>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube.
Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018.
Brought to you by ServiceNow.
>> Welcome back, everyone, to the Cube's live coverage
of ServiceNow Knowledge '18.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along
with my co-host Dave Vellante.
We're joined by Nick White.
He is a principal at Deloitte Australia.
Thanks so much for coming on the Cube, Nick.
>> Thank you for having me.
It's great to be here.
>> So we've been having great conversations
before the cameras were rolling,
but tell us a little bit about D.Assist,
which is a new technology you're unveiling
at this conference.
>> Yeah, so it's a solution that we've built,
which is essentially a voice-enabled solution
to allow patients and nurses to communicate.
Essentially we're targeting identifying
critical patient needs, critical patient requests,
and getting help to them as fast as possible.
>> Okay, so tell us a little bit more
about the technology behind it.
>> Yeah, sure.
Well, let me go back and tell you about where it came from.
One of my colleagues was in hospital
with his father who unfortunately passed away
while he was in hospital.
And through that experience, he was observing
what was going on in the hospital
and afterwards he and I sat down
and started to go through it and understand
where were the challenges that the hospital had
in that ward experience and the recovery.
And we identified that if you look back
at the history of the call bell,
it hasn't changed in about 150 years.
Florence Nightingale came up with the idea
of a bell for patients, but that was
in a ward environment where you had 30 or 40 beds
in a room and you could look across the room
and you could see that patient,
okay, I can see what they need.
Either I rush to their aid,
or I can get to them in a minute.
Hospitals today, we've gone and put walls up,
curtains, and you've lost that visual cue.
But all we've done to support the nurses
is we've made that bell electronic.
And we put a light above the door.
So we looked at that system and we saw
at all of the different points
where you could have a failure along there,
that essentially then would compromise patient care
at no fault of the nurses whatsoever,
and we thought, how can we better support the nurses
to give that care that they work so hard to give?
And we came up with the idea of having a
voice-based solution that a patient can actually state
their request, we could process that request,
and we could present it to the nurses
and try and give some guidance as
to what the next best action for the nurse might be.
And allow them to essentially provide
accelerated care those people really in need.
>> All right, so explain the system.
It's fascinating what you guys do.
How are you using NLP and ServiceNow.
>> Yeah, so the solution is enabled
by AWS and ServiceNow.
So at the front end of the solution
we've got a smart speaker in the room.
That essentially passes the speech
that the patient has made once they've woken the device
through to the AWS platform.
From there we pull out the intent.
So we convert that speech to text,
pull out the intent, and then that intent is
passed through to ServiceNow.
And once we've got it in ServiceNow,
we can do all sorts of things with it.
So we can apply a set of business rules,
we can smart route it to the most appropriate person
to meet the patient's needs.
We can look at the prioritization
that the hospital wants to give that sort of query
and we can push it up or down in the queue
based on that prioritization.
Then we present that to the nurses
using a dashboard on the nurse station,
but we've also got the mobile app deployed.
So the nurses have actually got a mobile
in their pocket, which buzzes when the patient makes
a request, they're able to whip the phone out,
have a look at what the patient's need is,
and make a decision.
>> I'm always fascinated when a company
like Deloitte comes up with a solution like this.
It's not like you went to the client,
and the client said, this is what we want.
So how did you go about figuring all this out?
What was the process you used?
>> That's a really good question.
For us it was, it's not about us designing the solution.
We saw the problem and we're problem solvers.
That's really what we do.
We went and engaged with one of the
local hospitals in Australia.
We said to them, listen, is this right?
Have we actually cottoned on to something
that is a real problem here?
And it really resonated with them.
And they gave us access to their top 30 nurses
and also their simulation hospital.
It's a hospital that's used for training and development.
And in that environment, we iterated the design
with the nurses and built a solution essentially
by nurses for nurses.
So the idea was that it was as intuitive
to use as your iPhone.
Because nurses aren't like IT guys.
They're not sitting behind computers all day.
It's not native to them to use that sort of interface.
So we wanted to make it as simple as
I touch, drag, drop, and I let go,
and I've done the job that I need to do.
And so the nurses' feedback from the implementations
that we've done so far have been,
this is so easy to use.
That's the phrase they've given us.
This is just so easy to use.
>> And then what's the feedback from the patients?
How are they using it specifically?
>> Yeah so, I'll give you the example
of the spinal ward we've gone into
at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney.
The Prince of Wales Hospital Foundation
heard about what we were doing
and they identified the opportunity
to fund us to go into the spinal ward.
And when you think about spinal patients'
traumatic injury and often these patients are
in hospital for months if not years.
In a very isolating environment trying
to recover from a traumatic injury.
Not only that though, they may not have
full access to their limbs anymore
to be able to press a call button.
And the hospital foundation saw this opportunity
to place our solution in the hands of these patients
or in these patients' rooms.
And it has been overwhelmingly successful.
We've got 26 beds rolled out in the ward.
We've been in there for little over a month now.
And on the very first day we had a patient
who was in the bathroom in a precarious situation,
needed help, couldn't reach the call bell,
and was able to wake up the device
from the bathroom, ask for help,
and have two nurses rush to their aid.
We've had a patient who was suffering
severe pain after their injury
and is now able to alert the nurses
that the request that they were making is
about pain and they were able to come
in a much faster time.
We've also seen complaints about nurse response time
go from a decent level to nothing.
And whether those were real complaints or not,
is beside the point.
The patients were feeling like they were waiting
a period of time and that was uncomfortable for them.
Now they're not complaining at all.
So that patient experience has really shifted.
>> That's great.
And it's such a miraculous technology.
This is really impressive.
Best of luck to you, Nick.
This is really fun having you on the show.
>> Thank you very much.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante.
We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge '18
just after this.
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