Customer Spotlight: CAE Delivers Ventilator Prototype with Training in 11 Days

First up, we have John Peebles, Chief Executive Officer for Administrate. And next we have Amar Patel, Chief Learning Officer for CAE Healthcare, and I believe John's going to get us started. So John, take it away. All right. Thank you, Steve, and welcome everyone. We're really happy to have you on a discussion where I think we're going to cover a lot of interesting topics. I am broadcasting to you all from sunny Scotland over here in the UK, and, I believe, Amar, you're coming in from Florida. And it's it's kind of funny when I think back on the journey that at least CAE and Administrate have been on together. Amar and his team were some of the very last people that I ever ate dinner in person with or saw in person prior to lockdown.

And so Yep. I think that'll be a memory that always sticks in my mind. It was like, well, we'll see you soon, and then, here we are a year later. But, Amar and his team have done some really incredible things over the last year that I'm sure he'll touch on, and there's a lot of exciting things, coming in the future. But I thought it would just be interesting. You've had a you've had a pretty interesting career, Amar, and it's kind of, moved around a bit and, different parts of the country and so forth. But I thought it would just be really, nice if you could just give us a give us a bit about your background, how you got into learning and education and so on, and, you know, what path led you here? It's an interesting Yeah, thanks, John. And good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for certainly joining us and taking the time today.

And John, thanks for certainly hosting and I'm excited about the conversations that we're gonna have. I think it's gonna be really interesting to share both journeys, if you will, as well. So for me, grew up in, family traveled around quite a bit, but I started my career working in EMS and in the mean streets of wonderful Windsor and Hartford, Connecticut for those Connecticut folks out there. And I had the luxury of being part of the EMS system since I was fifteen. And so, you know, the pathway forward really was really heading south. So pretty much I think the entire East Coast at this point hitting the tip in Florida now.

But worked in EMS in Hartford, worked to fire an EMS in Baltimore and did undergraduate and grad school in Maryland and continued down my progression and oversaw simulation education innovation for a healthcare system in North Carolina. And so, over the years I've had the ability to be able to work not only the academic side of the house, but certainly working the streets. And, I've done everything from critical care air and ground transports to nine eleven EMS and fire service, to teaching in the classroom setting at a university based location and really overseeing the innovations work for healthcare. And the last two years have been the most interesting for me is I came out of the non for profit healthcare academic setting and moved into industry.

And certainly a big change for those that have lived it, you know how challenging sometimes it is to go from a non for profit to a for profit environment and the KPIs and the metrics that are in place. And so, for me, I'm still learning and certainly growing, but from an education standpoint, I've had the privilege of doing the master's degrees and the doctoral degrees, and I still keep my clinical stuff up as a medic. So I'm still licensed in multiple states to do that work. You know, even today in the vaccination efforts, still actively involved in a lot of the vaccine processes that are happening all over the country. So it's been a nice journey. It's been an amazing journey and I think it's led to that vastness has led to where I am here at CAE. Yeah, that's great. And maybe just for those of us who may not be super familiar with what CAE does, I know CAE does a lot of different things, and then there are a bunch of health care things as well.

Maybe just give a background for the audience, for context on size of company and some of the products you have and how that all fits together. So CAE has been around for over seventy years. Our mark certainly sits in the civil side of the world. So if you fly anywhere in the world today, there's probably about a ninety percent chance that you're flying with a CAE trained pilot. And so we're known for developing flight simulation technology and training pilots and flight attendants and mechanics in the entire crew from stem to stern on the civil side of the world. We work closely with government agencies in defense and security. And then on the healthcare side of the house, we certainly develop products, services and solutions that are tied to meeting healthcare education and training needs.

And that completely focuses from starting their career in medicine all the way to the seasoned professional. And those solutions certainly vary on the healthcare side of the world. Are tangible human patient simulators, that you would use for training and education. There are skills trainers, are ultrasound trainers, are surgical models, and even the online content components where we're leveraging the world of augmented and mixed reality today. Certainly partnering with Administrate in the development of online educational tools and solutions. And then really kind of hitting the gamut everything and anything that is needed in the market. And our focus on the healthcare side, as it is even on the civil side of the world or the DNS side is healthcare is focused on making healthcare safer.

Our job is to really drop the rates of harm that are present from what it is today, changed slightly with COVID. But that third leading cause of death in the States is four hundred and forty thousand people that are impacted by that to zero, It's a huge mission to go to zero, but we believe that every individual should have no risk associated when we seek healthcare. We've been able to, with civil aviation, if you think about the number of airline crashes and planes with training and education, that number has dropped to almost nil, right? I mean, we see one or two pop up and oftentimes it's not pilot error, it's function error, right? System error, it's other errors that create it. And it's because of repeated training and processes in place to ensure that pilots are doing everything they need to and are able to act just in time.

And we believe that that holds true in the healthcare and a lot of the things that we learn in civil automatically transcend to the work that we bring forward in the health care side. Yeah, I love that connection. So basically you have this career, this clinical experience, you get involved in the learning, piece of that, and then it's time to go into the for profit world. This is a couple of years ago and you come in and you've got this challenge, right? I'm sure, know, CD's got goals and you're growing and all that stuff and you've got this challenge. You come in, you had to recruit a new team, systems, or a question mark. And I want to just pull on one thing from your background, which is you've got a specialization, one of the degrees in some of your studies in business intelligence.

So, that's probably not super traditional necessarily for a CLO, but that probably informs how you approach these problems. You had come into a new industry, you had to build a team, you had to get systems and platforms in place. How did that all? How did you approach all that? And what were some of the drivers there? I mean, king these days, right? And so I've been here with the organization, two years and we can call it a COVIDiversary, right? I think COVID has been a year and a month now, right? Since it's impacted and data is everything when you think about it. When the world of COVID certainly struck up, there was a lot of call to action to ensure that what we're doing from an education standpoint made sense to ramp up, to be able to accomplish the growing gaps that are existence.

And all of us right across the board have had to pivot from this in person learning environment to how in the world do I do virtual trainings and how do I take a classroom curriculum and turn it into a virtual, but yet competency based situation. And what the one thing that the experience has taught me in, you know, I kind of bring my medicine background is I've got to make split second decisions when taking care of people. And that same notion in business is important. You can't spend a lot of time analyzing and analyzing and analyzing data. Data is great, data does drive direction, but at some time you got to pull the trigger and take it at risk, right? And we got to move forward with something otherwise you're going to get stuck in a data circle.

And so, you know, experience wise data mining and losing a little bit of predictions kind of helps, move decisions forward. Yeah, and I think back, you know, CAE throughout the decision making process, you're running this very methodical, very thorough decision making process on, you know, putting a platform in. And, you know, at Administrate, we were like, well, you know, is a great customer, very methodical, you know, very you know, thoughtful and so on. And then, you came on board and then we learned how fast CAE likes to work.

Yeah, it was like pedal to the metal right away. But I think there were several times where, and part of it was just dictated by COVID-nineteen and priorities were changing, in some cases overnight. But I remember I remember, it was just one of those things where, that your crew pointed out several times. Well, this is why we wanted a platform and this is why we needed access to data so that we could be really fast and make these changes. And it's been a blur, but I think there's been so many things have been achieved. I don't know if you want to share some of those projects, but, it definitely strikes, me that, you know, for those of us listening in, that speed and that ability to make decisions, quickly and accurately is something that is so important.

And, you know, we probably all had that hammered home a little bit, but then for planning the future, it doesn't. May not be covid anymore, but it could be something else and, it could be equally, you know, as impactful on an organization depending on what it is. Yeah, we don't believe in impossible, right? That word doesn't exist in our culture. We believe in what's called the art of what is possible. And it's the art of what is possible that drives what is actually possible and impossible. Just because you think you can't do it, doesn't mean it can't happen, right? Because somebody else is going to figure it out, right? And somebody else is gonna do it with rigor and speed. And so organizationally, it's a hundred percent driven on, we believe in speed, we believe in quality to execution.

As a great example, a testament to speed, because I think when I started, you guys are starting to live some of it was the development of the ventilator, you know, on our side in response to COVID-nineteen. And everybody will tell you across the board that that was impossible. And yet we did it, right? We developed a fully functional ventilator in a record speed of time, right? And it's currently actively working through, it's being utilized and it's deployed in Canada and it's achieved FDA certification under the EU here in the States. It's all about the art of what is possible and what is needed. And again, our focus is on making healthcare safer. And how we do that is ensuring that we have not only the products available to ensure safety, but the solutions from a training perspective.

And one of the biggest challenges that are present is education, right? First thing to get cut off of anybody's budget is training. First thing to get deployed is training, right? First thing to get cut is travel money for training. And that's where errors in healthcare stem from. I thought I knew it, but I didn't know it, right? That unconscious competence that's often present or that unconscious incompetence that's present. And how do we ensure that individuals have the just in time trainings and available resources and tools online to achieve that. So we're all about the art of possible, not what's impossible. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I remember it was the ventilator project gets going. I mean, we're talking days, right? It was like, if I remember correctly, like twelve days or something.

It was from zero to approved in eleven weeks. Yeah, right. And the project was like, we're going next week. And so why that impacted, you know, our partnership was because, well, you got to you got to have the training. And I remember, you know, that was another thing that that CAE has been. It's been really interesting to observe. And maybe it'd be something for those of us who are listening in to kind of hear a little bit more about is how is it that CAE, the training organization, seems to be basically either leading the charge or right there up at the front on these very aggressive initiatives. You know, what helps you do that? How do you get to that point?

Is that, you know, what are some of the keys that people could take away from if they're not feeling like they're up there in the front leading the charge of the organization, particularly when times are tough? Yeah, it's a good question, right? So it's been embedded in our culture for the last seventy plus years, you know, that the institution has been here. And honestly, one the benefits that we've had from our civil partnerships and our defense and security sides of the arm is they've been in this, this is ingrained. Training is such a core element to our safety and our work that we do that culture, that need, that drive is certainly pushed over under the healthcare side of the business. And we do on the healthcare side, we do sixty million hours of training a year.

And what's important with that journey is you think about sixty million hours is how do you achieve that and get the buy in from a record speed time. And it starts really at the top. Training has to be part of everything that you're accomplishing, whether it's new product development and release, whether it's internal, just cultural wellness and bias training, whether it's just understanding the limitations of an individual. Here, the one belief that we have is that training is driven by student being student centered, right, about the individual. And it's customized to be about the individual. And it's away from this notion that one size fits all. And one size doesn't fit all. I mean, how many of us listening in today have had freshman biology, And at the end of the day, your professor says, look left, look right, that your partners won't be here today, right?

And that notion of one size fits all isn't setting us up as an organization for success. And so that notion of individual customized training to drive success and to make things safer has been a cultural element for a long time. And to get to that point really starts at listening to your teams and listening to and sending that message all the way to the top level. Within our own structure, at the highest level of this organization,

Mark Prontera, corporate CEO and my boss, Heidi Wood, believe training is essential for our global success. And it starts at those levels to ensure that we all believe that it's such a core element to our work. Yeah, I like that. So one of the things we think a lot about at administrate is training infrastructure. And, you know, maybe that doesn't make us the most fun at parties, but we think it's super important, right? And maybe a different way to say that is even training ecosystem. And that includes, you know, obviously the people that are involved, but also you've got a lot of equipment at CAE. I mean, there's test dummies or what look like crash test dummies, and they've got all these simulated organs and stuff.

And I don't pretend to know a whole lot about that, But that's equipment that needs to be integrated into this ecosystem. You have learning products, you've got classrooms, you've got online and so on. How does the ecosystem come together for you and your team? The journey really starts at the beginning, and that journey is what would the journey look like from the other end, right? So if I was an individual who needed to learn about and I'm going to use procedure skills as an example, IV therapy, right? Or let's do vaccines because that's what's going on now in the world. If we want to learn about intramuscular injections, know, where does that journey start? And is it an existing provider? Is it somebody who's new to this in the US? Were having to, people are having discussions all over the news and media of individuals who don't traditionally do I'm injections to be part of the vaccination efforts.

And we're seeing that across other areas. So that journey starts living in that seat. If you were that person, what would you wanna know? Right? And we work from that individual forward, not from what we as a business believe to be true. And if I'm sitting in that seat and have all those questions to ask, and we work through that, right? And the good news is, my team has got that diverse population of providers and learners. And so we start with the team level and then work through our voice of customer to really drive the educational gaps and the need that are present in the marketplace. Those every single time not only come down to a tangible, physical something, right? Whether you're learning how to use an iPhone or, you know, use a pair of headphones, that journey starts there and then works through the, okay, how do we ensure that you have the training tools?

So I'll give you an example. With the COVID vaccine stuff that's been going on right now, one of the biggest elements is learning how to do intramuscular injections. And what we found was that the seasoned professionals knew how to do IMs, they knew them well. That's what they did in their daily practice. But the COVID vaccine is different. So it's different in a lot of ways. You have certain time periods you have to accomplish before the thaw times, you've only tabletop times, you've all those different elements. Do you know how to do that? Do you know what the limitations are? Do you know where the injection sites are, right? What happens if somebody has a reaction? There's all these things that we don't always think about in the process. So, we worked through that journey. We looked at individual customers and they helped us work through that journey.

And what we found was that it wasn't just the boring online death by PowerPoint presentations, but we needed something more interactive and more agile. And we developed the app, right? We have something called CAE injection. It's online in the Apple store now. And that's something that your team as well. That was one of those rush to go, right? I gotta get this done. And we gave you almost no time to able to do that in. That sits on the Apple store today. And that's a device that not only has the just in time training for vaccinations, but it has an artificial intelligence engine that measures I'm injection performance and provides you with a grade that's reported in a learning management system. And that was done at record speed because it was driven by a gap that was identified from providers that are in the field that are doing the work, not us guessing what that work actually looks like.

Yeah, I remember that well. I think that was either Christmas Eve or the day before Christmas Eve. You know, here comes CAE again, and I think what's interesting about the approach is it is very different, right? Because you did start from first principles. It wasn't just we have an LMS and that's all we've got. Let's ram our content in there and whatever. And I remember somebody from our team called up and said, hey, you know, there's this thing going on and, whatever. And I was like, oh, wow, you know, it's Christmas Eve. And they're like, yeah, but it's really cool. Right? And and it's gonna help people, you know, it's okay. And I was struck by that because there there were some engineers involved that had built the app. They had to get results back into administrate, and it all had to be done, very accurately and very quickly.

And I was just kind of struck by that whole thing. The decision had already been made a long time ago, probably when you first started building your team, that platform and infrastructure and ecosystem matter, right? Which then allows you to even contemplate these types of things. Right? There's just no way that we'd be we'd have engineering teams talking to each other about injection apps, right before the break without that investment early on. So I guess my question would be, what would be your advice for people that are trying to emulate or replicate this speed and accuracy and flexibility? How do they go about planning their budget?

How do they go about planning their their tech stack? You know, because all of this stuff all this stuff matters. And then there's no time to just go and do an implementation real quick of a platform if you don't have one, right? You've got to be prepared. Yeah, injection was funny. That was a four day sprint, right? From zero to complete was a four day sprint. And when we add the online reporting elements into the administrative platform for completion, I think it was like another two days, right? So within a week, we had a fully functional app that had just in time training and certificate generation in an LMS, right, where people can actually log in and look at it from both sides of coin. And that is driven by dedicated teams, right? These are teams that are working on all hours of the day, to ensure collective success.

And we pull triggers to ensure that there's an executive sponsor, there's a solutions owner, there's a team underneath it for execution standpoint. And these are dedicated to the project to ensure that they get resolved quickly. And that solutions owner, that journey owner owns not only the development of, if it's a product, the product and then call software the product in a lot of these cases, but ensures that the experience is clean and it meets the growing need. And how that happens is, we start with an idea and design, but that happens in a small set of sprints and ultimately leads to an end solution. But from an education and delivery standpoint, it always starts with a core team dedicated to getting this done and because when you dedicate people, you could move with speed.

When you start pulling people in different directions, not only do you risk quality, but you risk focus and it just delays projects across the board. And it struck me too. There was high autonomy as well, right? I mean, were there were decisions being made by, you know, people very close to this that nobody was calling you up or calling me up. Right? Our teams are just working and making decisions as things and that that was another, I think, key component of that of that thing. And it's a super cool app, so, we're probably probably haven't even described it very well. Do you wanna, like, tell people how it works? Because I think it's super cool. So, it is, so there's two components. You can actually go online CA injection. There's a seven day trial. You can download it off of the Apple Store or the Android, Google Play Store.

But, the really cool thing with it is not only does it have all of their vaccination content, so it updates in real time and it's actually specific by country, right? So Canada, for example, just released AstraZeneca, there's two versions of AstraZeneca vaccine. J and J is still going through its review in the States, J and J is approved, but AstraZeneca is not. So the content is driven by the geographical region and the approval processes in those, given locations. And so you have all the content, everything from the initial unboxing all the way through all your information to guide the vaccine process. And we do remind people to hand wash because hand washing has been an issue for two hundred years and it continues to be an issue that education cannot seem to solve.

Know, one of the elements in there is called an injection test and we use what we call an injection puck, which mimics, the deltoid location for I'm injections for COVID specifically. And there's an artificial intelligence engine that's leveraging the camera functionality of your phone and some other native features of the phone. And based on the distance, it's actually able to measure speed of injection, location of injection, accuracy, the depth of the needle. And then you would basically train yourself on how to give injections to this puck and drawing up all the information, drawing up the vaccines and stuff. And we actually have a simulated vaccine, right? Not that you can see it, but I have a simulated vaccine as well.

And you're graded on that. And that grade is driven by what the benchmark standards are for that given skill. And you get a report and then that can be utilized to help clear individuals towards being vaccinators, when it comes to the pandemic. It just accelerates the speed in which we can roll out education for individuals. Yeah, very, very cool. And you basically just put your phone there, and it watches you and tells you to tilt the needle the right thing. And I was like, well, I even maybe I could could figure this out at some point. So so that's like that's like kind of the the strange and wonderful, projects that have gone, but there are other things that are going on that are a priority.

And and by the way, that those are that's an FDA regulated or or, you know, those results have to be kept and audited and all that, right? I mean, so this is not just training Yeah. If you're using them towards the ultimate, delivery of said vaccine for part of it, it's a training record that has to be maintained and provided, right? So it is, you know, and today it sits in the administrative platform. It's part of the individual can go in and look it up and find it. And so, you know, for that particular stuff, we actually had to do online self directed training and then as well as the injection so that we had complete, you know, complete solution in play. And and you can see, you can see the progress of that. Yeah. So it is training. It is something that has to be required. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, when when you're not building augmented reality artificial intelligence powered apps in days, and you're not building ventilators in weeks, to to help us all fight a pandemic, what else is going on? What is what is the, you know, What is the more run of the mill challenges that you guys think about and face up to? Because I think I still always think it's really interesting to watch how training teams engage with their organizations and what are the things that they zero in on and come to the table with solutions for and so on? Yeah, you know, I think the biggest challenge and I think we're all going to live it here shortly is what happens when things open back up again?

Does this world of digital that we know today go away? Does it become more of a hybrid model? Or, you know, or is there some other notion that's in play here? And if you're asking me what keeps me up at night, I would arguably say that's it, right? What is that future actually look like in this post pandemic world? Although I'm not even sure the pandemic will ever go where things are going, right? But in this post pandemic world, what does that actually look like and how do we move forward from that? And I think hybrid is here to stay. So what the teams are certainly tasked with today is growing the hybrid model for education, right? I think you're gonna see more online training and you're certainly seeing this notion of augmented mixed and virtual reality.

So XR is the future. And how does XR play a pivotal role in broadcasting education and competency based learning forward? Right? So, I use this notion of the time of the Avatar effect, right? We've all watched the movie Avatar and you end up in this cage of sorts that you're controlling a whole another body. Well, how do we gain competency based assessment and learning using digital, right? It's a notion that we all don't know. How does medicine become competent in skills using digital, right? Which is part of the reason why for us, the app was such an important thing. But, that's the stuff that we're working on in any given day is really trying to future cast out, you know, what does the next month or the next month or the next month look like? Because in person training may come back, but you know, we don't know what the future of hybrid currently sits at, but we still have to be ready for a fully functional digital ecosystem that's driven by mixed reality, you know, artificial intelligence, AI engines from a learning perspective are here to stay.

I don't think they're going away at all. Yeah. I think it's a great point. You know? And I I kinda think a lot about, you know, because you see people and, I help out with a a local tech conference here in Edinburgh and Scotland. It's it's really great. And, you you know, for a while, there was this concern, oh, you know, our conference is just gonna go away and, you know, we're all gonna just do this online. And I was thinking to myself, I will I will never do a Zoom call ever again, you know, after the pandemic. You know, it's just I'm gonna go to everything in person that I can possibly go to, but that's me and, probably unrealistic. But I think a lot about, a customer of ours that and this is a couple years ago, they started and they did classroom training, and it was, you know, high end software, training on software, and people fly in and they pay a few thousand dollars and, you know, the meal and the hotel and the flight and all that.

And it was global and it was, you know, it was the thing that we're all pretty much well acquainted with. But what they did was they actually started offering the virtual instructor led train, same content, right? But, they offered it and they charged more for it. And what they found was they were getting people were taking them up on that. And this is pre pandemic because they could actually save money and potentially save time and so on. And I thought that was really interesting because it was like this different modality, but they could actually generate more revenue. And it's again meeting the student kind of what you talk about. And, you know, does that mean, like you say, I do a little bit of augmented reality app in my home and then I do a little bit of classroom on-site and then I do refreshers online.

But we just don't know what that's going to look like or what people will want to do. And, you know, future proofing yourself for that, I think, is a huge concern that we probably all have. You know, how how do we do that? So how how is CAE how are you thinking about, you know, future proofing yourself for whatever, five, six day project we have, next, you know? Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of five and six day projects to come, I'm sure. You know, the future, it's funny. It is stuff that keeps us up, you know, us up, but training is here to stay, right? And the notion of, you know, healthcare is clinically focused in a lot of ways. And so where our head is always at is training, training, training, education, education, education.

And what's not out there? What can be done better? What needs to be stronger, right? Where are the individual pain points? Even to the point where pain point investigations for us are very personal, personal in the sense of I'll go do them, right? I mean, I was at a customer site going through an entire evaluation to see what we can come up with to resolve some of their pain points. And those pain point investigations are important because if one person is feeling it, then there are a lot of people feeling those points, right? It's just there's we have one shadow, one window into it. And sometimes it's just as simple as looking at, you know, a small structural change within an organization. But our future proof is driven by really understanding where the customer is at and really thinking in the future state, right?

So thinking about five years from now. So if you asked me the question two years ago, where is telemedicine going to be at? I'd have said, it's the next biggest thing since sliced bread, right? Today, where is it? It is the next biggest thing since sliced bread. We're all using it, right? We're actually engaged in it from a healthcare professional standpoint. Ultrasound was the same way ten years ago. Ultrasound, we were doing ultrasound training ten years ago and people were like, what are you using that for? It's never gonna take off. Right? And today it's the standard of care in medicine, right? So we're constantly thinking about that. There's constant ideation sessions around that. And we don't, you know, this isn't, this isn't the leadership team that's driving those solutions often. It's the folks on the ground. It's the people that involved in it.

There are people at the bedside that are part of it, right? And, you know, I'm lucky in the sense that my entire team is almost all clinical. And so they're living it every day just the same, right? But it's also looking at others and working closely with customers to figure out the now, the here and now, but also where their roadmaps takes them. Yeah, and you talk about the team and I agree it's so important. One of the things that seems to strike me as interesting again about the health care is for an organization of your size, your team makeup is different than what you tend to see, right? You have tons and tons of people doing administrative work. You don't have, you know, loads and loads of bodies, but you do have every now and then you have an engineer or two that comes onto the team and works towards a project which is not super normal for, these these learning projects.

And you've got, you know, content designers that are probably working a little bit untraditionally to help with augmented reality stuff or whatever. Maybe just talk us through what is what is your team mix look like and and how do you think about that relative to kind of the technology that you're using to get all this stuff done? Yeah, the teams are multidisciplinary. And so when we put a project team into play, it's usually a clinical expert that's there. There's always a project manager. We always have a technical writer. You know, we always add an instructional designer into the mix. And then there's, you know, a heavy focus from the engineering teams. And so we work closely, so for, you know, not traditional, but from an education perspective, we're heavily aligned with the product management teams and the engineering teams.

And as a commercial organization, we're equally aligned with the sales part of our organization. These are, if you will, four different departments that are collaborating together to end up with a single solution. And those four departments equally send representatives to the table to ensure that from a commercial side of the house, it makes to the marketplace, right? From a product management side of the house, they're gonna end up owning whatever we create from a solution standpoint. From an education side of the house, is it educationally sound? Does it meet the need that's present? Do we have the right expertise in house to be able to drive that from a solutions owner perspective? And then the engineering teams, when we get into things like, augmented and mixed reality or complex connections, and the app is a great example of a complex connection, right?

Connecting a public app into an LMS system, which is not always the case, right? It's not something you traditionally see come up. What is that process and that workflow look like? And that isn't an education team, that is an infrastructure person, that is a networking person, that is a designer, a UX designer on the back end. And those engineering teams bring that talent forward. And each person's perspective is brought there and they work collaboratively together, but we don't, it's not siloed, it's very much, it's driven by collective success. Yeah, I love that. I mean, it's easy to see, you know, the I think the two things that stand out for me are that equal seat at the table, which I think is something that, for me, you know, you talk to chief learning officers all over the country and world, I mean, getting that equality with the other teams in the organization is so important because, you know, that just makes the whole product better.

And it it it drives things I don't care what business you're in. It'll drive down errors. It'll increase your revenue. It'll help retention. Whatever it is that you you know, back to those KPIs that you're talking about, whatever whatever it is that you really are focused on. But then, okay, you've got the equal seat. Now, how do you deliver? Right? Because you do have to have the data and you do have to have the systems and so on to bring to bear. And I think that's always, that's where the fun stuff happens, I guess. So it is where the fun happens. I think that's where the, what we call it's where the magic happens, right? And so at the end of the day. Yeah. I mean, is a journey though. It's not and the one thing that we always forget about is the journey doesn't end when you're done.

The journey continues because injection, there's a team looking at that every day and in the CMS, they're updating that content every day. So every time you refresh that app from a close and open it perspective, it's new content. And that content even in the LMS and the administrative platform is updated daily, right? Because as COVID changes, the content has to shift based on what we're learning about vaccinations and new releases of content and stuff. And so that journey doesn't just start and end with, we're done with the product, that journey continues until the life cycle of that product is true.

And so you're still having to maintain and manage teams that are actively engaged in that. Because as a bug pops up in the AR lens, who's gonna fix that from a sustainment perspective, right? And who's gonna validate that whatever the bug is fixed, doesn't break content changes that are in there, right? So if I have an EKG being broadcasted and they're being evaluated against the ECG, I gotta make sure that the engineering teams didn't break it, because at the end of the day, the learner is the one that's impacted by it.

Totally. What are some of the just to put you on the spot, but you've got a degree in this. So, you know, what are some of the what are some of the KPIs that you really think, you know, you keep tabs on maybe specifically, but that you would kind of say could be of interest to really anyone, even if it's industry agnostic.

Yeah, I mean, from key performance indicators, for us it's driven by throughput and revenue, right? We're a commercial organization. So what we're looking at is team performance across the board and throughput of each individual, right? So what is the individual able to accomplish? And each job description has its own set of KPIs and those are everything from performance metrics to collective revenue metrics, driven by the department and the org that are put down to us. We're looking at outputs, right? So outputs on how many educational programs that are being released on a given period of time. What is the impact they have? The number of learners that they're impacting across the board. So speed and quality, and quality has a huge metric behind it. You know, how many issues are popping up as a result of a release or an educational module?

How often are we having to go back into it? What is the time waste that's present? What is the expenditures associated with all of it? So there's quite a few that are actively looked at, but it's oftentimes time, quality issues and money that usually sit in the pocket. Yeah. And, at least one of those is seems to be a struggle traditionally, for some, you know, some training learning teams to get in, which is, you know, finances. Right? Like, demonstrating that ROI is like I can't tell you how many times Challenge. Talked about this with yeah. I mean, it's just, but but it seems like with kind of the infrastructure you put in place that that that's well in hand. I think, we can learn still, right? So I was gonna say, there's still lots of learning here and, you know, we're a learning organization, right?

And just like all of us are learning, we make improvements on stuff daily, right? We learn from each other, we learn from others and we'll make constant changes to whether how we're capturing data or how we're capturing the metrics or how we're displaying it, just because it can be different. And we know one way or two ways or three ways, but you know, bringing fresh talent in or reaching out with others really helps us shape that moving forward. Yeah, absolutely. I think we've got about minutes left, and there might be some time for some questions. I've seen a couple come in.

So let's see. I maybe this is more of a maybe this is more of a comment, not even a question. It says, you know, I like I like the guitars in the background. Right? Thank thank you so much. So this is this is always fun time for me because I get to kinda put on my podcast equipment, and this all used to be, you know, guitar guitars in the back and these mics and headphones or whatever. It's like, you know, I I get to think that I'm in a band again. So whenever we can use this stuff, I'm always excited. Glad. But it says, question Omar, How do you deal with the group learning aspect performing as a team if you can't get people together? And that's kind of first part. And then second is simulation is about hands on. How do you overcome at present the limitations that people might not be able to come together or near a site where a simulator is?

Yeah, so first one is how do you manage the different training modalities, right? And so it's driven by the technology needs that are present. And so one of the things that we take a deep dive into it is what is really required from a skills based application and what can be just cognitive in nature. So when you really break, you have to break the two apart. When you start mixing the two together, that's when you start running into roadblocks in terms of the learning performance, learning outcomes. And we measure cognition first and a lot of that can be done in a multitude of ways. Artificial intelligence, AI engines, adaptive educational modules, and we have a strong partner, we work closely with on that front. We leverage that technology to really drive the understanding of the individual, not only provide education, but really understand where their gaps are and let the

system really drive that forward. The second piece of that is, can we leverage augmented mix and virtual reality to be able to drive some of the practical elements in a remote virtual world? And the answer is yes. And you're seeing more and more data come across. So if I create a virtual hospital, a virtual environment, can they methodically work through the systematic steps to surgery or putting out an oarifier or putting an IV in, right? There's other things that you can do. And from a research perspective, the answer is yes. And when we add HoloLens and you add eye tracking technology into the mix, I can actually speed up and build technology like we've done with the app to measure performance and let eye tracking drive the direction in which individuals are actually seeing.

And that actually has a competency tied to it. So let's add the tangible simulation because those are all simulation elements. They're not in person hands on, but they're an element of simulation. When we add the tangible in person simulation experiences, now you're mixing cognition with application. Now we're truly understanding, do they actually know and are they able to apply it? And how we've been able to really get into how to do the application component of it is think about telemedicine as an example. How does the physician know how to ask you the right questions or guide you towards an end goal or a diagnosis, right? And how we do that is we leverage other technologies. So we leverage, in this case, it's a HoloLens two, it's Microsoft's HoloLens and we broadcast through holograms.

We have an educator sitting in a space with a simulator. We have a learner that's actually dialed in through remote assist or dynamic three sixty five into that application. And the remote learner is guiding the educator through the sequential steps to manage the patient, the simulated patient. If they're able to walk us through that assessment, management, treatment, leg positioning for OB deliveries, movement of the head, then you can easily tie their ability to be able to understand and apply the knowledge with that. The last step is certainly can they physically do it themselves. And oftentimes that requires a little bit more uniqueness where you can actually leverage virtual reality or other things to be able to drive that coming forward. So we've been able to come up quite a bit in those areas by leveraging other technology to drive that.

It's kind of replicating each piece of that and then maybe at the very end you still have to do the hands on, but know, it's way more compressed and yeah, that makes sense. Well, and you're tying three segments. Sorry, you're tying three, you're tying online learning, you're tying augmented mixed reality and then you're tying the full simulation experience. And when you mix the three, not only do you create a student centered environment, but you actually get a good picture of the learner's performance and behavior. Gotcha. I'm laughing at this, next question. It's a great question, which is the reason I'm laughing, you'll get it and and just say, says, how is your LMS and HR system integrated? If so specifically, how do you link performance to learning offerings? And the reason that I'm kinda chuckling is because I think this was, the first project that we thought we were going be doing, you know, way back in kind of April or May of last year.

And then, you know, things kind of priority shifted or whatever. And I think now we're now we're we're going to be working on that together. But, you know, question for you. Yeah. So we're large organization, lots of learning management systems in play here. And so we're working on that integration today. We're not a hundred percent integrated right now. It's very manual. So my system administrator, my group leader for digital learning, she's having to manually enter a lot of the data that's present. So a future state for us is certainly being able to link, HR challenges and HR offerings through that competency tool, but we do it very manually today, unfortunately.

Yeah, But she's motivated. That's for sure. She's very motivated. Let's see. I'm trying to go through some quite a lot of great questions. Hopefully, we'll have time for one or two. There was one about what what are some metrics you use, but I think you covered that towards the end, Amar. And there's a question about what is the link for the app again. We'll we'll send out a a link if that's okay with at the end. And we've got some resources that talk about, you know, ecosystem and all that stuff. And then there's, you know, there's one which is, what are the top and somebody says customer centric like it, which I couldn't agree more with. And and a comment about, eleven weeks is lightning fast.

And, yes, it it felt electric. That is for sure. But here's one, which is, what what are the top two challenges that you kind of face as an organization when you're trying to commercialize something like the injection app? That was interesting. Yeah, I mean, top two challenges. One is speed, right? We set ourselves a clear deliverable. And I mean, for us doing stuff fast, you know, the art of impossible comes up often, right? And we live in this notion of art of, it's the art of possible. And so making sure that the culture continues and that sense of urgency and pride moves forward. So speed is certainly always a challenge. And then commercializing it secondarily, the challenges run into is how do we get this thing out there and accepted in the marketplace?

We follow a very customer centric model, but you know, it's how do we ensure that there's acceptance in the marketplace to the commercialization demand that is required for a large organization, right? And that takes time oftentimes, you know, for somebody to build a brand, you can spend a year building your brand, right? Or two years. How do we do that in weeks? Right? How do we accomplish that same task in weeks? And that's oftentimes the challenge too. Gotcha. Another question, and, I think it's interesting, which is, you know, you talk a lot about these achievements and, you know, about how people are important, the customer centric and learner centric stuff is important.

But it's almost kind of like you feel like you've got the the tech is figured out. Right? So I guess the question is what what role does your learning technology play in allowing your team to be more agile and adaptable and to iterate and do so rapidly and all that? Like how important is that to that equation? It's huge. It's immensely important, right? I mean, dissemination of information, expansion of new knowledge is through the learning technology platforms and it it's it's it's immensely, I mean, we can build the best product in the world that helps to substantiate training. But if the learning technology itself is not available and people don't know how to utilize the product or integrate it into their curriculums, useless. It's a product that will never be successful across the way, right?

So even in the case of the ventilator or the injection app or the thousand of the products, the learning technology is an integral element internally to the organization as well as externally to our customers. And you know, we leverage tech to ensure that everybody's on the same level playing field for execution. And so, it's core to what you know, into what we are as a learning organization. Well, that's interesting, right? Because, the level playing field within the organization. So I think we're all used to marketing has their systems and sales has their systems and the company will have its systems. But the learning and training organization also needs its infrastructure and systems. And, you know, I think back to the question about the HR system integration, I mean, that's just one of a number of things that your team is thinking about, right?

And that's that does not that does not feel like it will stop or slow down over time. Right? So, you know, how how do those how do you think about, you know, prioritizing those system integrations? And and what what is is the driver behind a lot of that? And that's probably all the time we have once you answer that one. What is the driver behind how you decide this integration? Well, it's how each system works together, right? So where is the building blocks? So if you think about a pyramid, what is the base of that pyramid need to look like? And then we have an ultimate goal, right? And we have a top level ultimate goal in mind. And how do we build the pyramid and the steps? What drives that is ensuring there's consistency between each layer of the pyramid and ensuring that there's notable success there.

So all of our NPI projects, our new product integrations follow what's called a gate check. At each gate check may launch a new product or a project because of how the integrations work through. But we've gotten good at workflows and triggers and stuff. And so I think it's at the end of the day, it's consistency. It's we're here to win. You know, everybody's here to win, right? And for us, the winning also equally sits at healthcare safety and quality. All right. Well, I think we've got, I think that's probably all we have time for. And but I really appreciate your time, Amar. I really appreciate everybody's time who tuned in, particularly for those of us who are into March Madness.

And, I think my team is playing right now full disclosure. So I've totally not been checking the score while this has been going on, I promise. But, yeah, I really appreciate it. And, I think it's just it's been a really incredible story to watch as a kind of a as a partner and having a front row seat. You know, I think we're an organization that's growing and, but we're still relatively small, right? And to see a large, know, older organization, seventy plus year old company innovating and moving at speed like this, when there's multiple divisions and so on has been really inspiring for us. And I know our team has been thrilled to kind of support these initiatives because at the end of the day, it's helping people and hopefully getting us all back to work in some offices a few days a week if we want.

And, you know, so we're really proud of, of what your team has achieved and, just just we're thrilled to be part of that story. So thanks so much for sharing. Thought it was it was great and, you know, we'll I'm sure we'll be in touch real soon. I'm sure there's a project somewhere in the queue already in in motion. Right? So, no, thanks for the partnership and certainly thanks for, allowing, you know, allowing, this connection. I think it's good to share and and grow. Together we've done so much in such a short period of time. It's hard to believe if you think about twelve months, right? Twelve ish months, what we've been able to accomplish and what's still in the future cast. But

it's always good to share out there because we learn from each other. So thanks for the opportunity and your openness. Yeah, no, absolutely. All right guys. Well, I do wanna say thank you as well, John, Ahmad, thanks for taking the time to present for us today.