Surprise Dialer : My Favorite "Should Be A Service"

Hats off to Anh Nguyen for his Surprise Dialer, my favorite of the student mashups (not as psychologically jarring as Summer's) at the ETel show. Surprise Dialer accepts voice mail messages from a number of people, then delivers them all at once to someone on their birthday. Having been a recent victim of a 40th birthday surprise party, it's really hard to deny you are loved when there's a crowd of people screaming it at you. Anh used PHP and Asterisk for his mashup, and if you look at his web page, did a great job of packaging and explaining. I really enjoyed seeing it, and I would use that service, all the time.

Maybe if we took Anh's business sense, with Summer's creativity.... quick. Get a VC down there.

After Hours Doctor's Office Page

Thanks to Backpack, it was really easy to throw up a page on the mashup. I'll update that page through the conference, and you can check back on it later to get the source for the application. Enjoy!

ETel Telephony Mashup Finalist?

Golleee. I'm a finalist in E-Tel's Telephony Mashup contest in San Francisco.

When I met Dave Nielsen at the mashup camp at MIT last month, he told me that they were sponsoring a mashup competition at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Show, and that I should submit something. Since I've been doing way too much business stuff lately, I jumped at the chance to strap on my keyboard and submit an application not to win, but to have some fun, prove a point and to see what happens when you take these wonderful Web technologies and smash them into the telephony world. Although I think the judges had some sort of group dementia when they nominated me as a finalist, I'll take it, just the same.

My business is in consulting and custom development. I'm really not interested in going into this space, so I'm going to post the source code and documentation after the show, so you can take it, extend it, whatever. I'm just doing this to learn and to teach. So, what's the application?

Application name : After Hours Doctor's Office

Business Problem : If a patient is sick after normal office hours, the only choices are to call the answering service to schedule an appointment for the morning, or to go to an emergency room. Many patients are unaware of which is the right choice, so they end up going to the emergency room needlessly, which not only drives up costs for the HMO, but also gives a lower quality of care for the patient and every other patient waiting in the same room. An easy-to-use, triage system to determine the proper course of care would result in faster service, lower costs and healthier patients.

Customer Experience : Mr. Kraus feels sick and dizzy, with a little left side weakness on a Tuesday night. He calls his doctor, Dr. McCarthy, to schedule an appointment for tomorrow. An IVR answers, telling the caller that it's after hours, and asking if the call is because of routine business or because of illness. If illness, it asks if the caller is on a cell phone or not. It then asks for a voice message to be relayed to the doctor, then hangs up.

Immediately after the call is over, the patient gets an SMS message on their cell phone telling him that the call was received, and that we are forwarding the message over to the nurses. If the caller is calling from a PSTN phone, we would do an outbound call back. (I couldn't do this one, because I'm not a real Tell Me developer, and outbound dialing is restricted for those who aren't.) The message is sent to a bank of nurses, who listens to the message to determine if it's urgent or not. If they think it is routine, they indicate that on their console, which results in another message being sent to the cell phone telling the patient that the matter is probably routine, and they would get a call in the morning. If urgent, the patient would get a message like "A nurse thinks you need to speak with a doctor. We are looking for one now - stay near the phone." Urgent issues are forwarded to the doctor as an SMS message to their cell phone with a summary of the call done by the nurse. In this example, the doctor's message would be : Mr. Kraus - 40 WM - left side weakness, nasuea -508 364 9972. The doctor would simply press the send button on his phone to call the patient.

At no time would the patient be more than a few minutes from feedback, and make the prospect of going to the emergency room so slow and painful, that they would prefer to sit and wait for the text message to get back.

The Mashup Components :

1. Tell Me VxML for the inbound calling IVR, the outbound status messages if I was a developer and to record and post the patient voice message.
2. Strike Iron Global SMS for the text messaging between patient, nurse and doctor
3. Amazon Web Services to setup the bank of nurses making determinations of urgency, and to transcribe the original voice mail by the patient for the permanent medical record.
   

Compelling Business Ideas and Notes :

1. Using IVR on the front end gets the critical information from the patient quickly and without asking for new patient behaviors, all without a real human doing anything.
2. Using a bank of amazon turk nurses leverages the tens of thousands of stay at home nurses with small children who wouldn't mind making $3.00 in two minutes by listening to a voice message and determining if it's important or not.
3. A typical doctor might have ten calls a night, which is not enough volume to pay an on-site nurse. A thousand doctors have ten thousand calls a night, which supports an amazon turk community easy.
4. An HMO would pay $300.00 to keep a non-urgent patient out of an emergency room.
   

Podcasting with Jon Arnold

Last Thursday night from the Internet Telephony Show in sunny Fort Lauderdale, I had the chance to do a joint podcast with Jon Arnold. We talk about the impressions from the show, ObjectWorld, Anton, Open Source, cruise ships, viruses and more. We had a good time making this - hope you enjoy it. I think Jon and I are missing the warm weather already.

Real Time Reporting from Mashup Camp

Well, the time for camp is here! I'm going to try to post as much as I can during the day, but the agenda that we are working on is so interesting, I might be able to keep up. This is my first un-conference, and it's really different than the other conferences I've been to.

Unlike most conferences, the agenda is not set before the day the conference starts. At the beginning of the day, the moderator asks the audience to come up to the front with the sessions that they are willing to lead. If you're unwilling to lead, but want to see a session, you can speak up too. I didn't see a session on real time communications mashups, so (lucky me) I'm running that one.

There are also some basic rules for the conference :
1) Whoever comes are the right people
2) Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
3) When ever it starts is the right time
4) When it's over, it's over

And the law of two feet:
If you are not learning or contributing, it's your responsibility to respectfully go somewhere you are learning or contributing.

If this isn't a good example of the mass democratization of our culture, I can't think of a better one. At other conferences, the vast majority of people who are speaking are those who paid for sponsorships. Here, there's a place for people who just want to talk. If you don't want to hear, just leave... which I suppose is where the two worlds overlap.