This year's Enterprise Connect was a busy event for vendors, from waves of generative AI announcements to animated discussions about hybrid work practices. It was also a significant occasion for the business users of the vendors’ platforms, who are passionate about and fascinated by the technology they adopt for their organizations.
One such business user is Shival Seth, CTO for Grand River and St. Mary’s hospitals in Ontario, Canada. For Seth, the evolution of UC and collaboration technology has been revelatory in recent years, particularly with the pandemic accelerating its growth and innovation in response to the rise of remote and hybrid working.
“One thing that we have learned with this pandemic is hybrid work is for real,” Seth told UC Today. “There are certain jobs which can continue to work remotely. We were quite mature and pioneering in our experience at the Grand River Hospital in actually looking at use cases with Webex where we provided all our staff with the capability to work from home. All our meeting rooms were equipped with Webex so that they had a single platform can they walk in and click on join.”
Even in a work environment in which physical contact and in-office collaboration are necessary, depending on the specific roles and tasks, healthcare had to navigate, and continues to grapple with, the challenges of adapting to hybrid work practices.
“For us, the challenge was purely around integration,” Seth said. “The integration with the clinical services, and integration with virtual care. Webex was the only platform at that time which was certified to be a care provider software with virtual care practices. So, we implemented our Webex solution with our Cerner Hospital Information System to provide virtual care to our patients across the community (during the pandemic), which was a huge success.”
Seth’s holistic remit includes overseeing everything from health informatics and biomedical engineering to the communications and collaboration platforms that helped steer Grand River and St. Mary’s through the pandemic.
He is enthusiastic about his job and the ways that constant innovations in the industry can enable him and his colleagues to provide better healthcare to patients, with Enterprise Connect an exciting stage for previewing innovation that could help him improve these processes. He also gained an “understanding of how the CpaaS and collaboration platforms, in general, have evolved over the years and how they can solve the problems that were supposed to be something of the past.”
AI was the major theme of this year’s EC, but would AI’s integration into these platforms practically serve the needs of Seth and the hospitals whose technology he manages?
“I would say given the leadership we have as a hospital,” Seth explained, “we are quite nimble and open to any kind of innovation. AI and also business transformation for us in general. We have the mentality of whatever you were doing yesterday, you definitely have a chance of doing it better tomorrow. Whatever you were doing manually yesterday, you have a better chance of actually automating it tomorrow."
