERP operations for diverse enterprises. This integration is the next step in ignio’s product development journey, and will enable users to chat or talk with ignio to detect issues, triage problems, resolve them and even predict system behavior.
“ignio combines its unique self-healing AIOps capabilities for enterprise IT and business operations with Dialogflow’s AI/ML-based, easy to use, natural and rich conversational capabilities to create an unparalleled, intuitive and feature-rich experience for our customers,” says Akhilesh Tripathi, Head of Digitate.
Indian enterprises going G Suite
The base of Indian enterprises that are making the switch to G Suite to streamline their productivity and collaboration also continues to grow. Sharechat, BookMyShow, Hero MotorCorp, DB Corp and Royal Enfield are now able to move faster within their organizations, using intelligent, cloud-based apps to transform the way they work.
A hybrid and multi-cloud future in India
IDC predicts that by 2023, 55% of India 500 organizations will have a multi-cloud management strategy that includes integrated tools across public and private clouds. (IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2019 Predictions — India Implications (# AP43922319). We look forward to sharing more success stories of Indian enterprises that have taken the next step in their digital transformation journey.
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Video: How Did GANT Get Products to Market in Just Three Months?
It was in 1949 that a Ukranian immigrant Berl Gantmacher launched–what was going to be an iconic shirt-making company–GANT in Connecticut, America.
Since then, the company has reinvented shirts every single day. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, GANT operates in 70 countries.
In 2017, GANT wanted to launch a flagship store in London. It takes most companies a year to open a store, considering the amount of cross country collaboration and planning that’s needed for a store to take off.
In order to open the store in London, teams from three countries—Sweden, Portugal and the UK—needed to work together.
“Right away through the process, we moved forward as one team with one goal. With G Suite we have access to all information in one place and we collaborate on Hangout. A flagship store could be well over a year. Regent Street (London) was three months. A very, very different timeline. It’s been an amazing success for the company,” says Matthew Wood, Creative Director, GANT.
G Suite made it possible for the various teams from different countries to collaborate on a single platform and launch a flagship store in just three months—instead of a year.
Bigbasket: Delivering Groceries Across 25 Cities in India
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When Bigbasket was founded in December 2011, it guaranteed to deliver goods within a one-hour delivery slot of its customers’ choosing or it would refund them 10 percent of their orders. The company also introduced an express service, delivering groceries within 90 minutes of an order being placed.
Bigbasket needed a mapping platform that could help it meet its delivery times, and offer a familiar interface to customers. MediaAgility, a digital consulting company, recommended Google Maps Platform to Bigbasket.
When customers use the Bigbasket mobile app to place orders, they select their locations on a Google Map. The prices and availability of groceries varies according to location, so a customer’s location determines the cost of the order and what can be ordered.
Google Maps Platform Results
- Bigbasket handles more than one million orders per month, and delivers in more than two dozen cities in India
- Bigbasket now has more than four million customers
- Orders are delivered on time, increasing customer loyalty
It is also used to determine driver routes. Bigbasket used the Maps Javascript API to build a web-based app for the company’s backend that tracks all orders and delivery progress. Dispatchers use the Directions API to match drivers with orders and customers, and the Distance Matrix API to get estimate the time of arrival for deliveries. As dispatchers track the progress of deliveries on the map, they can tweak routes as necessary.
“We’ve built Bigbasket from the ground up using Google Maps Platform. It makes sure we have the right customer locations and deliver to them on time. We couldn’t have started Bigbasket without Google Maps. It helps us to be fast and efficient, and make sure our customers get what they’ve ordered quickly,” said Pramod Jajoo, Chief Technology Officer, Bigbasket
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