As the health-care industry continues to change and evolve, IT vendors are realizing that they must step up to help payers and providers seamlessly transform their organizations from a technology standpoint. Emil Peters, vice president of Hospital and Health System Markets at The TriZetto Group, shares his message with health-care CIOs, The TriZetto Group’s new solutions and improvements to its flagship offering, how it’s innovating and what he is hearing from its customers and partners.
HCITS: The TriZetto Group is attending the Healthcare IT Summit, which attracts CIOs of health-care payer and provider organizations. What is your message to them?
Peters: I think I would say, ‘Welcome to the most interesting time in the most important industry in the world that impacts every member of every society.' We bring comprehensive experience and decades of knowledge from supporting risk-bearing entities to both payers and providers. As we enter new and innovative models that seek to solve the global health-care affordability crisis that we collectively share, we think our solutions will help new stakeholders play a pivotal role. We look to support and contribute to this new world not just by being an IT vendor, but also by being a global solution partner that supports its clients as they transform themselves.
HCITS: What new deployment methodologies and architectures is your flagship solution providing today?
Peters: With the payers’ drive to become more efficient, and the providers’ goal to enter new models without breaking their already broken piggy banks, we see an opportunity to be relevant and supportive in both spaces. TriZetto has not only made investments in functional capabilities to deepen our ability to support a variety of customers, but we have made some key acquisitions that extend our capabilities to address what these new payer/providers clients will ultimately look like.
Our GatewayEDI acquisition, last year, has given us tremendous insight and capability into physician revenue cycle management (RCM) and real-time payment capabilities. Recently we bolstered that investment in provider infrastructure by bringing NHXS on board to help group practices obtain accurate claim payments and recover underpayments. Continuing this expansion, we've just announced the acquisition of ClaimLogic, a medical claims and payment processing company that has serves hospitals and large medical practices. By combining all these capabilities, TriZetto is building an integrated, real-time payer-provider technology platform that helps health plans and physicians achieve efficiency and effective care.
HCITS: How are you innovating and driving innovation from a technology standpoint?
Peters: Having just spent a few days with our TriZetto technology team, I can't be more positive about our technical innovation trajectory. We continue to evolve our solutions to meet the ever changing demands of both our payer and provider clients. Being able to provide flexibility with a focus on TCO is important and the ability to scale is something that we think is going to be vital for payers and providers moving forward. When you think of information as the new currency for global population health management, the ability to flex with our customers is paramount. We're truly excited to be in position to lead with our clients, but it also brings a tremendous amount of responsibility that we are ready for.
HCITS: What are you hearing from your IT executive partners and customers?
Peters: There is a sense of tremendous opportunity, while at the same time there is a lot of risk. Providers, specifically, are catching their breath from the first wave of Meaningful Use and are getting ready to run and jump into stage two. Payers are looking to drive administrative efficiency, increase automation and improve the cost and quality of care. It's no surprise that everyone is a bit weary of all these new models that will require heavy doses of information to succeed. That's why we think we can play an impartial and transparent role in helping them mitigate risks and maximize opportunities. There is a lot of opportunity as I mentioned earlier, but it's below the surface and going to require some excavation to get there. If you're going to excavate, you're going to need the right tools and capabilities and our clients are coming to us asking for answers.
HCITS: What is your biggest piece of advice, from a vendor perspective, to our Healthcare CIO audience?
Peters: I think it would be to specialize and know your end destination. Know your place in the market and what your value proposition is. There will be a lot of iteration in order to get to that final destination and undoubtedly it will be an arduous journey, but if you know the end point and the way points to get there, the organizational risk can be manageable. To reuse my boat analogy, you need to plan for the whole journey and not just the rapids or the calm waters. Your equipment needs to serve you in the way you need to be served at the time you need it. Planning with that end in mind will help you get the right balance of people, process and technology. It sounds elementary, but it's really important.
Mimecast Helps Ease The Pain Of Health-Care IT
With all of the IT challenges within the health-care industry today, IT executives are looking for a little piece of sanity that a good vendor could provide them. Miguel Llopiz, vice president of the health-care sector at Mimecast, finds it remarkable how health-care CIOs handle all of their day-to-day responsibilities while still finding time and resources for innovation. Mimecast’s goal is to take some of the pain, and cost, away from these IT executives from cloud to email environments.
HCITS: How does Mimecast cater to health-care payer and provider IT executives? What are you doing in the health-care space?
Llopiz: Mimecast brings to bear a very powerful mix of capabilities aimed at distinct value propositions—compliancy and collaboration—while leveraging the cloud to attain much lower costs. We provide a cloud-based service that delivers collaborative HIPAA security and privacy, and compliance enablers that enhance the current mail platform, while reducing complexity and costs. We expand the capabilities that the current email system delivers while driving huge efficiencies in the IT organization. It completely aligns with health-care initiatives to drive costs down while delivering better service.
HCITS: Are there any new products or services that you would like to share with our audience?
Llopiz: We have spent a lot of time speaking to our current health-care customers as well as prospective clients, thus, have been able to align our existing suite of cloud-based services to their individual requirements. Additionally, we have learned that many are using either an inefficient mix of independent products or using such products in a manner for which they were not intended. Either way spells deficiencies and skyrocketing costs. What we are doing is delivering a unified approach to email management, where customers can leverage investments or consolidate disparate applications at much reduced cost and complexity.
HCITS: Do you have a specific example of this unified approach?
Llopiz: Our mobility products and services allow for BYOD deployment and bring 100 percent continual access to email, and archive for the mobile health-care worker. Even better, it does this seamlessly and inexpensively. Of the many new capabilities we are delivering, I am excited about our MSO4 (Mimecast Services for Outlook), which tightly integrate with the user interface and deliver contextual “on demand” retention, security and privacy policies. This allows IT to manage the compliance burden through good procedural mechanics. In addition, we are investing in some revolutionary technologies that provide high-level analytics that extract particular insights from our archive. In the future, we can shape these tools to the specific needs of not only our health-care clients, but also address custom requirements for many of our customers.
HCITS: How does Mimecast help health-care IT executives stay ahead of the curve in the health-care industry today?
Llopiz: This is very basic: We take the pain and cost of managing their email environment, thus liberating IT staff to direct their attention to the many other areas and initiatives that they have to support—again, doing more with fewer headaches. Our mantra includes our five Cs of IT: reducing cost and complexity while offering compliant and continuous collaboration.
HCITS: What is the biggest IT trend that you are seeing in the health-care industry today, and how are you addressing that trend?
Llopiz: IT executives are burdened with a tremendous amount of responsibilities, applications to support and initiatives to manage. Frankly, I don’t know how some of these folks do it! They have less budget, time and resources at their disposal. This presents a unique scenario in that they are also being asked to maintain an increasing portfolio of services, compliance initiatives, resources, applications, thus, vendor relationships. The challenges are great and the solutions are many, but the real efficiency is in ensuring these solutions address real concerns and not become shelf-ware. Our customers are looking for ways to leverage the cloud and bring about cost effectiveness and simplicity, and most offerings come in an all-or-nothing format. What we can provision are ways for them to leverage the efficiencies cloud technologies can potentially deliver, but not have to face the mountainous challenges in bringing these technologies to full use in a short time period. We can activate our services in days for incredibly low costs.
HCITS: What will Mimecast be presenting at the Healthcare IT Summit?
Llopiz: We will be showcasing success stories from our broad customer base and introducing new products and enhancements, as well as new partnerships that will please current and future clients.
HCITS: How does Mimecast cater to health-care payer and provider IT executives? What are you doing in the health-care space?
Llopiz: Mimecast brings to bear a very powerful mix of capabilities aimed at distinct value propositions—compliancy and collaboration—while leveraging the cloud to attain much lower costs. We provide a cloud-based service that delivers collaborative HIPAA security and privacy, and compliance enablers that enhance the current mail platform, while reducing complexity and costs. We expand the capabilities that the current email system delivers while driving huge efficiencies in the IT organization. It completely aligns with health-care initiatives to drive costs down while delivering better service.
HCITS: Are there any new products or services that you would like to share with our audience?
Llopiz: We have spent a lot of time speaking to our current health-care customers as well as prospective clients, thus, have been able to align our existing suite of cloud-based services to their individual requirements. Additionally, we have learned that many are using either an inefficient mix of independent products or using such products in a manner for which they were not intended. Either way spells deficiencies and skyrocketing costs. What we are doing is delivering a unified approach to email management, where customers can leverage investments or consolidate disparate applications at much reduced cost and complexity.
HCITS: Do you have a specific example of this unified approach?
Llopiz: Our mobility products and services allow for BYOD deployment and bring 100 percent continual access to email, and archive for the mobile health-care worker. Even better, it does this seamlessly and inexpensively. Of the many new capabilities we are delivering, I am excited about our MSO4 (Mimecast Services for Outlook), which tightly integrate with the user interface and deliver contextual “on demand” retention, security and privacy policies. This allows IT to manage the compliance burden through good procedural mechanics. In addition, we are investing in some revolutionary technologies that provide high-level analytics that extract particular insights from our archive. In the future, we can shape these tools to the specific needs of not only our health-care clients, but also address custom requirements for many of our customers.
HCITS: How does Mimecast help health-care IT executives stay ahead of the curve in the health-care industry today?
Llopiz: This is very basic: We take the pain and cost of managing their email environment, thus liberating IT staff to direct their attention to the many other areas and initiatives that they have to support—again, doing more with fewer headaches. Our mantra includes our five Cs of IT: reducing cost and complexity while offering compliant and continuous collaboration.
HCITS: What is the biggest IT trend that you are seeing in the health-care industry today, and how are you addressing that trend?
Llopiz: IT executives are burdened with a tremendous amount of responsibilities, applications to support and initiatives to manage. Frankly, I don’t know how some of these folks do it! They have less budget, time and resources at their disposal. This presents a unique scenario in that they are also being asked to maintain an increasing portfolio of services, compliance initiatives, resources, applications, thus, vendor relationships. The challenges are great and the solutions are many, but the real efficiency is in ensuring these solutions address real concerns and not become shelf-ware. Our customers are looking for ways to leverage the cloud and bring about cost effectiveness and simplicity, and most offerings come in an all-or-nothing format. What we can provision are ways for them to leverage the efficiencies cloud technologies can potentially deliver, but not have to face the mountainous challenges in bringing these technologies to full use in a short time period. We can activate our services in days for incredibly low costs.
HCITS: What will Mimecast be presenting at the Healthcare IT Summit?
Llopiz: We will be showcasing success stories from our broad customer base and introducing new products and enhancements, as well as new partnerships that will please current and future clients.
LogiXML Will Release New Version of Its Product In Early November
The health-care industry is under more pressure than almost any other industry. Its environment is changing faster than most in respect to what health-care IT executives have to do with their data. Ken Chow, chief marketing officer of LogiXML, believes that LogiXML’s health-care dashboards, reporting and analytics tools enable IT executives in this space to adapt to the rapidly changing industry landscape. In this interview, Chow discusses LogiXML’s newest version of its product, which will be released jsut in time for the Healthcare IT Summit in November, what they will be showing at the conference and how they are catering to the health-care CIO audience.
HCITS: How does LogiXML cater to health-care payer and provider IT executives? What are you doing in the health-care space?
Chow: We provide a way of producing the analytics and reporting health-care CIOs need across multiple disparate databases. Typically, the two main drivers of their concern are speed and having fragmented data sources; our solution addresses these issues as it provides a web-based platform that adapts to the changing health-care environment quickly and in an organized manner. The only other major way in which I think we are really outstanding in that area is that we provide a fine level of security, which I think is important for all health-care IT executives.
HCITS: Are there any new products or services that you would like to share with our audience?
Chow: This year, in early November, we are going to have a major release of a new product coming out that provides even more intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces and visuals. I think that’s important, because many health-care payer and provider institutions are delivering metrics that need to be interpreted on-the-fly both quickly and easily, so we are just making the whole visual impression even better. We plan to show it off at the Healthcare IT Summit.
HCITS: How does LogiXML help health-care IT executives stay ahead of the curve in the health-care industry today?
Chow: These individuals are certainly being thrown a lot of curveballs both from the regulatory arena as well as the increased competitive environment they are in. So, we give them a way of reacting more quickly. The same agility I spoke of in the first questions—the ability to get to multiple databases, get to them securely, and to really quickly make and change the views of the things they are looking at—is how we help them stay ahead. They know this industry and they are having a difficult enough time predicting these trends. They need to adapt and change the way they adapt and change to their data really quickly in order to stay ahead.
HCITS: What is the biggest IT trend you are seeing in the health-care industry today, and how are you addressing that trend?
Chow: The single biggest trend would be about cost control and reimbursement, and much of that has come by way of the change in the regulatory environment as well as the industry structures that have arisen to handle it. Things like the notion of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), and so forth, have changed the landscape of how both payer and provider institutions have to look at their data. If they are going to adapt to these new systems, particularly the new Medicaid and Medicare programs, they are going to have to really stay on top of that data. Cost control and reimbursement is probably one of the pain points—it certainly doesn’t take a back seat to patient care, which has always been a priority—but, cost control and reimbursement is the fastest-growing trend today.
HCITS: Please share a customer example of your success in this space.
Chow: NACHRI (the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions), which recently merged with CHCA and is now together known as the Children’s Hospital Association, use our product’s portal to allow all of their members to compare their operational metrics to their peers. They are able to help their members operate efficiently and make sure their memberships are as cost-efficient as possible by benchmarking, sharing and collaborating on best practices.
In contrast, Partners In Health has actually instituted our product to deliver patient care and direct patient metrics onto the floor of the care institutions so that the hospital staff, nursing staff, doctors and administrators can quickly take a look at care statistics and available resources to match the care needs. These are just two examples of the types of things that we do and offer.
HCITS: What will LogiXML be presenting at the Healthcare IT Summit?
Chow: We will be showing off the newest version of our product with some very compelling visuals, as l mentioned earlier. I think the main “aha” moment that most of the IT executives will have with our technology will be when they see how fast it is, how easy it is to hook it up to all of their data and the level of role-based security that it provides. The main thrust of the product will happen at the Healthcare IT Summit—we will be talking about the new enhancements and the release so we are really excited for the conference.
HCITS: How does LogiXML cater to health-care payer and provider IT executives? What are you doing in the health-care space?
Chow: We provide a way of producing the analytics and reporting health-care CIOs need across multiple disparate databases. Typically, the two main drivers of their concern are speed and having fragmented data sources; our solution addresses these issues as it provides a web-based platform that adapts to the changing health-care environment quickly and in an organized manner. The only other major way in which I think we are really outstanding in that area is that we provide a fine level of security, which I think is important for all health-care IT executives.
HCITS: Are there any new products or services that you would like to share with our audience?
Chow: This year, in early November, we are going to have a major release of a new product coming out that provides even more intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces and visuals. I think that’s important, because many health-care payer and provider institutions are delivering metrics that need to be interpreted on-the-fly both quickly and easily, so we are just making the whole visual impression even better. We plan to show it off at the Healthcare IT Summit.
HCITS: How does LogiXML help health-care IT executives stay ahead of the curve in the health-care industry today?
Chow: These individuals are certainly being thrown a lot of curveballs both from the regulatory arena as well as the increased competitive environment they are in. So, we give them a way of reacting more quickly. The same agility I spoke of in the first questions—the ability to get to multiple databases, get to them securely, and to really quickly make and change the views of the things they are looking at—is how we help them stay ahead. They know this industry and they are having a difficult enough time predicting these trends. They need to adapt and change the way they adapt and change to their data really quickly in order to stay ahead.
HCITS: What is the biggest IT trend you are seeing in the health-care industry today, and how are you addressing that trend?
Chow: The single biggest trend would be about cost control and reimbursement, and much of that has come by way of the change in the regulatory environment as well as the industry structures that have arisen to handle it. Things like the notion of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), and so forth, have changed the landscape of how both payer and provider institutions have to look at their data. If they are going to adapt to these new systems, particularly the new Medicaid and Medicare programs, they are going to have to really stay on top of that data. Cost control and reimbursement is probably one of the pain points—it certainly doesn’t take a back seat to patient care, which has always been a priority—but, cost control and reimbursement is the fastest-growing trend today.
HCITS: Please share a customer example of your success in this space.
Chow: NACHRI (the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions), which recently merged with CHCA and is now together known as the Children’s Hospital Association, use our product’s portal to allow all of their members to compare their operational metrics to their peers. They are able to help their members operate efficiently and make sure their memberships are as cost-efficient as possible by benchmarking, sharing and collaborating on best practices.
In contrast, Partners In Health has actually instituted our product to deliver patient care and direct patient metrics onto the floor of the care institutions so that the hospital staff, nursing staff, doctors and administrators can quickly take a look at care statistics and available resources to match the care needs. These are just two examples of the types of things that we do and offer.
HCITS: What will LogiXML be presenting at the Healthcare IT Summit?
Chow: We will be showing off the newest version of our product with some very compelling visuals, as l mentioned earlier. I think the main “aha” moment that most of the IT executives will have with our technology will be when they see how fast it is, how easy it is to hook it up to all of their data and the level of role-based security that it provides. The main thrust of the product will happen at the Healthcare IT Summit—we will be talking about the new enhancements and the release so we are really excited for the conference.
Todd Park, U.S. CTO, On HHS & Healthcare IT
Todd Park, the former Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2009, still has high interest in the healthcare industry and how it is utilizing technology for the American public. Prior to joining HHS, Park co-founded Athenahealth and co-led its development into one of the most innovative health IT companies in the industry.
Although he is now the Federal Chief Technology Officer, Park still keeps involved in the healthcare community by creating the Health Data Initiative (HDI) Forum and the annual Health Datapalooza event, which is a public-private collaboration that encourages innovators to utilize health data to develop applications to raise awareness of health and health system performance and spark community action to improve health.
Q: What is on the horizon for HHS? What is the biggest innovation in progress in the effort to revolutionize the release and use of health data?
Park: HHS has been the lead agency for the health data initiative and is continuing to expand the amount of data that is being available, readable and is continuing to broaden awareness of entrepreneurs, innovators and the public about this data and its availability as resource to power innovation. There’s a lot going on there across multiple dimensions.
Q: Among your achievements at HHS were the launch of programs such as the consumer website HealthCare.gov, the Health Data Initiative and the HDI forum. What was the thought process behind the creation of these projects and how did they come to fruition?
Park: Well, HealthCare.gov was a requirement of The Affordable Care Act so that’s where that project came from. The Health Data Initiative came from earlier conversations that I had with Bill Corr, deputy secretary of HHS, who really wanted us to think about how HHS can deliver higher social return on all of the data that HHS had as a priority. There were other ideas that were germinated from innovative career civil servants at HHS who came to me with amazing ideas, which we then crystalized and put into action. Something that I’ve learned from this is that great ideas can come form anywhere and anyone and as innovation leaders, it is very important to look everywhere for the next great idea that can then be turned into something wonderful for the American people.
Q: What is on the horizon for HHS? What is the biggest innovation in progress in the effort to revolutionize the release and use of health data?
Park: HHS has been the lead agency for the health data initiative and is continuing to expand the amount of data that is being available, readable and is continuing to broaden awareness of entrepreneurs, innovators and the public about this data and its availability as resource to power innovation. There’s a lot going on there across multiple dimensions.
For example, CMS (Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services), which is part of HHS, has very powerful data and has just launched a new office called The Office for Information Products and Data Analytics. This is an office that is dedicated to improving access to and utilization of data, both internally at CMS and externally, in order to improve health and
care.
care.
Q: Among your achievements at HHS were the launch of programs such as the consumer website HealthCare.gov, the Health Data Initiative and the HDI forum. What was the thought process behind the creation of these projects and how did they come to fruition?
Park: Well, HealthCare.gov was a requirement of The Affordable Care Act so that’s where that project came from. The Health Data Initiative came from earlier conversations that I had with Bill Corr, deputy secretary of HHS, who really wanted us to think about how HHS can deliver higher social return on all of the data that HHS had as a priority. There were other ideas that were germinated from innovative career civil servants at HHS who came to me with amazing ideas, which we then crystalized and put into action. Something that I’ve learned from this is that great ideas can come form anywhere and anyone and as innovation leaders, it is very important to look everywhere for the next great idea that can then be turned into something wonderful for the American people.
Q&A With Todd Park, U.S. CTO
Federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has a vision for changing the way American citizens interact with technology. We had an opportunity to discuss those initiatives with Park, who was appointed Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2009. Prior to joining HHS, Park co-founded Athenahealth and co-led its development into one of the most innovative health IT companies in the industry. Many of our questions came from XChange Events advisory board members.
Q: Please tell us about the digital government strategy—how will it help the American people, and what you are doing to drive that strategy forward?
Park: U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel and I rolled out the digital government strategy in May, which seeks to do three things:
- Put government at citizens’ fingertips and literally bring government to mobile devices, and any device in general, that citizens are using.
- Buy technology in a certain way that gives bigger bang for the taxpayer buck.
- Move even more energetically and strongly in the direction of open data.
Q: Why is it important to make government data open and machine-readable?
Park: This is important because if you open up the data and make it machine-readable, it becomes easier able to power innovative digital government services. And, even more importantly, it opens the data in usable form so that all of the other “smart people” in the world—developers, innovators and entrepreneurs—can take our data and turn it into magic. They can turn it into new products or services that can improve American lives, help grow our economy and create jobs.
Q: What is one of the key initiatives that you are pursuing to catapult the digital government strategy forward?
Park: One of the key initiatives that is driving the digital government strategy forward is the open data initiatives program. This program seeks to not just liberate government data in machine-readable form, but also catalyze the development of an ecosystem of innovation that utilizes that data and educate innovators and entrepreneurs about that data. Through a series of meet-ups, code-a-thons and datapaloozas, we are able to celebrate the wide range of innovations that people are already pursuing.
Q: What is the Presidential Innovation Fellows program? How will it impact the state of our health care industry and the American government as a whole?
Park: The Presidential Innovation Fellows program is a program that we launched simultaneous with the digital government strategy. It’s a program that aims to bring together the amazing innovators from outside the government and the best innovators inside government. We then create agile teams that aim to deliver game-changing solutions in six months.
Q: At what point does the federal government start leveraging this country’s IT infrastructure and talent as opposed to developing its own?
Park: I think that moment is now. The central thrust of our approach with open data initiatives and the digital government strategy is that we shouldn’t build the tools that should be useful to citizens ourselves; we should open up that data so innovators outside of government can leverage our data to build useful services and applications with their infrastructure, technology, ingenuity and people.
So if we want to maximize the social return on taxpayer investment in government data, we know that we can’t just have the government build tools on it, but instead have everyone else build tools on the data to help the public.
Q: What’s your plan to deal with “Policy Lag” where the current federal policies have not kept up with the advancement of technology?
Park: Initiatives like the digital government strategy can close that gap dramatically. If you think about the implications of a move like open data, what we’re doing is future-proofing the U.S. government from a technology standpoint because we are saying, “we are going to open up our data and when the world evolves, it will utilize that data in a number of ways.” It allows our data to evolve and advance at the same speed that technology is advancing.
Q: Small businesses continue to struggle to get a fair share of the federal government IT pie. What are some actions the federal government is taking to enhance SMB opportunities?
Park: RFP-EZ. One of the features of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program is that it is both bringing in 20 people to be literal fellows, and it also is an opportunity for others to engage as well. You can sign up and provide input from wherever you are. We are looking for folks to join the networks to provide support and ideas to each of the projects. It gives small businesses, and anyone else, the opportunity to provide input and insight. To sign up you can go to white.gov/innovationfellows.
Q: If you could give our diverse IT executive audience one piece of advice, what would it be?
Park: There is immense innovation talent locked in your organization and the most important thing you can do as an innovation or IT leader is to unleash that talent and unleash that mojo. Embrace the power of the lean start-up approach to change management (an idea first established by Eric Ries). The final piece of advice is to embrace the power of open innovation and to embrace the idea of Joy’s law. It is to recognize that if you came up with lots of other people to get something done, you will actually deliver much better results, much faster with a much lower cost than if you try to do it all yourself.
Q: What is the day in the life of Todd Park as the CTO of the U.S.?
Park: Crazy and wonderful! About 80 percent of my time is spent functioning as the virtual CEO and leader of a set of high-priority initiatives and projects that I am responsible for leading the execution of, and delivering results. The other 20 percent of my time is being a senior adviser that provides council and ideas and other kinds of assistance on issues as they arise.
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