SPARK SESSIONS

DAY 1

TRACK 1 @ 1:15pm

  • CR-301A | Re-imagining Software Engineering with Gen AI – GenWizard – Arabinda Goswami and Murli Iyer, Accenture

  • CR-301B | Litehouse - The Path to a New Digital Language Strategy - John "Griff" Griffin, Mike Doubintchik, Lindsey Crook, and Alina Kerov, Blue Cross NC

  • CR-302A | Snow White and the Seven Risks: A Recovery and Resilience Story - Matthew Lamoreaux and Joseph Bartnik IV, Blue Cross NC

  • CR-302B | Healthcare Industry Clouds and Digital Health Platform – Roger Benn and Austynn Eubank, Gartner

  • CR-302C | Building the Future with Beacon AI – Brody Heffner and Pavel Kolomiets, Blue Cross NC

  • CR-402 | Healthplan Customer Experience and Call Center Transformation - Aaron Warren, EXL Services

 

TRACK 2 @ 2:10pm

  • CR-301A | Accelerate Business Agility and Value through Active>Metadata - Eric Krause and Mark Coyne, Ab Initio

  • CR-301B | Advancing Dementia Science through Health and Behavior Data – Jon Corkey, Amissa Health

  • CR-302A | Security and Sustainability with GenAI – Jody Elliott, National Grid and sustainableIT.org

  • CR-302B | AI Sleep Therapy for Enhanced Wellness – Morgan Moncada, Neru Health

  • CR-302C | Lead with Integrity: Unlocking Leadership at Every Level – Thomas Edgar, Lane Hardin, Shibu Majeed, Sunil Gupta, and Sarah Oraby, Blue Cross NC

  • CR-402 | Leading Tech with Human: Harnessing AI to revolutionize the Human Healthcare Experience – Lisa Woodley, NTT DATA

 

TRACK 3 @ 4:00pm

  • CR-301A | PechaKucha Micro-Sessions – various presenters, Blue Cross NC

  • CR-301B | The State of the AI Market (and what you can do about it) – Pete Johnson, CDW

  • CR-302A | Streamlit / Snowflake BI - Bhanu Kanna, Blue Cross NC

  • CR-302B | Riding the GenAI Wave: Are You Leading the Data Revolution or Drowning in Data Chaos? – Ram Kuchana, HCL Tech

  • CR-302C | Aging Population Solutions – Dr. Greg McDavitt, ServiceNow

  • CR-402 | Cyber-Security at Scale - Andrew MacKenzie, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association

SPARK SESSION INFO

Re-imagining Software Engineering with Gen AI – GenWizard

CR-301A | Arabinda Goswami and Murli Iyer - Associate Directors, Accenture

Reach NEW LEVELS of Speed, Efficiency and Quality with GenWizard.  Discover how our platform can transform your technology delivery lifecycle during this interactive session. GenWizard, a comprehensive Generative AI platform for software engineering, harnesses the power of existing tools and assets to dramatically enhance delivery outcomes. It's a scalable solution that effortlessly aligns with your business technology and generative AI applications. Drawing on Accenture's extensive industry knowledge and process expertise, GenWizard supports a broad range of technology delivery scenarios. Grounded in Responsible AI and Human in Loop principles, and ensuring security and legal compliance, GenWizard propels your business towards enhanced speed, efficiency, and quality. Experience the future of software engineering with GenWizard.

Litehouse - The Path to a New Digital Language Strategy

CR-301B | John "Griff" Griffin - Director, Customer Experience Design & Business Integration, Blue Cross NC; Mike Doubintchik - Manager, IT Solution Delivery, Blue Cross NC; Lindsey Crook - Sr User Interface Design Analyst, Blue Cross NC; Alina Kerov - Sr Developer, Blue Cross NC

Learn more about how Blue Cross NC’s enterprise design language system can help teams build beautiful, consistent user experiences with fewer resources, faster.

Snow White and the Seven Risks: A Recovery and Resilience Story

CR-302A | Matthew Lamoreaux - Infrastructure Design Engineer, Blue Cross NC; Joseph Bartnik IV - Manager, IT Infrastructure Solutions, Blue Cross NC

Disaster recovery, high availability, business continuity, service continuity management, operational resiliency: Aren't these just different words for the same thing? The short answer is "yes." Eskimos, depending on your source, have between 50 and 180 different words for snow and ice. Why? Snow and ice impact every part of life in the Arctic. Snow's not that big a deal in IT. But risk is. Join this session for the rest of the story…

Healthcare Industry Clouds and Digital Health Platform

CR-302B | Roger Benn - Healthcare Analyst and Researcher, Gartner; Austynn Eubank - Principal Analyst, Gartner

This session will cover the cloud trends, and where the industry is headed.  How can organizations use industry platforms’ composability capabilities to gain the adaptability they need to cope with accelerating industry disruptions and unique requirements.

Building the Future with Beacon AI

CR-302C | Brody Heffner - Sr Manager, Advanced Analytics, Blue Cross NC; Pavel Kolomiets - Principal Data Scientist, Blue Cross NC

Get up close with Beacon AI, the first custom Generative AI-driven application at Blue Cross NC designed to empower CSR teams to quickly and accurately respond to member inquiries, reducing the silent time on calls to improve our members' experience.

Cyber-Security at Scale

CR-402 | Andrew McKenzie, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association

This session explores the Association system-wide cyber strategy and how our local cyber-design feeds into the nationwide blueprint.

Accelerate Business Agility and Value through Active>Metadata

CR-301A | Eric Krause - US Healthcare Vertical Lead, Ab Initio; Mark Coyne - Strategic Consultant, Ab Initio

Come and learn how BCBSNC is teaming up with Ab Initio to create an agile data ecosystem for the future.  We’ll show you how to activate your metadata to enable automation and self-service while enhancing the governance of your data assets.  Find out how you will soon have trusted data products, with lineage and data quality, so you know where the data came from, what its quality is and where it is being used, with all this information and all your data available to all users not just technical experts.  With this kind of automation, transparency, and ease of use there will be no limit to the value that BCBSNC can generate from its agile data platform.

Advancing Dementia Science through Health and Behavior Data

CR-301B | Jon Corkey - Founder, Amissa Health

This session will explore the tremendous opportunity to improve the lives of people with dementia, to improve their safety, to improve the stress and burden for caregivers, and improve the collection of data to advance research, behavioral research, and intervention research to prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s disease leveraging wearable technology.

Security and Sustainability with GenAI

CR-302A | Jody Elliott - Head of IT Sustainability and Risk, National Grid (and sustainableIT.org)

GenAI’s corporate use is rapidly accelerating. In this session, we will look at how to balance its positive and negative impacts to our security and sustainability strategy and business case discussions.

AI Sleep Therapy for Enhanced Wellness

CR-302B | Morgan Moncada - Co-Founder and CEO, Neru Health

Neru Health is a Harvard-backed startup that develops AI-personalized Sleep Therapy to manage chronic sleep disorders and reduce fatigue for 70M Americans and 20M+ shift workers in ground transportation, healthcare, and aviation industries.  

CEO, Morgan Moncada, will guide you through: 

  • The prevalence of sleep disorders faced by the general population and shift workers, including negative outcomes for safety, mental health, and cardiometabolic health

  • The challenges in the sleep health system – from healthcare providers like sleep clinics to general consumer solutions

  • The science of sleep and circadian rhythms with actionable research-based interventions to help you regain control of your sleep 

  • How Neru is using AI to personalize sleep therapy for individuals' unique sleep problems, work schedules, and lifestyles.  

Lead with Integrity: Unlocking Leadership at Every Level

CR-302C | Thomas Edgar, Lane Hardin, Shibu Majeed, Sunil Gupta, and Sarah Oraby, Blue Cross NC

Leaders are not always managers. An IT Panel discussion on leadership, leadership cultivation and empowering others to become leaders among their peers. Topics include Panelists' leadership experiences, strategies in leadership style, identifying leadership abilities in others, pushing beyond the comfort zone, and ways you, too, can become a leader.

Leading Tech with Human: Harnessing AI to revolutionize the Human Healthcare Experience

CR-402 | Lisa Woodley - VP and Head of Design, Launch by NTT DATA

The incredible pace of technological innovation has revolutionized how we deliver products and services. Advancements in machine learning and generative AI have yielded nearly limitless potential for us to streamline our processes and deliver digital products faster and at lower costs. For many IT executives, that benefit alone makes any investment worthwhile. But what if you could do more? What if you could leverage these same cost saving technologies to change how you interact with the humans that are the center of your business.

Join Lisa Woodley as she shares inspiring stories from healthcare leaders. See how they're using AI not just to save money, but to make real human connections with their brands. Learn how they've shifted from seeing tech as just a cost-cutter to using it to create meaningful experiences. Get ready to start your own journey with practical tips and insights.

PechaKucha Micro-Sessions

CR-301A | various presenters, Blue Cross NC

PechaKucha is a storytelling format in which a presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each. At a PechaKucha Night, individuals gather to share personal presentations about their work. We are taking this concept and using it loosely to accommodate demos and Q+A for deeper understanding of three different topics, including:

The Power of Data Storytelling - Dr. Brian Sneve

This micro-session we will focus on various methods of converting dry facts and figures into interesting characters and events, and relaying them in the form of a story to enable our company’s decision-making. 

Medicare Enrollment Dashboard: Product Development Process - Kayley Pirt and Francis Anthony

Get a look into how the modernization of our core systems enables CX/UX in this use case that gives better insight into the customer journey.

Red Hat best-practice for stable Python-Development environment - Alex Virgilis

VENV is an awesome way to customize and control your python test environment on Linux, because the user gets complete control over all variables packages and user settings that they want to test in. This micros-session will cover what it is, why and how we use it at Blue Cross NC, and how you can work with VENV too.

The State of the AI Market (and what you can do about it)

CR-301B | Pete Johnson - Lead Field CTO, CDW

Gen AI 2024 is a lot like Public Cloud 2008. There’s lots of hype, but it’s not always clear how to get started and how to set up a roadmap. This session will cover Microsoft Copilot for M365 to the NVIDIA DGX Superpod and everything in between. Learn about how we got here, what the full state of the market is, and why custom Gen AI solutions can be a lot less expensive than you think using open source models like Llama and Mistral alongside techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

Streamlit / Snowflake BI

CR-302A | Bhanu Kanna - Director, Business Intelligence, Blue Cross NC

Join this session to explore how Streamlit connects into Snowflake and its capabilities to develop tools and applications that enable data-driven use cases. From chatbots to data quality audit applications to no-code interfaces for end users to interact with advanced predictive analytics, we’ll review a wide range of ways that Blue Cross NC takes advantage of all Streamlit has to offer.

Riding the GenAI Wave: Are You Leading the Data Revolution or Drowning in Data Chaos?

CR-302B | Ram Kuchana - Data Lead, HCL Tech

The focus of this session will be on understanding data complexity and creating an approach to scale AI.

Aging Population Solutions (Complex Care Management)

CR-302C | Dr. Greg McDavitt - Director - Health Insurance Industry Go-to-Market, ServiceNow

Join us for an exciting presentation on transforming the management of aging populations with best-in-class enterprise workflow automation, seamless data integrations, and advanced service capabilities. Discover how we connect front-office operations and external vendors with middle and back-office processes to enhance member services on a large scale. Building a robust network to care for our aging population is just the beginning; the greater challenge lies in effectively coordinating your service offerings to truly meet their needs. Don't miss this opportunity to see how we can revolutionize care management together!

Health Plan Customer Experience and Call Center Transformation

CR-402 | Aaron Warren, Vice President – Healthcare & Clinical Services, EXL Services

AI in healthcare, where we started 10 years ago, where we are now and where we'll be in 5 years. How does this impact, cost, experience and outcomes.