 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello and welcome to the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich. Today we're going to highlight the most valuable Amazon Connect deployment. And we are now joined by Steve Kerful, Adult Social Care Expert, PA Consulting Group and Graham Allen, the Director of Adults Health and Care at Hampshire County Council. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. Thank you very much, Steve and Natalie. Well, by now we're all really familiar with the call to shelter in place and how it especially affected the most vulnerable of people. Give us some experience or some insight on your experience with that, especially in light of some of the technology that was deployed. Let's start with you, Graham. Yeah, thank you. So just by way of context, Hampshire County Council is one of the largest areas of local government in England. So we have a population of 1.4 million people. And when lockdown was imposed by the national government in England on the 23rd of March, 2020, shortly thereafter, the evidence in terms of vulnerabilities around COVID-19 strongly identified that people with a range of clinical conditions were most vulnerable and needed to shield and self-isolate. For the size of our population, we quickly were advised that roughly some 30,000 people in the initial cuts because of clinical vulnerabilities needed to shield, self-isolate, and receive a variety of support. Shortly after that, through the summer of 2020, that number increased to some 50,000. And then by January of this year, that number further increased based on the scientific and medical evidence to 83,000 people in total. So that represented a huge challenge for us in terms of offering support, being able to make sure that not only practical tasks related to obtaining shopping, food, and so on and so forth, but also medications, but also the real risks of self-isolation. Many of the people that we were needing support weren't either too known to us as a social care provider. They were being advised through clinical medical evidence and needs. And many of those people lived alone. So the real risk of self-isolation, not seeing anyone potentially for an extended period of time. And the risks of their wellbeing were something very significant to us. So we needed very rapidly to develop a solution in terms of making contact and being able to offer that support. Yeah, and I'd love it now to get your take, Steve, on how PA Consulting Group helped deliver on that call and that need. Sure. So we have an existing relationship with Graham and the council. We've been working together for a number of years delivering care technology solutions to service users around the county. We were obviously aware there was a major issue as COVID and lockdown began. So we sat down with Graham and his colleagues to ask what we could do to help. We used our relationship with AWS and our knowledge of the Connect platform to suggest a mechanism for making outbound calls really at scale. And that was the beginning of the process. We were very quickly in a position where we were able to actually get that service running live. In fact, we had a working prototype within four days and a live service in seven days. And from that point on, of those many thousands of people that Graham's alluded to, we were calling up to two and a half thousand a day to ask them, did they need any help? Were they okay? If they did need help, if they responded yes to that question, we were then able to put them through to a conventional call handler in a call center where a conversation could take place about what their needs were. And as Graham said, in many cases, that was people who couldn't get out to get food shopping, people who were running short of clinical medical supplies, people who needed actually some interesting things. Pet care came up quite often, people who couldn't leave the home and look after their dog. They just needed some help locally. So we had to integrate with local voluntary services to get those kinds of results and support delivered to them across the whole of Hampshire and ultimately throughout the whole of the COVID experience. So coming right up until, until March of this year. Right, well, as the COVID pandemic progressed and evolved in different stages with variants and a variety of different issues that came up over the last year. So, how did the technology develop? How did the relationship develop? And, you know, tell us about that process that you had with each other. So the base service remained very consistent. That different points in the year when there were different issues that maybe needed to be communicated to the service users we were calling, we would change and update the script. We would improve the logistics of the service, make it simpler for colleagues in the council to get the data into the system to make the calls. And basically we did that through a constant series of meetings, checkpoints, staying in touch and really treating this as a very collaborative exercise. So I think for all of us, COVID was a constant stream of surprises. Nobody could really predict what was gonna happen in a week or a month. So we just had to all stay on our toes, keep in touch and be flexible. And I think that's where our preferred way of working and that of AWS and the Hampshire team we were working with, we really were able to do something that was special and very fleet of foot and responsive to needs. Right, and I'd also love to get Graham's insight on this as well. What kind of results have you seen? Do you have any statistics on the impact that it made on people? Did you receive any qualitative feedback from the people that used the service? Yeah, no, absolutely we did. And one of the things we were very conscious of from day one was using a system which may have been unfamiliar to people in the first instance in terms of receiving calls. The fact that we were able to use human voice within the call technology, I think really, really assisted. We also did a huge amount of work within Hampshire County Council. Clearly in terms of the work we do day in day out we're well known to our local population. We have a huge range of different responsibilities ranging from maintenance of the roads through to the provision of local services like libraries and so on and so forth and also social care support. So we were able to use all of that to coalesce as Steve has said through working very collaboratively together with a trusted brand, Hampshire County Council working with new technology. And the feedback that we received was both very much data driven in real time in terms of successful calls and also those going through to call handlers and then the outcomes being delivered through those call handlers to live services out and about around the county but also that qualitative impact that we had. So across Hampshire County Council we have some 76 elected members. Believe me, they were very active. They were very interested in the work that we were doing in supporting our most vulnerable residents and they were receiving literally dozens of phone calls as a thank you by way of congratulating but as I say thanking us and our partners PA, our district council partners and also the voluntary community sector in terms of the very real support that was being offered to residents. So we had a very fully resolved picture of precisely what was happening literally minute by minute on a live dashboard in terms of outgoing calls calls going through the call handlers and then successful call completion in terms of the outcomes that were being delivered on the ground around the county of Hampshire. So a phenomenally successful approach, well appreciated and well, I think applauded by all those receiving calls. Terrific insight. Well, Steve, I'd love to hear from you more about the technology and how you put the focus on the patient, on the person really made it more people focused and obviously that's so critical in such a time of need. Yeah, you're absolutely right, Natalie. We, I think what we were able to do because myself and my immediate team have worked with Hampshire and other local authorities on the social care side for so long. We understood the need to be very person focused. I think sometimes with technology it comes in with a particular way of operating that isn't necessarily sensitive to the audience and we knew we had to get this right from day one. So Graham's already mentioned the use of human voice in voicing the bot call and that was very important. We selected a voice actress who had a very reassuring, clear tone, recognising that many of the individuals we were calling would have been older people, maybe a little hard of hearing. We needed to have the volume in the call. Simple things like this were very important. And one of the debates I remember having very early on was the choices to whether the response that somebody would give to the question, do you need this or that? Could be by pressing a digit on the phone. And we understood that again, because potentially of frailty, maybe a little lack of dexterity among some of the people we'd be calling, that might be a bit awkward for them to take the phone away from their face and find the button and press the button in time. So we pursued the idea of an oral response. So if you want this, say yes. If you don't want it, say no. And those kinds of small choices around how the technology was deployed, I think made a really big difference in terms of acceptance and adoption and success in the way the service ran. Terrific. Well, Graham, I'd like to shift it to you. Could you give us some insight on the lessons that you learned as a result of this pandemic and also trying to move quickly to help people in your community? Yeah, I think the lessons and some of the lessons that we've again learned through our response to the pandemic are lessons that to a degree of traveled with us over a number of years in terms of the way that we've used technology over a period working with PA, which is being outcome focused. It's sometimes very easy to get caught up in a brilliant new piece of technology. But as Steve has just said, if it's not meeting the need, if we're not thinking about that human perspective and thinking about the humanity and the outcomes that we're seeking to deliver, then to some degree it's going to fail. And this most certainly did not fail in any way, shape or form because of the thoughtfulness that was brought forward. I think what we learned from it is how we can apply that as we go forward to the kinds of work that we do. So as I've already said, we've got a large population, 1.4 million people. We are moving from some really quite traditional ways of responding to that population accelerated through our response to COVID through using AI technologies. Thinking about how we embed that more general service offer, not only in terms of supporting people with social care needs, but that interface between ourselves and colleagues within the health sector, the NHS, to make sure that we're thinking about outcomes and becoming much more intuitive in terms of how we can engage with our population. It's also, I think about thinking across wider sectors in terms of meeting people's needs. One of the, I think probably unrealized things pre-COVID was that actually using virtual platforms of various kinds of actually increased engagement with people. We've always thought in very traditional ways in order to properly support our population, we must go out and meet them face to face. What COVID has taught us is actually for many people, the virtual world connecting online, having a variety of different technologies made available to support them in their daily living is something that they've absolutely welcomed and actually feel much safer through being able to do. The access is much more instant. You're not waiting for somebody to call. You're able to engage with a trusted partner, face to face over a virtual platform and get an answer more or less than a name. So I think there's a whole range of opportunities that we've learned, some of which we're already embedding into our usual practice, if I can describe anything over the last 15 months as usual, but we're taking it forward and we hope to expand upon that at scale and at pace. Yeah, that's a really excellent point about the rise of hybrid care, both in the virtual and physical world. What can we expect to see now moving forward, like to shift over to our other guest? What do you see next for technology as a result of the pandemic? Well, there's certainly been an uptick in the extent to which people are comfortable using these technologies. And again, if you think about the kind of target group that Graham and his colleagues in the social care world are dealing with, these are often older people, people with perhaps mobility issues, people with access issues when it comes to getting into their GP or getting into hospital services. The ability for those services to go out to them and interact with them in a much more immediate way, in a way that isn't as intrusive, it isn't as time consuming. It doesn't involve leaving the house and finding ways on public transport to get to see a person who you're gonna see for five minutes in an unfamiliar building. I think that, in a sense, COVID has accelerated the acceptance that that's actually pretty good for some people. It won't suit everybody and it doesn't work in every context. But I think where it's really worked well and Wax is a great example of that is in triaging and prioritizing. Ultimately, the kinds of resources Graham's talked about that people need to access, the GPs and the nurses and the care professionals are in short supply. Demand will outstrip supply. Therefore, being able to triage and prioritize in that first interaction using a technology route enables you to ensure you're focusing your efforts on those who've got the most urgent or the greatest need. So it's a kind of win all around. I think there's definitely been a sea change and it's hard to see people going back just as the debate about, will everybody eventually go back to offices having spent a year working at home? I think the answer's invariably going to be, no, some will, but many won't. And it's the same with technology. Some will continue to interact through a technology channel. They won't go back to the face-to-face option that they had previously. Terrific. Well, thank you both very much. Steve Careful, PA Consulting Group and Graham Allen, Hampshire County Council really appreciate your insights on how this important technology helped people who are suffering in the midst of the pandemic. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Well, that's all for this session. Thank you so much for watching.