Virtual waiting room

The unmet need

• Remote health service providers use video and audio to provide clinical consultations remotely
• The prevailing practice is, that service requests flowing into the system are queued for a clinician
• Clinicians pick a patient from the top of the queue and initiate the call
• Which means that clinicians have to deal with unanswered calls, wrong numbers, patients not ready to take the call, etc
• As a result, much of the clinician's time is wasted doing non clinical work, which leads to longer waiting times and overall inefficiency

The value proposition

A system that calls queued patients and puts them in a "virtual waiting room", enabling the clinician to click "Next" to join the call and immediately start the consultation

The KPI

• Increase the ratio of clinicians "consultation time" to "connection time" versus a benchmark
• Reducing manual resources needed to operate calls versus a benchmark
• Keeping average patient waiting time in the virtual waiting room less than a target value
• Increasing the system's throughput while reducing the operational resources

The main requirements

• Should be workable 'out of the box' with predefined best practices configuration scenarios
• Enable non-technical users to fine tune the basic scenarios to accommodated different business and operational use cases
• Enable support / professional-services teams implement low level customization to the basic logic, without installing a new product version

The system logic

The overall predictive dialer logic

The waiting room logic

Trigger and fetch methods

• The 'trigger' and 'fetch' methods are two functions at the heart of the virtual waiting room logic
• They determine the logic by which appointments are selected from the queue to start the calling process, and how they will be fetched from the virtual waiting room once a clinician is available
• A predefined list of trigger and fetch methods are delivered with the product
• Additional methods can be configured and quickly added per specific use case

User experience

Administrator

Service administrators can define the dialer settings, including the trigger and fetch methods, and the waiting room settings. Configurations are made per service and can differ from service to service

Clinician

All the clinician has to do is click "Next" to start the conversation with the patient

Patient

The patient receives a call from the system, and is asked to join the waiting room. Once the clinician is available, the patient is automatically connected to the clinician

The impact

The virtual waiting room and the predictive dialer became the core capability of the product, and the main market differentiator. It's unique capabilities and fit for purpose, enabled organization to increase the number of patients served per time unit by 50% to 200% in some markets, reduce the operational costs by 20% - 40%

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Image quality assurance

The unmet need

• In remote clinical consultation, patients are often required to upload images prior to the consultation
• The data has shown that 25% to 30% of uploaded images are of low quality
• That leads to sub optimal use of clinician time and hinders consultation quality

The value proposition

Enhancing the process of image upload, adding a preemptive image quality check, prompting the user to try again if the quality of the upload candidate is low

The KPI

• Reducing the percentage of consultations cancelled with the reason "Bad images"
• Benchmark: 30% cancellations as "Bad images"
• Target: 10% or less
• Business goals alignment: optimizing clinical resources efficiency and consultation quality

The acceptance criteria

• 85% or higher accuracy
• Performance: under 1 second
• Processed entirely on the edge device, hence eliminating network latency and servers load

The research

Training and testing data

• A sample of 1000 uploaded images had been extracted
• Of which 672 images had been tagged for quality as "Good" (24%), "Okay" (44%) and "Bad" (27%)

Model selection

A number of models were tested, including: BRISQU, NIMA and several pretrained neural networks that were additionally trained on the tagged images. Eventually OpenCV was selected as it gave the best results and passed the acceptance criteria

Image assessment workflow

The workflow of assessing the image quality is comprised of 3 steps: processing the raw image, scoring the processed image and then classifying the score into "Good" and "Bad" categories

The prototype

To verify the assumptions and fine tune the model and user experience, the full concept was implemented as a Progressive Web App prototype.

A working prototype can be found here: Image quality prototype

The Implementation

The image quality check had been implemented into the image upload process in the native mobile apps and the Web app. Feature setting were added to the Admin Console app, to enable administrators fine tune the behavior to specific use cases / services

Image upload process with quality check

Patient UX

Administrator settings

• Administrators can:
• - Toggle the image quality check on or off per service
• - Select the scoring model (for additional future models to suit differen use cases)
• - Set the max number of failed upload attempts (after which the image will be uploaded as is)

The impact

A MVP was implemented in the Web app and the native mobile apps, exceeding the minimum required KPIs and a good level of user acceptance

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Appointment rescheduling agent

The unmet need

• Appointment based services ("scheduled services") face challenges in ensuring efficiency in a dynamic environment
• For example, a scheduled appointment is canceled by the customer, which creates an empty slot or, a service provider cancels an availability slot where appointment have already been scheduled
• Such naturally occurring events make keeping an efficient and 'fair' system a challenge. Usually requiring costly human intervention in order to review the changes and try to balance capacity vs demand while maintaining the service level agreements (SLAs)

The value proposition

A system that reviews the calendars, detects unbalanced capacity / demand sections, and issues reschedule offerings to customers, whether moving the appointment forward or backward in time

Example use case

• A patient cancels a future scheduled MRI scan appointment
• The system looks for appointments scheduled for a later time as candidates for filling the vacant slot
• The system sends an email/SMS/voice message to the customers of those appointments, suggesting to reschedule the appointment for the vacant time slot
• When an offer is accepted by one of the candidates, the appointment is rescheduled and the vacant slot is filled

The KPI

• Reduce the 'over / under capacity' (where service resources are idle or overbooked) time for a given time period
• Reducing manual resources needed to operate the schedules

The main requirements

• Should be workable 'out of the box' with predefined best practices configuration scenarios
• Enable non-technical users to fine tune the basic scenarios to accommodated different business and operational use cases
• Enable support / professional-services teams implement low level customization to the basic logic, without installing a new product version

The system logic

The system consists of two main processes: backward scheduling - which is the action of moving appointments backward in time, and forward scheduling - which is the action of moving appointments forward in time

Backward rescheduling logic

Forward rescheduling logic

The user experience

Customer

Customers receive rescheduling offers via Email, SMS, phone or push notification based on the service settings and can approve or reject the offer

Administrator

Administrators can decide if to activate or not the rescheduling agent per service, fine tune its settings and logic, choose the communication channels and the templates to be used and customize the messages. In addition, the administrator can view the rescheduling agent's performance and efficiency reports

The impact

The feature was released to selected test services, and showed a significant improvement in the efficiency of the appointment scheduling process. Due to the complexity of the logic that needs to be implemented per use case, the test run raised the need for a simulation tool to test the results of such a system before deploying it to production.

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Virtual queue simulation

The unmet need

• As a platform designed to automate high volume remote and face-to-face clinical encounters in many different environments and settings, the way it is configured and customized is critical to the success of the deployment
• As it grew in features and complexity, it became impossible to predict how different configurations will affect parameters like waiting times, service times, queue lengths, clinician utilization etc. And in turn, how would that affect SLAs and patient clinical safety
• The common practice was to deploy changes to production and pray that nothing goes wrong
• Hence the need has arised for a reliable way to test different configuration scenarios before they were implemented to production

The value proposition

A virtual environment that simulates the real world, and allows to test different configuration scenarios and their impact on the system's performance.

The KPI

• Simulated results are within reasonable accuracy with actual results
• Adaption of the practice of simulation by customers and customer facing teams

The MVP

• As an MVP the simulator was designed to be a stand alone tool for internal use
• No graphical user interface required
• Outputs can be exported and communicated with stakeholder

The simulator components

The implementations

The simulator is implemented as a stand alone Python script that can be run from the command line. The outputs were both numerical and graphical

The simulation input

The simulation output

Some examples of the simulation graphical outputs

The impact

The simulator proved to be highly accurate in predicting the system performance based on various configuration scenarios, an achievement that was not possible before. It became the go-to practice when introducing new configurations internally and while communicating changes with customers.

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Patient 360° view

The unmet need

• Telemedicine providers require - for both clinical needs and regulatory compliance - to view data about a random patient from different sources
• This data could be demographic - e.g age, gender, address; clinical - e.g existing conditions, treatments, prescriptions; or other such as eligibility, insurance, child safety etc.
• Usually there are multiple systems a clinician or administrator needs to interface in order to view the data, which is inefficient. In the better case, an expensive bespoke integration is done which is hard to maintain and upgrade
• Our product, bening the primary system used by remote and out-of-hours health care providers, clearly needed a simple, reusable and scalable way to integrate and display data from multiple systems in a single view, which is easy to implement, maintain and reuse

The value proposition

A framework, built into the core product, that enables a structured way to integrate and display data from multiple systems, which is easy to implement, customize to specific customer's needs, maintain and reuse

The KPI

• The KPI from a B2B product point of view is the amount of customers opting for an integrated solution vs using multiple systems

The main requirements

• Should define a customizable structure for displaying summarized data and detailed data
• Should define a structured 'plug in' mechanism to add data resources
• Should be customizable, within defined boundaries, to specific requirements

Conceptual architecture

The system consists of reusable data sources plugins, a customizable data processing engine and a templates based display front end

Display framework

The display framework consists of a designated place for the summarized data and a place and structure for the detailed data, controlled by customizable templates

Administration

Administrators can select suitable display template per service

The impact

The framework prooved to be highly successful in enabling the integration of multiple data sources into a single view, and adopted by multiple customers

In one case, when a customer suffered a prolonged outage of its clinical data system, our teams managed to integrate the sources into our system in a few days utilizing the framework, enabling the business continuity of the customer

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Shift planning

The unmet need

• Clinical practitioners are typically the most in-demand, in-shortage and costly resource for health service providers
• Hence, carefully planning their shifts is critical for maintaining an efficient and viable service
• In our target market, shift planning was done with various tools from white board and markers to spreadsheets to various specialized software
• All of the aforementioned tools demanded onerous effort, and depended heavily on human knowledge of the day to day operations in order to be efficient

The value proposition

Having large amounts of data on the actual operations of the clinical services, we saw an opportunity to provide an integrated shift-planning tool, leveraging data to enable better planning quality, simplify the process and provide insight that is otherwise not available to the planners

The KPI

• Adoption level of the shift planning tool by services

The implementation

• Clinicians' shifts are entered via a graphical user interface per service
• Based on the entered shifts, the system calculates the aggregated capacity derived from the individual characteristics of each assigned clinician
• The system presents the total capacity vs the expected demand based analyzing historical data, enabling to balance the two
• In addition, for every shift, the system calculates the predicted waiting times for the given planned capacity and predicted demand, enabling insight on SLA compliance

The impact

The tool was adapted with good user satisfaction in some services, but faced challenges in use cases where the organization was heavily invested in a third party specialized solution which offered more features. Additional development was required to successfully compete with the specialized solution

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Owing to his unique and extensive skill-set, Erze is Instrumental in the conceptualization and design behind all advanced and innovative features. In addition, he also took a dominant role and became instrumental in providing crucial knowledge expertise for the PS/account mgmt/support teams.

Within the product team, Erez is the main simplifier, problem solver, rational thinker and counter balancer. I can confidently say that “No Erez, less of a chance to nail a MVP”

On a personal level, I enjoy working with him and often look forward to our conversations to share thoughts and hear his feedback, both on work and non work related issues

In summary Erez is instrumental for me to be able to deliver on our product vision and objectives, as well as for the current, and future, success of the company. I think he is a mission critical asset to the company both in terms of his personality and his extensive and unique skill-mix, experience and capabilities.

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I had the pleasure of working closely with Erez for several years on a complex telehealth digital product, where he led product management and I handled product design.

Throughout our collaboration I was constantly impressed by his methodical approach, deep understanding of user needs, and ability to navigate complex challenges with clarity and precision.

Erez is not only a great listener—always open to feedback and different perspectives—but also a strong strategic thinker who brings brilliant ideas to the table in an effective and actionable way. His ability to balance user experience with business goals made our collaboration seamless and highly productive.

Beyond his skills, he’s simply a pleasure to work with—professional, thoughtful, and a true team player. Any company would be lucky to have him on board!

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I had the pleasure of working alongside Erez for close to 6 years, when we were part of the management team at Netex.

Erez always had a unique perspective and approach which had a tremendous effect on the development and product teams. His ability to take ideas and manifest them into fully operational products was remarkable.

He was involved hands-on with every aspect of the product journey, understanding the clients' needs, highlighting potential issues, and providing solutions.

A true professional at his craft. I hope we get to work together again in the future

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I had the privilege of working with Erez at Ummanu for almost six years, collaborating on the development of numerous innovative and valuable features for our telemedicine platform.

This deep understanding of client needs and ability to translate them into actionable product stories were exceptional.

His structured, insightful, and highly professional approach to storytelling helped me and the entire R&D team fully grasp the objectives behind each feature. This clarity significantly streamlined the development process and enabled us to deliver effective, well-integrated solutions with confidence.

Collaborating with Erez was a fantastic experience. His expertise, strategic mindset, and ability to deliver impactful solutions make him an invaluable asset to any organization.

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If you are looking for a true creative professional, then Erez Dori is your man. He meticulously went above and beyond my expectations in an efficient and timely manner, when previously others told me the scope of work would be too complex.

I was equally impressed with his patience and customer service

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Dear Erez,

The time has come to write you this letter as a sign of appreciation for your work at "Teleconsulting".

From your first day with our company, you have shown initiative, diligence and responsibility which have contributed significantly to the company's success.

You have demonstrated complete control over all aspects of our work, starting from cultivating reliable relationships with our customers, through independent development of complex solutions, and ending with training our teams in all the aspects of the fruits of your labor.

In the last year, you have contributed another layer as the manager of the consulting group, in the integration of a new system and its successful implementation within the company.

Your unique personal qualities, like your excellent professional skills, place you at the forefront of professionals in your field.

I am confident that you will succeed in whatever you set your mind to. Please consider this letter as a warm recommendation for whom it may concern

greetings,

Moshe Nir

CEO, Teleconsulting

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