 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit, presented by NTT Research. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Upgrade 2020. Of course, it's NTT's Global Research Summit. Really excited we're going to be able to dig into healthcare, the health system of course, something that's been, you know, top of mind for everyone around the globe, this year, so happy to welcome to the program. First time guest, Mary Edwards. She is the president of provider at NTT Data Services. Mary, welcome to the program, saying thanks so much for joining us. Hi, Stu, glad to be here. All right, so why don't we start? As I teed it up, we're going to be talking about healthcare there. Just a little bit of your background, your group, inside of NTT Data Services. Sure, so I've been at NTT Data Services for a year, just about a year on the nose. Really glad to be here. I've been in healthcare all of my career over 30 years. At first in the blues in underwriting, actuarial and strategy, then hop to consulting, was a partner with Accenture for 20, well, yeah, I think 22 years I was at Accenture, and then was leading the commercial model of the markets portion of a platform as a service company for a couple of years, and then NTT called, and I was really impressed with what I learned about NTT, and delighted to join the firm as the president of provider. Well, Mary, I've got a little bit of background in some of the health. I love, I go to innovation conferences, and they're like, we have the opportunity to really transform markets, but it's so tough to make change. Well, you've been there for a year, and in the last year, there's been a forcing function to change. The advent of hella health and telemedicine, I've done plenty of interviews, and heck, me and my family have been to doctors using those services, which at the beginning of this year, I wouldn't have thought was possible. Some of these might be long-term changes and impact on what's happening, but bring us inside your customers. What are some of the pressing challenges they're facing? And it's been a little bit of this, there obviously are huge challenges, but there's also been an opportunity to make some rapid changes. Great question. Well, first of all, there's no place I'd rather be right now than serving the health systems across the US, and certainly we have impact globally. It's a dynamic time, lots of change, and as you say with change comes opportunity, but also it's a time of deep fragility and a time when these clients really need help, not just from entity, but from a variety of partners. And I know, I feel in my team feels that it's a privilege to work in supporting them through this very difficult time. And when I say difficult time, I mean, think about it, even before the pandemic, Chartus Research was talking about the fact that likely 25% of rural hospitals would fail. Fast forward only a couple of months from that research being published and across the industry, outpatient revenues are down 11% year over year in patient revenue down as well, labor expenses up by nearly 18%. And so there's a lot of pressures on the industry right now, and that's what I mean by just a very significant time to be in the industry and position to help. There's a huge recovery that needs to happen from what our clients have experienced, first and foremost, top line. We've got to get the revenue back into the hospitals. The CARES Act funding doesn't last forever and certainly brings with it some obligations. So bringing in that top line growth, virtual health, which you mentioned is a big part of that strategy. At the same time, they've got to deal with all the new delivery models or working models, work from anywhere is something that all businesses have to face and incredibly, an incredible challenge for our health systems because of course it's not just about how we do our individual work, but the interactions that they have to have in conducting the work that they do. So care from anywhere and work from anywhere are huge concerns of our health system clients now. And you have to do that in industrialized ways because you don't know where you're working day to day. You have to be able to have fast switching, right? Because we're not in control of where we work. Cities and states are telling us what we have to do on a day in, day out basis. There is a huge cost. Oh, go ahead, sure. Yeah, no, I just, as you say, obviously health care is rightly so a heavily regulated industry. So bring this inside a little bit. What are some of those opportunities, some of those innovations that providers are being able to take advantage and have we opened the gates a little bit to help things move a little bit faster here in 2020 due to necessity? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, virtual care, you mentioned that earlier has exploded. There's a lot of dialogue right now in the industry about whether that's forever. It will never go back to the low single digits that it was prior to the pandemic. I mean, prior to the pandemic, health systems were happy if they could get to 10% overnight, virtual care went to, you know, 40%, 50% increase overnight and just continue to grow. CEOs across the industry prior to the pandemic were really focused on digital front door strategies, the ability to enable consumers to enter the healthcare system digitally and virtually. And so, you know, probably for the 18 months before the pandemic, most large system CEOs that I talked to were working on those strategies. They're doubling down on those strategies because the industry is reshaping around that digital future state. The cost pressures that we're seeing in healthcare at the same time require that they think about new operating and delivery models. Certainly the industry will restructure based on what we've gone through and continue to experience. And that will mean certainly changes in consolidation in the healthcare industry, right? As certainly certain systems will fail, right? Can't support what's happening around the economics of the industry. But also within our delivery and operations, there will be, and we're already seeing a trend toward more pervasive outsourcing, moving offshore, moving, you know, taking particularly back office functions, whether it's IT or business processes and looking for the help that can, you know, drive down the cost structure, better automate and innovate on those processes and delivery models and accelerate their journey to the digital future state of health. So Mary, help us understand entity data services and entity broader, what are the solutions? How are you helping your customers with everything we've discussed here? Sure, well, you know, you can't enable those digital front door strategies unless you do things like get your applications to the cloud. You know, you've got to be able to open up your environment to trade, if I, you know, if I say it that way, right? To exchange more broadly, even within your own ecosystem, you know, within your own walls, the ability to connect doctors with doctors that, you know, before the pandemic didn't have a need to connect in the same way becomes important. So at NTT, we do everything from journey to the cloud, certainly the security that's so important to those journeys and also the digital future of healthcare. RPA, the introduction of bots and AI to workflows and operations in order to reduce cost. At, in my division in provider, we worked for nearly the last year on something we call Nucleus for Healthcare, which is that digital front door enabled by a digital foundation and which delivers through pre-selected capabilities scheduling through virtual care visits to care coordination and payment all integrated, you know, across a digital fabric in order to accelerate the industry and certainly our health system partners achievement of that digital front door vision and the full digital future for healthcare. Yeah, I love, you talked about RPA. Automation has been one of the top things we've been hearing this year. Just top C level priority. We love coming to events like this, a lot of discussion of, you know, research looking a little bit forward down the road. What are some of the items here at upgrade 2020? You want to make sure our audience get a little peek into. Yeah, yeah, well, you know, you talk about automation and you know, I said a moment ago about offshore. We kind of, we're thinking about no-shore, right? So when you think about the application of automation and advanced analytics AI into business processes, it's not about moving business processes to a lower cost geography. It's about automating and enabling through, you know, bots and whatnot, the ability to not have, you know, hands touch it and really conserving your resources for the more complex things that have to happen. So I love that concept of no-shoring and really using technology to position humans for their best possible work, solving the harder problems, you know, that we face as an industry. I think about innovations in patient monitoring and what we can take in terms of IoT from other industries. And for instance at NTT, we've been doing a smart city with the city of Las Vegas for a couple of years now and we've got lots of AI around movement, heat, light, you know, the physical context of things. When you think about how you move that into healthcare and, you know, it's certainly about patient observation and creating safe spaces where doctors and nurses don't have to travel in and out of rooms when, you know, there's a high contagion rate, but it's also about using AI, not just to watch the room, but to allow AI to alert when there's something very significant happening, you know, what kind of movement in the bed. You know, what does that infer in terms of, you know, what's happening in the patient's room and alerting on that basis versus a, you know, a visual monitor, if you will. There are other innovations. Oh, go ahead, Stu. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I thought you were set. Please finish. Well, I was just about to say there are other innovations that we're working on that are really about patient wellbeing, patient companion. I think about the work we're doing at NTT disruption around something called Gibo, which is a robotics and, you know, very cool little guy who we've had some experience using it in children's hospitals, right? It becomes like a, really a companion of sort. There are lots of applications for that kind of technology, especially in a pandemic time when most of our patients are isolated and craving some kind of, you know, human interaction. And, you know, these kinds of capabilities can be like, like that. They can be companions and they can provide the kinds of social interaction that really lead to health and wellbeing. Well, so many important topics. Mary, thank you so much for joining us. Great to hear, you know, automation, robotics and the people at the center, of course, of what we look at in healthcare. Great to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Bye-bye. Stay tuned for more coverage from Upgrade 2020. I'm Stu Minimanen. Thank you for watching theCUBE.