Whether you’re a clinician or a researcher, you’ve likely been in a situation where you’re waiting on a report. You’re excited about what you might learn, how you might forward your mission, which could be working on patient care directly or taking big steps in research that can impact many. Velsera is committed to driving innovation throughout both its product suite and services offerings. Highly complex problems require highly complex solutions and in high-stakes arenas such as precision medicine, the notion of proactive monitoring from a customer support perspective becomes essential.
What is proactive support monitoring?
Let’s take a detailed look at the in-depth requirements of NGS Workflows, just one example of the innovative support capabilities our uniquely skilled team delivers to customers with proactive support monitoring.
Proactive Support Monitoring for NGS Workflows: An Example in Action
NGS workflows are long and complex processes, particularly with the sample-to-clinical-report cycle often stretching into days. You could be working in your lab on a Thursday afternoon preparing cases to move through the NGS workflow, and you leave at the end of the day hopeful that everything will go smoothly, and that the clinical report will be generated. Sometimes when you get to work the next morning, unfortunately, you discover that something has gone wrong somewhere in the workflow. The clinical outcome is delayed, and patient care timelines are affected.
Problems typically faced in the processing cycle include:
- Connection failures that stop processing unexpectedly
- Data file mismatches like file types or other data errors in data ingress
- Sample quality issues that prevent report generation
This example may be specific to NGS, the challenges managing complex data sets are common to everyone in precision medicine. You get a real sense of this when you look at the volume of our support tickets that are related to Proactive Support Monitoring. It represents about 40% of our task volume and is a significant focus for us. We’re able to resolve many of these ourselves with our highly skilled bioinformaticians and technical experts, which means when the Lab Technician does return to work the next morning, often we’ve already got them back on track or at least got them a few steps ahead again towards their clinical outcomes.
Don’t Lose Days of Progress
This is why Proactive Support Monitoring is so important to the Velsera team. We actively monitor NGS workflows and pipelines through a successful clinical report or output. It goes above and beyond the infrastructure monitoring that you would typically see with Software-as-a-Service products, by tackling other equally impactful issues that disrupt Turn-Around-Times for patient care. Customers working with us on NGS Workflows can lose days of patient care if a case failed on a Friday night and cannot be resolved until Tuesday of the following week. Research progress can already be arduous and slow, can that work afford to be delayed further with avoidable data processing issues?
Timely Access, Reliable Data, and Taking Action
Proactive Support Monitoring isn’t about preventing disruptions simply by monitoring infrastructure, this should be industry standard. Proactive Support Monitoring is about optimizing efficiency, reducing costs, and ensuring the quality and timeliness of patient outcomes meet the highest standards. This is done by understanding what is important to the organizations we work with and what the users of our products are trying to accomplish.
Liam Scott is Velsera’s VP of Customer Support and brings over 15 years’ experience helping customers achieve their goals.