Rapid innovation with Taking Care

Context

Taking Care are part of AXA Health, and one of the leading providers of domestic panic alarms for the elderly.

The company had committed to be lead sponsor for the industry’s flagship conference. They wanted to establish industry influence through this event, but were worried that without a significant innovation to launch at the conference the opportunity was going to be wasted. 

They felt that a ground-breaking innovation was needed to make the most of the opportunity, and had made some initial efforts to develop it, but reached the limits of their internal capabilities. Their suspicion was that their large cache of historical data could be used to improve and tailor their service through an improved understanding of their customers’ frailties.

At the time we were engaged, time was rapidly running out, and the nature of knowledge that might be revealed in the data remained unknown.

Our process

The main need was not just for a generic exploration of the data, but for the development of a conspicuously game-changing development, opening opportunities for the industry that had never previously been apparent. This is, of course, an impossible thing to guarantee, and would be normally present a significant challenge even with a far longer time horizon. 

The result was to be targeted at marketing material to be distributed at the conference. This had a few implications. First, that although it needed a fundamental level of mathematical rigour and credibility, it was only in proof-of-concept stage so did not (yet) need full implementation, or the level of rigour expected of an academic publication.

Second was that the usefulness of it needed to be understandable by a varied audience, and in particular at executive level. This added further to the time pressure, needing time to translate technical details into understandable prose and polished marketing material to be printed prior to the event.

Despite the uncertainty in the nature of the outcome, we needed a high degree of certainty that we could achieve some form of result. The financial consequences far outweighed the scale of the work – not only through the cost of the sponsorship but also because there was seen to be a significant potential upside through exposure to public sector and large-scale care providers. They further hoped that the findings would help to set the direction of company’s upcoming 5-year data and AI strategy. 

On the exceptionally short time-scale available at this time, it was a formidable challenge. The only chance of achieving it was through a scrambling of all the resources we could mobilise, together with a reasonably aggressive trimming of priorities to focus efforts where they needed to be. 

To ensure rigour and credibility in the results, we enlisted the help of a leading professor in medical statistics and with him, the analysts, the company’s leadership, and their marketing department, explored the avenues we thought might yield useful results. With a view to discarding some, and to maximise the chance that at least one avenue would prove productive, we committed to pursuing three simultaneously, and three different sets of analysts were tasked with the selected investigations. It soon became apparent that one approach was showing the most promise, so we were able to discard the other two and focus resources on finishing and refining the one that remained. 

The result was a proof-of-concept delivered with enough time available to for analysts to be able to switch their efforts to supporting with the marketing department with materials describing and illustrating their findings. The work was ultimately refined into a glossy brochure trailing the result, which was distributed at the conference. 

The Outcome

The brochure was received at the conference to significant acclaim. As had been hoped, the analysis was novel to the industry, positioning Taking Care very much as a technological leader in the field. 

It also captured interest from some of the influential figures and bodies they had hoped to reach, including Public Health Wales, and other leading providers. The approached trailed at the conference has subsequently become a pivotal aspect of Taking Care’s data and AI strategy, mapping their expected developments over the years ahead.