This year’s Enterprise Connect was a busy event for vendors, from waves of generative AI announcements to animated discussions about hybrid work practices. It was also a significant occasion for the business users of the vendors’ platforms, who are passionate about and fascinated by the technology they adopt for their organizations.

One such business user is Shival Seth, CTO for Grand River and St. Mary’s hospitals in Ontario, Canada. For Seth, the evolution of UC and collaboration technology has been revelatory in recent years, particularly with the pandemic accelerating its growth and innovation in response to the rise of remote and hybrid working.

“One thing that we have learned with this pandemic is hybrid work is for real,” Seth told UC Today. “There are certain jobs which can continue to work remotely. We were quite mature and pioneering in our experience at the Grand River Hospital in actually looking at use cases with Webex where we provided all our staff with the capability to work from home. All our meeting rooms were equipped with Webex so that they had a single platform can they walk in and click on join.”

Even in a work environment in which physical contact and in-office collaboration are necessary, depending on the specific roles and tasks, healthcare had to navigate, and continues to grapple with, the challenges of adapting to hybrid work practices.

“For us, the challenge was purely around integration,” Seth said. “The integration with the clinical services, and integration with virtual care. Webex was the only platform at that time which was certified to be a care provider software with virtual care practices. So, we implemented our Webex solution with our Cerner Hospital Information System to provide virtual care to our patients across the community (during the pandemic), which was a huge success.”

Seth’s holistic remit includes overseeing everything from health informatics and biomedical engineering to the communications and collaboration platforms that helped steer Grand River and St. Mary’s through the pandemic.

He is enthusiastic about his job and the ways that constant innovations in the industry can enable him and his colleagues to provide better healthcare to patients, with Enterprise Connect an exciting stage for previewing innovation that could help him improve these processes. He also gained an “understanding of how the CpaaS and collaboration platforms, in general, have evolved over the years and how they can solve the problems that were supposed to be something of the past.”

AI was the major theme of this year’s EC, but would AI’s integration into these platforms practically serve the needs of Seth and the hospitals whose technology he manages?

“I would say given the leadership we have as a hospital,” Seth explained, “we are quite nimble and open to any kind of innovation. AI and also business transformation for us in general. We have the mentality of whatever you were doing yesterday, you definitely have a chance of doing it better tomorrow. Whatever you were doing manually yesterday, you have a better chance of actually automating it tomorrow.”

“Hospitals are in the business of providing patient care and saving lives,” he added. “If you can utilize the power of this business transformation and AI so you can provide better services and more effective care to your patients, that is the way to go.”

Seth is particularly excited about learning how specifically AI can help in transforming these processes and business cases but is also cautious about integrating AI “then calling it a day.” “It’s more about continuously enhancing and tweaking the experience to provide better patient care,” he said.

While AI can certainly offer scope for improving the processes around healthcare provision, Seth believes more cross-collaboration between different platforms and tools would be an innovation that would boost his and his colleagues’ productivity.

“I’m quite happy with the way the whole industry has gone,” Seth said, “but I would like to challenge the vendors at Enterprise Connect for next year around their view of actually integrating everything on a single pane of glass. I think the great thing that has happened through the evolution of technology over the past five or ten years is that the capability exists. There are bits and bytes of software integrations and bits and bytes of overall functionality or feature sets available.”

“From the healthcare perspective,” Seth continued, “or from any industry perspective, one thing you want less of is having another tool to work through instead of having one tool that can do everything. It’s now coming to the point where you have 10 different solutions which can provide you with 10 different functionalities. What I would like to see is the partners and vendors looking at how you can bring all those things together into one single pane of glass.”

Looking forwards, Seth’s plans for the hospitals’ tech stack revolve primarily “around how we can liberate the data and make better use of it for research. Being part of a healthcare organization, I think we’re the custodian of quite a bit of data that’s rich. It can be provided towards clinical research and overall use for providing better patient care.”

Data analysis could play a more prominent role in healthcare research and provision, not just inside Seth’s organization, but across Canada and the U.S.: “I think there is a big shift in the province and in North America to start looking at how we can do population health (informed by data analysis) and how can we solve these problems together.”



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