Originally published: . Volume 10, No. 6. Source pages: 12.
Dr. Richard Blocker has developed and launched his "Employee Confidential Project," an enterprise web database capable of managing an unlimited number of individual consultants, facilities and records. The big data tool is offered by his company, Psymetra, and the analytics are offered as a “web service” to be run in-house by subscribing businesses and management consultants.
Big data analytics examines large amounts of data to uncover hidden patterns, correlations and other insights. How did Dr. Blocker get into this type of software development?
"I had been providing psychological consultation services to nursing care facilities," he said. "I found a staggering rate of employee turnover. During this period my partner, Tricia Knaack, and I had been coding and to a lesser degree, selling EMR-type software. As a small shop, we were not excited about keeping up with the ephemeral agenda of CMS for software. Full-court policy- wonking was not our thing. We weren't really making any money but were learning a lot and enjoying the coding."
"We starting writing a project to analyze employee turnover," Dr. Blocker said. "We decided to upgrade our skills to scalable internet-based development and we expanded our turnover application beyond just healthcare (e.g., police departments, hospitality and other industries). We gradually added a large survey component, basically re-writing a year's worth of coding. We knew the survey concept wouldn't work in a business without strong respondent confidentiality, so confidentiality became our algorithm and mantra (hence, "The Employee Confidential Project"). Adding surveys again expanded the scope of our work to include a broad swath of workforce issues."
Dr. Blocker's Psymetra Labs has thousands of survey items in a searchable survey item database making on- the-fly survey construction feasible. The survey archives available to subscribers grows with each new survey from any and all facilities using the system anywhere, in any industry. Analyses are anchored to employee turnover and employer-defined employee readiness as outcome criteria.
Dr. Blocker has served as owner and clinical director of Riverside Psychotherapy Associates, Inc., a multidisciplinary mental health practice, until 2001, when he entered solo practice and focused on consulting to hospitals and long term care facilities in the south Louisiana area, and then went further in IT and performance analytics.
"I think the fun part of this for psychologists is the potential for effect at scale and the novelty of studying stress and human coping in real time. Cambridge Analytica showed the raw power of human analytics to scale. Now hopefully, there is still room for a more positive contribution. There is the opportunity to save lives in healthcare and law enforcement," he said.
"The statistic and testing background certainly helps organize the analytics and surveys. Graduate school quality discipline and research skills also help. The coding is a different beast but can be learned online. It's pretty exciting stuff."
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