Shuttling between his offices in Bengaluru and New York, Chocko Valliappa is all smiles as he looks back at the two decades since he set up Vee Technologies to offer technology-enabled solutions to a slew of businesses and organisations around the world. The newest feather in his cap is a tie-up with the Toronto-based University Health Network (UHN), Canada, to collaborate on a multi-institution research and commercialisation effort to develop smart fabrics that can help people meet health-related challenges. Between his cross-continent travels, Chocko also finds time to keep his fingers on the pulse of Vee’s parent, the 83-year-old Sona group of educational institutions in Salem, Tamil Nadu. “We at Sona proudly commit our best scientific brains to the FIBRE project,” says his father C. Valliappa, who is the founder chairman of the group. “We hope that the application of this long-term research will bring much-needed relief to millions facing health challenges. When some of these products get to the market, those of us in India will be the big beneficiaries.” While three universities, four colleges and a number of industry partners are actively working on FIBRE’s goal with the UHN hospital network - which includes Toronto General and Toronto Western Hospitals, the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and The Michener Institute of Education – Vee Technologies and Sona group will be the only partners outside North America. The two will, apart from the ‘significant’ cash contributions to the current and future research projects, also contribute to the project through Sona’s faculty, laboratories and facilities. “This new partnership will help us move closer to achieving our vision of creating a healthier world,” explains Bradly G. Wouters, executive vice-president, science and research, UHN. “It will bring together multi-disciplinary expertise to develop textiles and garments that can support the growing needs of the healthcare sector for people in Canada, India and beyond.” The health benefits of this team science approach to solving today’s greatest health issues are far-reaching and will serve to help individuals experiencing chronic illness, aging as well as those living with disabilities, he adds. Vee Technologies has teams for its various verticals like logistics and media, e-governance – through which it facilitated NEET exams and helped power corporations across India to function – and several processes, including everything from automation to creating apps like HireMee and VeeTrace and from RPA Botification to building workflow engines. Over the past two decades of its existence, Vee Technologies has been providing information technology services to over 150 hospitals in the US, including six of the Top 20, handling their clinical coding and revenue cycle management in addition to providing e-learning and e-governance solutions. While the firm has all these business offerings, its biggest is healthcare, with 3,000 of its 5,000 employees engaged in healthcare analytics. “As healthcare moves from SickCare to WellCare, we are in the epicentre where wellness, coding, revenue cycle and payor teams continue to be the leaders in their areas,” Chocko says. Talent assessment Its social enterprise HireMee offers a host of services including a learning management system and automatic and live proctored assessments. In the healthcare sector, it is demonstrating how medical assistants can be re-skilled, training medical assistants in administrative, clinical and non-technical skillsets to make them versatile members of any organisation they join and ensure their long-term employment. HireMee’s digital platform has enabled talent assessment of a million young men and women from 800 towns all over India and connected them to start-ups through a verified assessment process that evaluates their knowledge, skills, personality and communication. A cloud-based solution, this has helped recruiters select candidates for over 120,000 job opportunities without any cost and no carbon footprint. Team HireMee draws upon the experience of its affiliate SonaYukti, a pan-India player for skilling and re-skilling rural youth for a range of trades as part of India’s ongoing mega-skilling initiative.
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Vee Technologies offers technology-enabled solutions to a slew of businesses and organisations around the world