Jul 9 2021
Nolij Consulting (Nolij, pronounced 'knowledge'), a leader in federal and commercial IT healthcare and a fast-growing, woman-owned business, shares outcomes of the innovative, central role of its versatile Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform has achieved in advancing business intelligence at the government agency level throughout the pandemic era and beyond.
Developed by Nolij as a custom-built tool and recommendation engine, its AI platform leverages a multi-path, human-centered approach to harnessing the power of various automation solutions to drive expanded insights and outcomes. The platform's innate versatility is achieved through its focus on what automation path is the best at each stage of the automation pipeline. The functionalities are easily modified as new tools emerge and/or client requirements and the larger marketplace evolve over time.
Under its contract with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Nolij's platform was adapted by the BuySmarter initiative to drive greater efficiencies in overall group procurement and purchasing efforts. Nolij's AI platform substantially decreased procurement time. Coupled with the overall BuySmarter team effort this has contributed to saving HHS an estimated $750M.
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the flexibility of the Nolij platform was essential to its ability to pivot its focus to serve rapidly changing needs. Working directly with the Assistant Secretary of the HHS, Nolij's automation platform was put to work to locate and source personal protective equipment (PPE) that was in drastically short supply across all industries.
In leveraging the power of AI, Nolij's tool was able, in a span of minutes, to identify every active contract over the past five years that contained PPE and other needed medical supplies. From there, the program's software was able to categorize and break down each item by types of thermometers, brands of hand sanitizer, sizes and amounts of nitrile gloves, among others. As a result, HHS was provided with access to hundreds of thousands of existing PPE and necessary medical supplies in less than a business day. This is an achievement that would have taken years, if not been impossible to accomplish manually.
Key elements of the platform itself position it to drive unique and powerful outcomes in a marketplace where they were previously unavailable. These include:
- The use of heavy Natural Language Processing (NLP) to go beyond the capabilities of AI, along with named entity recognition to identify key attributes of items purchased or sourced;
- Deep learning algorithms with the ability to translate structured and unstructured text into usable language and data points, the latter being a complicated, laborious process that does not currently exist in the marketplace for contract language;
- Custom-built fields to handle and process acquisition data from various sources and format types to create actionable insights; and
- A human-centered design approach at the core, which enables the platform to build specific features that users need to maximize their goals, while allowing their ideas to come alive and gain momentum as efforts and activities move forward.
"We are at the center of the monumental achievements and applications for AI and automation technology at this critical time in history," Nolij's Chairwoman and CEO, Ashley Mehta said. "Prior to COVID-19 we had established this multi-path, human-centered automation approach for our clients, and it was truly put to the test amid the changing needs and significant demands that arose throughout the pandemic. Our platform is able to deliver a level of business intelligence to our client organizations that has never been achieved to-date. This accomplishment is a promising step in the future of technology and automation on the global stage, and at Nolij we are at the forefront, driving it forward."