It is Friday. I arrive at the 50 Beale street office of Blue Shield of California. Instead of going to my desk, I head to the
‘Collaboration and Innovation Lab’. As I step out of the elevator on 23rd floor, I think about getting myself something to eat, but my excitement of first going to the ‘Lab’ (yes! we call it the Lab ) makes me turn right. As I walk past offices of our ‘C’ team, I get to catch glimpse of beautiful foggy Bay before arriving at the space we call our home for Fridays.
Suddenly, I realize that Friday’s have become even happier than they used to be.
As a routine, first thing I do when I step in the Lab is read Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ painted on the wall. It reminds me every day of what me and all others on the Core team aspire to be. Though what Kipling wants me to be seems ‘ideal’ and ‘unachievable’, remembering how it has made me better, makes me keep trying. After all, the spoils that will come out of this is not what I am looking for. It is the honor and privilege of attempting to do things that should not otherwise be possible.
Most of us are already here, so we begin our day with a huddle-talk. We share anything, personal or professional, that we feel like sharing. I share photos of my toddler while others share things like TED talk they heard over the week, show off new Apple Watch, give stock buying tips, share plans for the weekend, discuss interesting acquisitions, talk about new patent that Google is filing.
As scheduled, Todd Walthall joins us in the Lab at 10.00 AM to talk about ‘What keeps him up at Night’ and ‘What makes him get out of the bed every morning’. We all listen intently as he shares his scares and dares. This is the 3rd session in a series that was kicked off by Paul Markovich, and followed by Mary when they discussed their scares and dares with us. This discussion with senior leaders of the organization help us not only with an understanding of how we can help our leaders, but also lets us know that leaders care and take the mission personally.
As Todd waives bye, all of us write our takeaways from his talk on the top left corner giant 10 ft * 20 ft white board. The top left corner is where we maintain the problems worth solving list. Its almost 11.00 as we get ready to welcome a product manager and engineer from Apple who were involved in the Apple Pay program. They are helping us understand the technology, challenges and lessons learned as we attempt to digitize our membership cards. After around 30 minutes of presentation we have a very informative question answer session, engineers in the group look excited as they learn about new ways of handling data.
It’s lunch time! This is when people from Team Blue visit us for ‘Lunch In the Lab’- informal chit chats to understand what we are up to and also to share their ideas. Their ideas go right next to the section where leaders have shared their problems. We also have a physical dropbox where people can share feedback about anything related to lab, anonymously. We do this because anonymity of feedback allows us to focus on feedback rather than allowing our reactions to be influenced by who provided the feedback. (and hopefully keep some of our cognitive biases out. Eliminating cognitive biases is not humanly possible, so we try to minimize them)
After lunch, as part of our ‘Academia Outreach’ efforts, today a PHD student from Stanford is visiting us to share his approach to identifying Fraud in Healthcare. I met him at a meetup a few weeks ago where he presented his idea of identifying anomalies using a two prong approach of using google page rank algorithm with Graph database. What an approach! Our SIU director, Jonnie Massey is also visiting us this session for and she is curious about false positives and the anomalies being a legitimate healthcare event. Our team agrees to dive deeper and explore possibilities of using our data to test out his thesis. That will require some technical assistance and Hortonworks agrees to help us out free of cost and with no strings attached. Well, when you are a $14 B organization, technology companies bend over backwards to help you test out their products. In the lab we take it to a whole new level by sticking to our principle of ‘Don’t sell us, till we are sold on your value’. We ask that they demonstrate value by working with us in the lab at no cost to the lab, but with an incentive that proving out a product or service offering may help them make a sale. I am amazed how much stuff (technology as well as consulting) is given to us for free. We also keep reminding ourselves that we do not want to bully our vendor / technology partners, but also believe that every $ from our member must be used frugally.
We have a special session this week. Between, 2-4 we will be hosting a team of 9 IT experts who are going to help us plan for our first pilot. We have people with wide variety of skills (from PM, Dev, QA, Deployment) who have answered our call for help. Call for Help is a @shield based - pull resources as needed – similar to cloud computing where computing resources are pulled on as needed basis. A bit of planning is required to make sure we are able to employee source needed resources, but it’s worth it. And except for a couple of roles where we do not internally have the required skills, we were able to get multiple expression of interests for each role. Employees have tied this to their PDP or their P(ersonal)DP, have either convinced their managers to allow them to work with the lab using their operational budgets and a couple have also offered to work voluntarily, on their own time. I love when I see that kind of excitement! I have also seen people taking courses on LMS platform to meet some of the needs of our Lab.
The 2-4 session turned out to be a busy one. We uncovered a lot of tasks we had not thought about. Good thing – we anticipated that we will have surprises and that does help tackle these unexpected things.
It’s 4.00 PM and we take a coffee break… actually it is just a break. The team is free to do anything they want… call it Facebook break or twitter break. Or like I do, ‘PSiO’ break. For those who don’t know, PSiOs are Light and Relaxation Therapy glasses, which I am trying out. It costs, $399 and they offered it for free to be used and tested in the lab.
At 4.30, team gathers again and discusses the day. We make a list of things that we need to do and people pick up tasks based on their skills. The next few weeks are going to be fun as we start working on our first prototype, working more closely with claims and benefit data, and see if we can come up with some insights. Another exciting thing next week is we are meeting with a delegation from our customer service team to understand our members better. Ohh yes, and we also are attending a Calper’s open enrollment volunteering training next week – which puts us in front of our members and allows us to have one on one interaction.
Just when I am about to leave, I get an email from AT&T foundry’s Chief Data Scientist. It is an invitation to visit AT&T foundry to talk about our experience working in the lab. AT&T is exploring the future of healthcare. Imagine that. This is exciting as not only do we get to share our experience, but also get to understand how they go about innovating and listen to what they have to share with us.
On that note, I pick up my bag and step out of the Lab to start my weekend. But honestly, working in the Lab has never felt like work, so my weekend had begun already and now I can’t wait to get home to hugs and kisses from my son!
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