Community Services Industry Masterclass Insights

Nuno Goncalves: Hey, Mike.

Mike Reed: Hello, how are you going?

Nuno Goncalves: I'm doing good. How about yourself? Already the first days of almost spring on the, in New York, or not yet? Yeah, days getting longer..

Mike Reed: I can, the t - shirts are making their way towards the top of the pile. They're not out yet. But,. Yeah. They're getting there.

Definitely getting there.

Nuno Goncalves: I can imagine someone coming from Australia that you have, this, it's three quarters of your wardrobe are, something that you would use in Australia and then Yeah. You probably need to balance a little bit with the weather. Yeah. Really. Really?

Mike Reed: Yeah. In Sydney there's only the one, there's only one summer, one, only one season, right. So, yeah. But over here I get to diversify into other things that are also black or gray. So

Nuno Goncalves: there you go. There you go. Welcome everybody. And we're just giving a minute for everybody to come in, to join us.

We know it's an interesting beginning of the year already. If we can still talk about it's still the first quarter, but there's a lot of movement and a lot of things happening in with everything, single person that we speak with as well. So take a little bit of your time and, grab a coffee and have fun and insights from some of the things that we're going to share also here today.

So today's is a we're going to focus in a very for me a very interesting, industry. We're we'll be exploring the community services, industry, which for us is one of the most vital, in complex sectors in the u. S economy as well. So, take as I said bring a cup of coffee and sit back and enjoy and Relax and interact with us because if you have any questions, whether it's linkedin or even here let us know more than happy to divert the conversation to where it makes most sense and where you have more questions as well.

So, welcome back everybody, and welcome to reejig Skills Masterclass. As usual, we, unbundle, work, one industry at a time. Today, as I said, we'll be focusing on this community servicing industry, which is dear to my heart as well and should be dear to everybody, that is having, people that we care and that we know.

that are, in sometimes in difficult situations and needing for care, as well, it's, today we're gonna, we have, an industry that is focused on roughly 600 billion. It's a huge industry as well, that provides, as I said, essential care for millions of folks, including elderly, individuals, with disabilities, children in foster care.

which for me is very close to my heart, as I said, and those facing mental health or substance recovery challenges as well. The most interesting thing, one of the most interesting things about this industry is that it actually brings parts of industries in healthcare, all together. But focus on those that are in specific needs any specific circumstances of their life as well, which is really good.

So, we talked about an industry that has 7 million workers. So very large. Community care is a cornerstone of public health, social inclusion and economic stability in all societies. And this plays a significant role in that platform as well. So as demand surges, driven by everything that we see from a sociological perspective, aging, population, policy shifts, and increased awareness of what exists out there and the care that can be provided to some of these, populations, organizations that are focusing in this care are rethinking their workforce strategies and how to become better.

And that doesn't change Mike from. From other industries than this one, we're all trying to become better and faster and provide more value to the people that we are focusing and targeting, whether being a client on one side or in this case, people that are in need of care as well. So they are rethinking their WordPress strategies to build a sustainable, skilled, and scalable future as the world of work transforms and continues to transform as well.

So. I'm Nuno Gonsalves. I'm heading up a WordPress strategy at reejig. I have always the pleasure of doing this with Mike Reed. Mike is reejig's chief product officer and one of the co founders as well. As I said, we'll be unpacking the complexity of the community services industry. Leveraging is always data driven because we are and we have this responsibility of bringing data for actionable insights in every single industry.

And that's what we want to showcase also today. And hopefully you'll come up, you'll come out of this conversation much richer and with much more insights than before. So that's the challenge for you and me, Mike, as we go through this night, 55

Mike Reed: Minutes that we have left together.

as well. Amazing. No, I'm looking forward to it. And it's been, it has been an interesting start to the year because across a bunch of geographies. This same industry, this industry in aged care, elder care are both continuing to bubble to the surface as areas of specific interest. So not something that I would have anticipated coming to 2025, but community care, elder care, health care are super focus of the conversations that we're having.

So very interesting.

Nuno Goncalves: And it's interesting to see because I've lived in different parts of the world. You've lived in different parts of the world. It could be really interesting to see if we see some differences also, with data or from a perception perspective of how different parts of the world are ultimately investing in this industry as well.

So let's see if we can provide that perspective as well. But what do you think specifically, in this, Mike, do you think there's big differences or, US versus Australia, for example, that you see?

Mike Reed: It's super interesting. I think there's expectation that the amount of direct care that's delivered is going to increase.

I guess that's a reaction to commercial models that may have been putting that at jeopardy. How much time people are actually getting care on the health side. I think what the other thing that we are seeing across all regions is an increase in demand, as you said, child welfare, mental health, aging population.

are decreasing in requirement, they're increasing requirements. So for an industry globally where the workforce have been, maybe have been, under resourced, and aren't at the top end of the pay scale. There's real challenges to deliver in a market where we know demand is increasing, but we also know it's about maintaining a workforce.

So those things are uniform. I guess the data that we've been looking at for this conversation, primarily on the U. S. Market, but with some global, very similar to what we've seen in the Australian market, haven't looked too deeply into mainland Europe or Asia.

Nuno Goncalves: Yeah, but you live there, right? And you're from there.

And I think it's always interesting, from, at least from a perception perspective, how society is evolving, even if then we don't yet have fully the data, but let's explore this and let's go in this conversation. So a little bit of a structure for our conversation and we'll again, and we will tailor it as to the needs.

And to some of the questions that he made, it might eventually have, we will typically provide a little bit of an industry outlook. We go and see what, not only from a data perspective, but also from. Almost qualitative perspective with what CEOs have in their mind, what are they saying and so on and so forth.

So we'll start with a broad perspective of our, of this industry, what are we seeing again from a data and from some of the senior leaders and some of the CEOs of this industry, we'll then say, we'll then focus on our work ontology. Which is ultimately what brings together the view of work, for this industry specific.

We'll drive you through, we'll drive you guys through some of the data that we have there. We'll talk about what does this data means, because that's the sense making is one of the things that I love about Bridging is that we not only bring data, but we also try to understand what is the sense of that data, what are the insights that this data is giving.

And then. And then if we have those insights, what are, what can we do? What are the opportunities that we have on one side? And then what are we gonna do with the opportunities? Right? It's, I think that's the entire journey. First, understand where you are, understanding the industry.

Then understanding the data and what the industry is asking from a leadership perspective, what are the opportunities and then what are we gonna do about it? So that's the intention of these next 52 minutes. And we will be talking about in these actions. Also, how do you develop the skills that ultimately you will need for this industry as it continues to evolve as well.

So that's a bit of our agenda. We'll tailor it as it makes more sense and accelerate here or spend more time in some of the other pieces as well.

The community care industry, as I said in the beginning, actually brings together, a broad spectrum of services, right? And it's not, oh, we're talking about pharmaceuticals, or we're talking about optimization. No, here, we're talking about a broad spectrum of services that are aimed at supporting vulnerable populations, which is the focus, right?

We're talking about, and you heard Mike talk about the elderly, we talked about individuals with disabilities, those with mental health conditions, which I think, and here I'm a psychologist, I have a wife that is a psychologist as well. And it's something that we are very attuned to and we see a lot of differences and, since COVID and to where we are right now and how society is evolving and how mental health is becoming a central part of our health, not only physically, but also mentally as well.

We're talking about children in foster care, and individuals also recovering from substance abuse. So it's different sides of one industry focused on those that are in need and those that are in more vulnerable populations as well. So, you will see, here that, as Mike is sharing here, we're talking about An industry that employs 7 million people, 7 million workers, and one of the largest workforce sectors in the U.

1. You'll see some of the split also there, 600 billion dollars, the U. S. Community care industry, is valued at 600 billion dollars as you can see there. And this is, as I said, the combination between healthcare and disability and many others. So, in some case, a very large industry, not as large as others that we've been seeing here, but one that is complex because of the different dimensions that brings together as well.

It's any, anything in particular that actually that you find industry of this interesting in this community services, industry, Mike, that you want to draw our attention to.

Mike Reed: Yeah, I think just to frame it, I think, as with some other industries, it's in the middle of a transformation. So, as I said, demand uniformly is increasing.

We're seeing, as you said, child welfare. I know, looking at the stats, there's an increased 10 percent year on year since the early 2020s in the U. S. In foster care. So, foster placements, caseworkers aren't changing. So the ability to service that need the ability to manage those cases. It is really stretched mental healthcare's again, emerging 40 percent who is adults reporting, issues, opioid, overdoses, spiking 30 percent during 2023.

So recent stats, all of these numbers are going north and not by points by percentages. So all significant. And the other thing that's happening at the same time. Is we're seeing a significant shift to home care. And that's, that means that the reliance we had on institutional and facilities is really changing.

The ability to have a controlled and replicable environment is changing when we're delivering home care. At home care isn't cheap. When you look at the minimum wages around these workers, if you're looking at home care 24 7, that is significantly more expensive than putting somebody, in a facility or in an institution care.

So there's all these pressures, both on the individuals, on their families, on the workforce in general. So it's, it is a critical, element of a stable society. But all of the metrics for volume and demand are going north, but the ability to supply a workforce to deliver is really presenting challenges.

And that's something I'm really keen to jump into.

Nuno Goncalves: And the interesting thing is that you were talking about the Hopefully increase of middle class and the increase of, the population that ultimately can access home care, right? So, as we become a more sustainable economy, and if we as the middle class hopefully continues to enlarge, hopefully, then this will be something that will be more affordable.

But we see also in the from the industry and sometimes some of the leaders in the industry to actually how to make an effort of how to make, all these services more, sustainable. Available not only available, but more affordable as well, right? And we were talking about home care, and there's a lot of companies also working now in remote care that ultimately would allow one, bigger scale even for parts of the world that don't have necessarily access to medicines or to people that are specialists in their location, but ultimately can have that, part of that care remotely as well I think there's one of the things that one of the questions that is coming on the chat is how do we Foresee technology playing a role in the future of care services and for me, that's one of the dimensions Is technology ultimately allows you scale that typically humans don't have necessarily Allows you access to different populations on one side, but there's also technology on diagnostic.

It's also, there's always technology on actually helping, provide that care perspective as well. But other than this reach and sustainable and, affordability as well, any other dimensions that you would see that technology would we play, would play in this,

Mike Reed: industry?

Yeah, I think if I step back and look at, I think one of your opening comments comparing to other industries, this is about enabling the delivery of the service rather than improving or chasing improved commercial outcomes or faster or more money or grabbing more of the market. This is about being able to sustain, deliver it.

So really it is about. It is about transformation. It's about, and we'll touch on a number of the elements, but I think when we look at a workforce that's not going to, in the current model, be able to deliver on the needs, even in the near term, we have to look at AI as effectively the silent workforce here.

So that AI is a silent workforce in care. They're picking up all of the administrative stuff that's taking people's attention away from the direct interface, the work that only the humans can do, delivering the care. And allowing them to improve the middle here, mental health delivery by using technology.

So really, it's, it is, it needs to become the workforce.

Nuno Goncalves: Right. And if I would summarize, then there's a piece of technology that will have an impact on everything that is structural, meaning the data, the information and so on. So the more the backstage that will be a part of the technology that will allow this scale and reach and access to people that might not have necessarily, access and direct access, whatever they are in the world.

There's another piece that I actually also find it interesting. A lot of these folks are in the ground. They are, they visit and they are not necessarily tied to a desk, right? One of the things that has been some of the challenges that I've seen is actually bringing information, bringing learning, bringing content to people that are on the ground.

many years ago, I was working with the Red Cross, for example, and one of the biggest concerns is how do we push education? How do we push standardization of process? How do we re skill those folks as well? And that's probably most likely and for sure. One place where technology will play a significant role in supporting the improvement of the expertise and the skilling and the reskilling that we all love, of the people that are in this industry as well.

Mike Reed: Good. And the analysis of this industry, this workforce is pretty clear. It's not so much a, an AI implementation or a deployment. It's a trust question in a very human focused workforce in a very human focused industry. It's around trust, recognizing privacy, recognizing health data, recognizing ethics, recognizing what we need around training.

all of those things come together to mean that we need to help this industry up. On a path to adoption. So how can they integrate technology with their workforce, where the workforce is going to be facing these questions of trust, and that's going to be a hurdle in implementation that we need to work together to get across

Nuno Goncalves: understood.

So guys here, mostly what we're talking about. It's a large scalable industry, 600 billion. From a revenue perspective, 77 million workers in being one of the largest workforce in the U. S. As well. It's a combination of different parts of other industries as well that are also growing to what Mike was saying at It significantly as well.

If you remember, we talked about these elderly care services before and it's projected. And if you remember, almost to 2 trillion in 2024 and by 2025, actually going, surpassing those 2 trillion industry as well. With 8. 9. If you remember, 8. 9 CAGR growth rate as well.

So, and this is only one part, this elderly. There are others that also combine, bring and form this industry that are also contributing to the increase of importance of community services industry for us as well. If we see the next slide and if we actually start seeing, some of the concerns and that's also something that we typically do, it's very interesting that also in these community services, the questions and the challenges of the CEOs field are ultimately more or less the same.

Mike, right? You can see here that we're talking about, Joanne there saying, listen, the challenges in workforce and having the skills that we need are not necessarily going away. It's actually increasing one way or the other. You see, that, Craig also talking about the ability to be able to drive innovation in.

in an industry that sometimes it's so scattered and doesn't always necessarily have all the investment that is needed as well. You see, then Alex talking about AI and the need to ultimately help accelerating supercharging superpower, the workers and the people that are, doing this community services as well.

So you continue to see that it's not too different than other industries, right? It's about skills that are still in shortage. And we remember the conversation that we had with nurses as well, which is. No unknown issue that we have also specifically also in the last the question with the skills and the fact that ultimately needs to continue to drive innovation for cheaper services to give more affordability to the people that need and so on and so forth.

It's not different. Yet it's a very different type of services that are being done and a very different industry from its roots as well. What are your thoughts there, Mike? What? What? What? What is specific to this one that might not necessarily be for others?

Mike Reed: So the other thing that I think falls out of the amount of transformation that this industry is going through I is the underpinning commercial model.

I think when you're looking in the US markets transition to home care, increasing demand. I think the, what I think each of the, well, I think what I think some of these leaders are saying is that the current model, the Medicare, the Medicaid reimbursement isn't keeping up. It's not sustainable for them as a provider or for the individuals who are involved.

Almost all. I think when we looked across the data on earnings calls and we love earnings calls because it tells us what's important to the market where people are focusing their energy. But when we look at the earnings and the reporting across this industry or over 80 percent of the providers are saying that funding short call, funding short calls are their top challenge.

Recognizing that 100 percent of them are also saying that they are going to struggle to serve this workforce. But they're saying that the funding shortfall is their top challenge because that is today. So I really do think that there's a, an underpinning transformation of the commercial model. And it's interesting, around the home care, particularly around what, right for the home care of saying is that it's not a question of whether or not technology is going to solve it.

They are actively looking for ways to support their workforce to be able to deliver more care.

Nuno Goncalves: Yeah, and I think it's one of the biggest advantages of technology in this industry as well. Do you, what do you see, almost a world where we would have agents actually replacing some of that care remotely as well?

Mike, is that something that would go through all the hurdles of the regulations and so on to have something that would be or a hybrid, a doctor or To Or a psychologist that is there remotely or, face to face, but with support of technology for diagnostic or on some cases, even completely remote and with an AI agent that is trained.

on whatever we're talking about, whether it's, or addiction or, mental health, that would somehow have a role there, or is it not yet because those are so critical areas that maybe it, we won't see this in the next few years. What's your take?

Mike Reed: I think it's, I'm expecting it to continue to emerge quickly.

So we see almost across the board. Level one interactions is opportunity to pick up level one interactions and address those based on the knowledge. But what have we seen before? How does this map with other circumstances? What are these trying to tell us? And even if that's just a direct. The conversation to the right resource that's already removing a significant amount of the administrative overload in other areas, technical diagnostics that almost 90 percent of that work has been done.

And now the effort of the individuals who were traditionally doing that diagnostics is up and now stepped up a level and really dealing with exception handling and making sure that models are moving forward. So definitely across whether it's conversation and case management. Whether it's, into a medical interpretation diagnostics, there's already a number of technologies in place, which are reasonably mature, and able to do a fair amount of the heavy lifting on some of these interactions.

Nuno Goncalves: Yeah. But at the same time, we're

Mike Reed: talking about, we're talking about an industry, connected with health, connected with, social welfare where regulatory frameworks have to be in place because this is, there's no market around here. We need to be comfortable. The diagnosis is proceeding and treatment in the right direction.

So while it's. Well, it's really exciting to see some of these in place. I think we need to help, the marketers and how can we move this through regulation as well in a responsible way.

Nuno Goncalves: Yeah, and we're typically with FDA's in the U. S. And other regulations. It's it typically takes time, right?

It takes time to bring a drug to the market. It takes time to actually bring different ways of producing and doing research and innovating and so on and so forth. So maybe something that also helps. Even the regulator is actually to be faster as well, because ultimately, we've seen that with Kobe and the vaccines and all that we were able, there was no reason and we were able to accelerate by the exponentially the process of actually doing and developing, not only doing research, but also developing the potential vaccines and cures as well.

So maybe something an opportunity to help them accelerate and be better as faster, better, more efficient as an organization as with the work that they need to do as well.

Mike Reed: And this is really interesting. This applies to everything. So I know internally, when we're looking at our ontologies and developing those, when we go through a process of validating, that's an incredible amount of time, incredible amount of data across each of these industries.

So if that validation with a customer, for example, is a hugely manual task, then that's a huge investment of it. So that's an example of an opportunity to see, can we be using AI separately to be supporting that validation? Translating that to your conversation about the regulator, is their ability in the regulation frameworks to be using AI's and existing models to help with the heavy lifting on validation, not to remove humans from the process, but at least to give them a steer about What do we need to be aware of when we're considering new technologies?

So I think the validation technologies needs to be considering technology just to make sure that it's recognizing we're now talking about big data, huge stuff.

Nuno Goncalves: So if you bear with me, I'm going to actually bring and take this analogy a little bit further because we were talking about diagnostic, right?

And here, this is an industry that ultimately needs to be able to diagnose so that you can bring some, the right care one way or the other. But we also said, listen, but rigid with the ontology, what we also do is that we also somehow diagnose them. Diagnose the health of the work that you do because and I would love to play a little bit with that analogy as we dive deeper on how do we help organizations in this case in this community services actually understand, diagnose some of the pockets of inefficiency.

Some of the diagnose, some opportunities also for to accelerate, and be better as an organization and healthier as an organization. So I'll play a little bit with our analogy because I think ultimately rigid is starts by being a solution that helps with the work ontology surface, give visibility of the opportunities that you have and the challenge that you might need to address as well.

So let's see. If this makes sense and how far we can take this analogy as well, Mike, again, as we go, let's go. There you go. There you go. Let's go. So if we go to the next slide. So if we talked about the industry, then the question is what we're going to do about it. So, and for us, it starts with first.

rigid and I love this. And every time that I see this is something that it's a great reminder. I think we are in a place where, all of us, we see everything innovating very fast and technology and everything going very fast. And I believe we believe, our co founders believe that Whoever you are in every single one of these industries that we talk about, you need to be very bold and being very bold on the way that you do work, not only one way or the other, just accelerating what you do, but actually reengineering, rethinking how you do work and actually and go to a place where it's even, eventually more of a fit for purpose for the services that you deliver and to the clients and to the people that you serve one way or the other.

But being very bold again. Also brings a responsibility on the other side. So that's the balance on the other side You need to be very responsible on the fact that if you are changing and evolving significantly your organization You need to understand that ultimately there's people behind that organization.

And how can we help? Bring clarity of the skills that we will need to Bring and inject and upskill and reskill The people that are today doing the work great work so that they can be a fit for purpose for the future as well. So that balance of being very bold on how you organize work, but also being very responsible in bringing people with you Your talent that you have in your organizations as well is critical and at the center is this zero wasted potential Because if we do that If you have visibility of the opportunity to understand what we're going to do, how we're going to do work, how we're going to, how can we be better if we understand and start mapping the journey, then we can start building and investing on the upskilling and reskilling of our folks.

So that's what we all stand for. That's why we try to give so many insights early on so that you can act and be proactive as well. But we also know it's a journey because, and Mike, we talk, we have many conversations about this and in the past 15 years, the World Economic Forum was saying, they said, oh, there's the skills of today are not skills of tomorrow.

We all know that. And I think that drove a lot of the focus on, okay, what are the skills, right? And, oh, we need to up skills and we need to upskill and reskill people and innovation. And we need more entrepreneurship and we need more digital. And we focused on the skills, which is an important But we've neglected something that I believe now we are, in rigid started to pay a lot of attention to, which is what is the source of the need to upskill and reskill?

Is that because you're reinventing work because work is changing, that's what will drive the needs of skills. So rigid actually starts with the first part of diagnostic. We try to understand what work do you do. We give you visibility of that work so that you then can reinvent your workforce and understand where are the areas where you can automate, where you can, decrease the duplication and areas where you ultimately need to reinvent and just do it differently as well.

So we give you that visibility through the ontology. You'll see it on the next slide. But once you have that data, those insights, that intelligence one way or the other, then you say, okay, what does this mean? From an organizational perspective, what does this mean from an individual perspective and from the roles that you have and the people and the nurses and the clerks and the administrative assistants and so on that you have in this industry, how will their, the way that they are doing work will evolve in the future.

And that's where we then need to start understanding what's the impact at an individual level. So if you have an organizational view and you reinvent your organization. You have an individual view and you reinvent your individuals, your, the skills that you're going to need. And then we need to build the journey towards that, which is a journey of retaining your talent because it's talent that has developed and delivered a lot of value and reskill and upscaling them to pivot to the roles that will be.

supercharged the world that will be more sustainable and exist also in the future as well. So skills are important, critically important, but we also need to understand what's the first, how are we reinventing work so that we understand how will we need to reinvent skills as well, Mike. One of the, and this is probably one of the insights and you were there two and a half years ago that we had is that ultimately we understand that people have skills, right?

And that's the ultimate goal is to understand that people have skills that we need to build those skills and we need to build the skills of the future. Wonderful. Now, let's do some work before that. We also need to understand that there's the work piece and the work, as we said, is what gets automated, what gets transformed.

But work doesn't have skills. Work has tasks. So jobs have tasks. The AI automates tasks. And by the way, it's not only the AI. We, there's the reengineering effects, the combination of the tasks that we will be doing, the humans will be doing and the agents and the AI will be doing. And then.

We understand that there needs to be a correlation between the tasks and the skills. RIGIG, and in my head, there's always this triangle of ontologies give you visibility specifically for every single one of these industries, of the jobs that exist in those industries, of the tasks that exist in every single one of those jobs, and on the skills that ultimately are needed to deliver these tasks as well.

So, That's why we started to build the ontology so that then we can understand and have a better informed decision on the investment of skills as well.

So, if we, talk about specifically on the ontology for the community services, Industry as well. So typically, as you see, we bring the visibility to what I to call my maybe another better word. But for me, it's the unit of work. What is the unit of work and the unit of work is ultimately the task.

It's what you need to do. Right? So we provide visibility to all those tasks, and that's what you see on the bottom side of the slide. We also then start seeing the task by different angles on who does those tasks, and how much time do they dedicate, and how much exposure to AI every single one of those tasks have, and so on and so forth.

We map the skills, and as we always say, is that One task typically means three to five skills. So how can we correlate and understand what are the skills of every single one of those tasks and so on? That's the power of the ontology something that we couldn't have done this 15 years ago But today technology allows us to bring that correlation to in the form of an ontology So that then we have the data and then we start giving the workforce intelligence Which is that banner that you see over there Is the opportunities that you have role by role and then family by family or sub family by family.

What are the opportunities that you have to make the work that every single one of those jobs, make better, more efficient, faster, simpler. As well. And it may be more automated if that's something that you want to explore as well. So we start giving that those not only the data, but then the insights and the intelligence that will try to guide you to where should you ultimately invest the most moving

Mike Reed: forward as well.

One of the points you've made on the way through, one of the areas that you were going to try and explore a little bit was where to focus. And I think this has been transformational, our ability to unpick work and describe it to the level of how much effort is involved in each of these tasks. So where are your people spending their time?

That is. Industry where the availability of people is critical, identifying that they're spending their time, for example, in travel to get to check on their home care patients. And it's only that point when they're identifying that there's been a fall. So not only are they spending time traveling, they're also disconnected from the event that's most critical to that patient or the number of instances that could relate to that, but the ability to visualize that.

Allows us then to start stitching all of those tasks and I say, okay, where do we get the most advantage? Where do we release the most, capacity in our people? It gives us a direction on where to start. So I think the ability to unpick work and as you call it, the atomic units of work, the tasks, and then focus on those, how much of these are consuming our people's time?

How could we most quickly deliver the same or more value, but also unlock the capacity on our people to be delivering more care?

Nuno Goncalves: What I love, and this is, Some of the people that join us might have, oh, let's have an organizational efficiency perspective of the data here, right? So how can we as an organization be better, faster, sometimes more profitable in some cases as well, right?

But what I would say is that let's have both of them, right? It's the organizational piece that for efficiency, but actually the improvements. Of the value that the individuals can bring, right? Because you simplify and you supercharge the roles that one does in this industry, then the value that is creating.

And for me, value is something that is important. I wake up every day wanting to bring value to the work and to the company that I work, to my family, to the society that I'm in, right? So if we're able to organize work in a way that optimizes the value that I deliver. So imagine the energy that brings and the joy that brings to specifically also for those that are in this industry as well.

So I would say it's the and that's what I love. It's the view of efficiency of work, but it's the view of the exponential value that an individual will bring to the table as well.

Mike Reed: I'm going to be a bit, going to be a bit blunt here, I think. As a psychologist and a workforce strategist, finding a partner value is a nice thing.

If you're in healthcare and if you're in community services, you're there for one reason. That's, that is the reason. What's different here is that it's not about shifting believers to be more competitive and take advantage of the market and more profitable. That's ideally an outcome. But I think it's, I think it's crystal clear.

AI in healthcare is not a futuristic idea and it's not a competitive advantage. It's survival strategy. We don't have the resources to deliver. The demand is growing. If we don't find another way quickly, if we don't leverage technology to find another way quickly, burnout costs, inefficiency, that the system.

Risks collapse. There's a whole commercial model that needs to go alongside that. But if we look at the raw statistics, the people are in there, healthcare, they're in here to serve. They're in here to deliver value and care. 100%. We don't have enough of them. So we've got to find a different way to deliver and support those who are invested in the workforce to deliver more care because that's what they're there for.

Nuno Goncalves: Especially because going back to what you said is that ultimately demand is increasing. Funding is a challenge. So if you're not funding something that is increasing, then you're going to have to do maybe more better with less, but that shouldn't always be at the expense of the human. We can. We can.

We can still, supercharged these roles so that we, ultimately, we can add more value with less cost and still have win situations in both sides.

Mike Reed: And we've said across a number of geographies, regulations coming in place to mandate care, minutes to protect against that, trying to do more with less.

I'm trying to deliver a better care in 30 seconds rather than 90 minutes. So recognizing that face - to - face care is critical. There's current regulations in a number of geographic regions that are mandating an increase to a minimum number of minutes. So we're gonna find out what are our people doing that isn't direct care.

Get that out of their way so they can spend more time delivering on the team. 100%. I'm going to take a break.

Nuno Goncalves: Let's accelerate now. But I think you're absolutely right. I think that's the purpose that drives the passion that drives us all. And I think this industry specifically, right?

And some industries more than others, bring that emotional connection as well. So I love that. So keep it coming. It's really good. We talked about this intelligence, right? We talked about the data. We talked. Giving you the data, but data without insights is just data.

Then how do you actually understand, okay, what are the opportunities and the challenges you have? So at reejig, we focus on four big dimensions of insights. One is around the AI potential index, because we go task by task, we understand task by task. What is the exposure to automation that every single one of those tasks happen?

And then up to you, to ultimately decide to automate or not, because you might not be ready to automate as well. One thing that it typically is a low hanging fruit is that because we have visibility of all the atoms of the work Mike then we can understand how the same atom is being done in different places, how the same task is being done in different places, and there's an opportunity for simplification and process improvement as well.

We talk about what, if you ultimately transform yourself, what is the hardship behind that transformation and how long will you start reaping the benefits of that transformation as well. So we estimate and infer some of that. And, because as, we also want to understand what is the sustainable piece of this is how can we.

If we transform our organization, then what are the reskilling requirements? What are the pivoting paths that people will have to go from their career as well? Those are the four big dimensions that we have. If we go to the next slide, what you see here is from a community services composition.

no surprising. We're talking about 67 percent of people that are very somehow similar from the from a profile perspective. So we see 43 percent on home health and personal care aides, which is very interesting and goes to example. You were saying, in the beginning, and we see 24 percent in nursing assistants, which again, is one of the biggest shortages that we have in the workforce as well.

the rest of the rest, you still, we still see some of the nurses, some social services assistants and. Community health workers as well. But the biggest percentage, as I said, that are these home health and personal care aides and nursing assistants as well. I know you're going to double click on some of these roles.

But from a high level perspective, it is very in line with what you probably were expecting of the composition of these community services. Industry as well.

Mike Reed: Yeah, absolutely. No surprises in that. And no material change in the dimensions where we look forward. So while we're looking for growth, it still is going to be heavily focused on individuals who are able to deliver care, whether it's health or whether it's social or community service care, mental health or child welfare.

It's the ability to stack this industry with individuals who can deliver that. It's going to. Continue to be the 96%, sorry, 91.6% of this is those people. That's not gonna change the ability for them to deliver care is the leader that we've gotta switch.

Nuno Goncalves: So if we go to these three big, we've selected these three because we believe that those are high impact, jobs at the heart of the, of this industry as well.

and Mike will drive you guys through some of more details of what does this mean and how, what's the opportunity behind each one of these, the home health aides, the case managers and social workers, which is very intriguing. And I think there's a lot of opportunity there. And then this remote telehealth and remote care coordinators, which I think it's a fascinating and growing part of this industry as well.

Mike over to you.

Mike Reed: Thanks. And there's relationships between all of these roles. The nature of work is changing. So when we're talking about home health, personal care assistance, the headline stats that we're seeing is that technology it's in the market today. I agents automations have the ability to free up to 35 percent of their time around response to some issues, whether it's full detection, whether it's other remote telemetry, other monitoring, smart monitoring, the ability to implement systems that, which can, which do come with a capital cost, because there's now infrastructure that needs to be supported in home to deliver that, but does deliver significant efficiency in response times.

Which flows through to the ability to serve more customers, because again, your focus is now on how you have the ability to respond more quickly, the issues that are demanding attention, which allows us to increase the, number of clients that are served. So again, we're finding a way with the same volume of workforce to deliver to a higher level of demand by in the order of 20 to 30%.

not only improves the margin impact and the calculations that we saw in the order of 15 to 25 margin impact for this work. So positive, improvement in profitability also increases the amount of billability. So not only are you more profitable, but you can serve more clients. So as an organization, as a provider, you can invoice more revenue.

So that's both an improvement in profitability, but also an increase in your ability to deliver revenue, which is an outcome of having more. The requirement here is for an increase in the workforce to support this. So introducing workforce, but also giving them the capability and the skills to work with this data is material.

While that's a growth in the workforce, it's really about reducing the workforce gap. So we're trying to find a way to grow the workforce, knowing that we won't get to what was a 2024 target because we need to use technology in order to deliver the service. So again, Looking at opportunities revolve around remote telemetry and health and in home stuff really has direct line of benefit to the individual.

And this is the quick, bold steps that will transform the way we can deliver service. If you look at case managers, the focus that we saw here was around the infrastructure that helps them administer their work. So administering inbound contacts. Automating triaging. And I think, you're talking about agents.

There's a number of agents that do that first level triage, not to take hold of at this stage. And address all of the issues, but at least to triage it so that when it does get a pair of eyes on it, 90 percent of the work, 90 percent of the collation, the standardization has been done. So what we have seen across some platforms is the ability to reduce that admin time by 40%, which is key to allowing case managers in a limited number to increase their throughput in a way that's still delivering a high level of quality.

So while you can reduce admin time by 40%, You can also increase their ability to deliver by 15%. And again, faster case processing commercial model leads straight to increasing your reimbursement. So again, there's a commercial outcome that's linked to implementation of this technology. Not just to make more money, but also to allow you to service a growing demand.

Still doesn't negate the requirement for case managers familiar with this technology, increasing numbers. So we're seeing an expectation that we still need to find a way to grow this workforce by in the order of 25%. So this isn't a role that's going to disappear. This is a role that needs to become more effective and continue to grow.

I talked about it being administrative infrastructure, which gives us the opportunity to move a bit quickly as well. It's not necessarily health diagnostics. It's not that necessarily regulated procedure, which needs a whole lot of approval, FDA or others. There's a potential for this to be administrative, which leverages other industries to deliver efficiency.

So there are systems that can be delivered in. And deliver value in the order of string odds. So there's some reasonably mature technologies out there. And the last one is the one that I guess reflects both the transition to home care, but also I think as you call it out, the ability to deliver this care.

At scale across geography. So rather than having to historically consolidate everybody into facilities, we can now deliver this care using technology much more remotely and much more quickly with a lot different level of quality so that we know when an incident happens, not just because somebody's visited, but because the remote telemetry is telling us that there's a reason to be investigating or spending.

Effort to interface from this individual. So again, manually triaging this workload allows us to access higher patient caseloads. It also allows us to access the individual at the right time, when the incident's happening rather than next time we're visiting or by the time somebody's called us up. What this directly translates into is a reduction in hospitalizations and ER visits that directly reduces the cost per patient, which again, directly flows through to.

The patient's condition, the patient's experience, but also medical costs. So a significant improvement up to 25, 21 percent in terms of the margin impact here. This is the emerging, this is the emerging roles. The ability both to, on the care side, install and configure this remote telemetry and then back on the, home based side, the ability to coordinate the telemetry, to manage the process and the workflows.

These are the emerging skills and the emerging roles, the things that transform us from a facility based care infrastructure to a In home in society care infrastructure. Some of those telemetry still do require, a reasonable amount of approval. So while there's some in place, there is a reasonable amount of capital invest investment required in order to bring this into an organization before we start moving out.

So not as quick as some of the admin that we could see benefiting caseworkers. But and requiring potentially more capital investment, but certainly delivering on the value and the ability that the ability to serve the requirements. I hate to pick a winner in these spaces, but if we're going to look at where to focus based on metrics, we would be directing towards, the home care.

How do we help them prioritize their focus? You talked before about how do I spend, where are they spending their time? Where can I deliver the most benefit? The home health, AIDS, personal care workers. The ability to focus their few hours for biggest impact, it's going to have the most direct impact. And then we get to the case managers is.

an administrative layer. It allows them to free up time. So it allows them to deliver in that order. So the metrics we look at, there are potentially which is how much impact the technology could have alongside risk adjusted for how much benefit, how much likelihood do we believe in the benefit will be achieved.

And then we look at time and we look at efficiency. So on those scales, we see, home health aides and personal care workers, and then the administrative supporter and caseworkers and social workers.

The other side of that, not just looking at where do we need to invest and where do we need to transform our industry in order to support is how do we best support the people who are in the industry to be right fit for the industry going forward. So how do we get who we have to who we need as quickly as possible?

And that comes down to identifying the skills that we hold and the skills that are required and looking at those proximity. How do I find somebody who has the capability to be doing what we need and get them there? As quickly as possible. And the three that we'll focus on here are, admin and scheduling staff.

So again, that a lot of that coordination work, medical transcriptionist, which is again is taking the detail and make sure it's formulated and recorded in a way that's compliant to a lot of heavy lifting on the, document processing there. And then medical coding specialists. So that's really on the invoicing and the finance for coordinating with insurance, which is critical to revenue streams, but also very specific and highly manual data entry for those.

We see parts, we see the skills that I have a directly relevant to the roles that we will need going forward. And we can see the admin and scheduling staff based on the skills that I have transitioning successfully into health information technicians, we see medical transitionists, transcriptionists, transitioning to telehealth coordinators.

And we see many coding specialists transitioning to health data analysts. These are the key roles that will support a change in infrastructure that, allows this industry to continue to deliver on its requirements. If we looked at the first one, admin staff into health technicians, what we see is that they already hold organizational abilities.

They already hold attention to detail. They're familiar with their systems. What we're going to do is to bring them a higher level of familiarity and skills with a specific to the EHR systems. Understanding of the nature of medical coding and building and billing and the ability to do that means that they are now managing the health systems rather than the admitting the system.

So it's a step up in terms of capability, but it's leveraging skills that they have and finding a path to get them most quickly to the roles that we need. There are courses available across a number of platforms to support this a transition. And it's not a huge leap. It's a small investment in re skilling for a large return in capability.

So we see over 238%, in investment. We see this linked to between 22 and 30 percent increase in revenue per employee. So from an organizational point of view, that's valuable, but these roles are materially different in the way they're remunerated. We see these, and this is true for all of the ones that we've looked at in this sector, that community service roles are.

A generally currently remunerated load. The value of these roles in the market is significant up to a 57 percent increase in this specific example. So it's not only delivering significant, value to the organization in terms of revenue per employee. It's also delivering potentially significant benefit to the individual with a much more valuable role.

When we look at medical transcriptionists coordinators, we see that they're already familiar with the nature of the industry. They're familiar with medical terminology. They've experienced with health documentation, patient documentation. What we want to do is then move those same concepts about the nature of the medical conditions around the patient documentation into the health technology.

So rather than just dealing with how do we record this, they're now dealing with how do I then align these issues with the technologies we have in place. And that's looking at the, is the technology doing what it needs to do? And how is it transitioning between necessarily, potentially between telehealth platforms?

There's an area of investment here. So again, the courses may end up being specific with the, technologies that are deployed. But again, we see. That the loss of our medical transcriptionists. Is already coming at a high turnover costs. So in order of 150 percent of the current costs, so if we can take that expertise that we've invested in and then move it through reasonably affordable upskilling, reskilling, sorry, we see that those roles are now able to deliver value across the organization much more quickly in coordinating the responses from telehealth incidents.

So we see a 28 to 35 percent increase in value to the organization. And we see a similar to what we saw previously in the order of 61 percent increase in base salary when we're comparing role versus role between medical transcriptionists and telehealth coordinators at the moment. So it, all of these instances we see show significant value for the organization, higher revenue per employee and significant value for the individual.

It's a much more valuable role based on the skills that they already have. So anybody could clearly transition to this telehealth coordinator role, but the medical transcriptionist already has a lot of the, a lot of the arrows in the quiver, a lot of the skills already in their back pocket, and they can move more quickly.

And just to look quickly at the last one, medical coding specialist, which is around understanding the technology around the medical procedures, understanding how health data is processed. And moving from that leveraging automation and moving into health data analysts, we see this becomes a leverage of their, the knowledge and the experience that they already have and combine that with how do I start to automate these processes and how do I understand what the analytics around this data and specifically in health care and health care finance are telling me.

And again, we see, a significant return on investment, a more significant, investment in skilling. So 16, 000 is in the roar of four times what we've seen previously. Significant ROI. And again, the same numbers we see in terms of return in value revenue for employee and salary growth.

Recognizing that these are both more valuable roles, so medical coding specialists are often three or four times the cost at the moment of what we've seen previously, data health analysts are twice or 50 percent more than that, so these are already well remunerated roles, but they are moving to significantly more remunerated roles, but still delivering a huge amount of value.

Nuno Goncalves: I love. So it's interesting because as you were talking about this, Mike, in every single business that I've been, if you see a 250 percent, profitability or return on your investment, it's a no brainer, right? You're gonna you will invest because ultimately you have 2. 5 more times and it will, you'll have it.

Typically the invest is one shot and then you have 2. 5 times a recurrent revenue one way or the other. So I think looking at work as we are also as we also look at Yeah. Yeah. Business would be a key driver for us to say, Okay, hold on. How can we do better and have ultimately better outcomes as well?

So maybe something to also to explore is this analogy of looking at work as you look to your products as well, right? One way or the other, because there's a lot of profitability gains there and efficiency gains as well. So it's unbelievable. It's really good. I love the path that you're showing and that we're showing that ultimately are very in line to all of what the industry is saying, and specifically on the telehealth piece, which is something that will be incredibly important as well.

So, Thank you. Thank you for all this wealth of knowledge, Mike. I think if we do a little bit of a summary, big, complex industry with a lot of opportunities in different paths and to reshape the way that we do work with a lot of opportunities for to automate and to transform and to accelerate as well.

We then showed where are some of those opportunities. What needs to be done, what's the investment that you need and what will be the return of the investment that you should expect also there. So, again, reinvent yourself as a, as an organization, think about how to do it faster, better, but maybe even re engineer and re imagine, reinventing the way that you do work, mobilize and make sure that ultimately You understand what is the impact on at a job level at the people level and then bring people with us, right?

Bring people on the journey, bring people on the path of reskilling, upskilling of managing their careers to towards sustainable, more valued based jobs as well, moving forward. So, I love this and thank you. Thank you for this. Mike was incredibly helpful. So we are almost at time.

As always, we are here to help bring visibility and help you understand what are also the opportunities, not only at an industry specific, but also eventually at some specific organizations. So if you want a personalized skills masterclass for your organization, you have the QR code over there. We'll be able to come to the conversation with data that is more targeted not only for in your industry, but also to your organization, and it's the first conversation to try to understand and give you visibility of data of the insights and start giving you visibility of what could be the intelligence of your reinvention moving forward as well.

So. Come join us in the conversation and more than happy to help you here. So this is it. We have, we're wrapping up this industry. We're getting ready to another one that is also really important. Also in many parts of the world, we'll be focusing on the construction industry, very different than what we've been talking about.

But I'm very curious to what are the insights. And again, how this is industry is reinventing itself. And what are the opportunities ahead of us? Stay tuned. This will be Thursday, March 20th at 11 a. M. Eastern time, so that we can have as many people from different geographies and different time zones also with us as well.

So Mike, as always, Thank you so much for the preparation. Thank you so much for the data and for the insights. Really good provocations and a lot to come out of this conversation with as well. So it's always a pleasure, Mike. Thank you.

Mike Reed: Always. Thanks for that. Thanks for the chance.

No, it's been great.