EPAM NEXTFUTURE

EPAM NextFuture

We are EPAM’s NEXTFUTURE Hackathon team and we are inspired to use our skills to help the world build a better future.

Our team embarked upon this hackathon together by examining a range of business problems and challenges.

In this year of COVID we saw an opportunity to crush complexity by enabling scientists involved in clinical trials to more effectively reach all world citizens.

Before committing to develop any solution, we worked together to brainstorm and evaluate many scenarios, research topics and answer key questions that included:

Does this scenario showcase the power of PEGA’s platform?

Who are our users and who do we actually help?

Will our solution address real world business problems such as reducing cost and risk or increasing quality?

Are we helping the world?

Will we be able to grow and develop our team’s connection and skills?

Do we all believe in the purpose and vision of this Hackathon?

We challenged each other to work through many different scales of opportunity ranging from simple process driven analytic scenarios through expedited AI driven outcomes until we found something that excited us all: ‘What if we empower business users with extended Pega Platform capabilities and delegate human tasks to the World (crowdsource) by a single click in PEGA?’

It became clear to all of us that in the context of clinical trials there is a tremendous opportunity to augment automated workflow with human interactions and that, PEGA makes it easy to unify the two. We therefore chose to integrate a human interaction capability with PEGA to make it possible to delegate case assignments to a crowd using just one single click.

EPAM NEXTFUTURE’s solution allows businesses such as pharmaceutical companies, clinical trial laboratories, and universities to seek feedback from large and diverse focus groups resident in pan-world locations. Once responses are received by labs, crowdsourced results can be integrated into otherwise automated processes.

The goal of incorporating crowdsourced data is to make it possible for any trial or business process to assess cross-cultural variations in human responses at scale and in a cost-effective way so that outcomes such as the successful uptake of COVID vaccinations worldwide is made more likely. EPAM NEXTFUTURE’s solution also creates new and equitable employment opportunities for task-based work. The cost and efficiency of COVID vaccines are, at the time of writing inviting significant review as represented by this article.

EPAM’s NEXTFUTURE solution scales well and can be used for small and large group feedback by selecting an appropriately sized crowdsource who provide statistically relevant responses within planned timelines. Anonymity is preserved through configured size choices.

To build our solution, the EPAM NEXTFUTURE team assumes that a drug company has been authorized by the FDA in the USA to find an edible low-cost COVID vaccine so that everyone in the world has equal access to health.

In order to align with the FDA’s clinical trial and research procedure our solution used:

The Pega Platform version 8.5.3 to model the FDA aligned Drug Development Process (DDP) and case structure

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) human interaction tasks as the method of sending and receiving data from the DDP case hosted in a PEGA application to the crowd target. In the NEXTFUTURE scenario, the crowd are chosen to be the focus group for pill packaging choices as it is known that the color, size and design of pills affect the willingness and ability of people to consume medicines. Information requests to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are supported by key parameters from PEGA.

A PEGA dashboard chart used to present the results of the crowd sourced responses

The EPAM’s NEXTFUTURE user is a Lab Technician who logs in to PEGA in order to create a new DDP case in a process that is hosted in a PEGA application. NEXTFUTURE’s application configuration assures that the trial conforms with the FDA’s process requirements. Different configurations can be used for different regulatory authorities.

The lab technician first selects a disease for which the drug is to be created: Edible COVID in our example.

The DDP trial process application triggers a child case, in which, after the drug formula is finalized, the Lab Technician initiates a call to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service.

After initiating the Amazon Mechanical Turk service, the Lab Technician uses the PEGA application to track crowd responses.

The PEGA application displays summary results in a form of a graph or chart.

Our diverse and multi-disciplinary team volunteered their time for this Hackathon. The team benefits from diversity in every sense of the word. The team includes creative business owners, design thinkers, technical innovators, scrum masters, planners and orchestrators. Team members are located in Canada, India, the UK, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. All of us employed Agile software development practices and the PEGA Express delivery methodology to progress our Hackathon solution using daily stand-ups and acceptance criteria to make progress towards visible and measurable outcomes.

All team members joined at the ideation phase and brainstormed together enjoying mutual engagement and support to assess hypotheses from both business and technical credibility perspectives. Together we tried to prove and disprove each other’s hypotheses one by one. Those hypotheses not proven, were discarded.

Once our business parameters had been decided our Technical team members leveraged ‘EPAM’s DNA’ to test PEGA’s integration capability with the Amazon Crowdsource platform. Given the knowledge of the Hackathon team and the scope of the solution, the most critical proof of concept was to ensure that PEGA and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk could interact and share query parameters.

With regard to implementation the team held a kick-off and then naturally aligned around a backlog of work contributed to and described by the team. Our tasks generally grouped into (i) UI Design for the Lab Technician experience and crowdsource response activity, (ii) design of the information architecture for data collation and sharing, (iii) implementation of stages and cases in support of an FDA aligned clinical trial process and (iv) general business analyst tasks associated with confirming ease of use and business efficiency. The latter included leading video production and authoring materials such as this document. At the beginning of our Hackathon all team members studied the FDA’s clinical trial assessment stages. All team members undertook solution evaluation and test activities according to their ability and availability.

Given that all team members collaborated to build this NEXTFUTURE solution in their spare time, the primary motivation for those taking part has been to have fun while developing skills. Establishing a shared vision together at the beginning was key to ensuring that we all felt engaged and supported throughout.

Of course, we have faced challenges on our path to delivery. The main challenge has been the amount of time required to deliver. Each team member has had to balance their billable project client work as a consultant with Hackathon delivery, so all Hackathon team members were required to ‘go the extra mile’. This has not always been easy.

The very varied physical location of the team has added time zone management pressures. We have sometimes been able to use this to our advantage but there is also no doubt that this added to the overall complexity of our project.

Challenges aside, we are proud of a great deal but to summarize we are delighted that:

We made the Solution real: PEGA users can delegate assignments to the World.

We show how PEGA capabilities can be extended and also demonstrate the power of the PEGA platform in crushing business complexity.

We are enabling real businesses and clinical trials to optimize costs and

We benefit all people in the world by providing them with new work and tasks. Last but by no means least

We achieved our goals: we have provided a working proof of concept, worked as one team and improved our skills. We are proud of our team, and our work.

What we learned

PEGA can support assignment delegation to crowdsource platforms. Integration works and tests were passed

Distributed teams work.

The combination of creativity, business knowledge and technical design thinking is unbeatable.

Cross-functional teams succeed: we have all acted as one team to achieve results, either by raising new ideas, testing solutions, creating videos and otherwise delivering results. We invite you to enjoy our work.

The last question is ‘So, what’s next for our team? –

We will use the proof of concept and the EPAM team now developed to deliver real solutions to clients and tackle a wide variety of business problems in health and other verticals

We will embrace the great opportunity ahead to introduce new ideas and solutions.

The future is coming, and our team is ready. We will do what’s next.