Time is money, as the old adage goes, and this is doubly true in healthcare systems operating with thin margins now made even thinner thanks to the loss of revenue caused by a freeze on elective procedures.

Stepping in with a technology that automates much of the time-consuming back-end processes hospitals and healthcare providers need to keep up with is Olive, a startup out of Columbus, Ohio.

The company, which counts among its customers more than 500 hospitals representing some of the largest healthcare providers in the U.S., has raised a new round of $51 million as it sees significant growth for its business.

The round, raised from investors including Drive Capital, Oak HC/FT and Ascension Ventures, was led by General Catalyst, which recently closed on $2.3 billion in new capital to invest in early-stage companies.

As a result of the investment, Ron Paulus, the former president and chief executive of Mission Health, will join the board of directors, the company said in a statement.

Olive software toolkit automates administrative tasks like revenue cycle, supply chain management, clinical administration and human resources, the company said in a statement. And demand for the companytechnology is surging.

According to data provided by the company, roughly half of hospital administrators intend to invest in robotic process automation by 2021.

&As a recent health system CEO, I appreciate the duress our hospitals are under as they focus on delivering the best patient care possible under challenging circumstances all while needing to keep the lights on,& said Dr. Ronald A. Paulus. &Olivereliable automation of essential back-office processes saves time, reduces errors and allows staff to focus on higher-order work. I am excited to be working closely with Olivemanagement team to maximize the outsized positive impact we can have in healthcare on both the administrative and clinical fronts.&

I recently had a scheduled video conference call with a Fortune 100 company.

Everything on my end was ready to go; my presentation was prepared and well-practiced. I was set to talk to 30 business leaders who were ready to learn more about how they could become more resilient to major outages.

Unfortunately, their side hadn&t set up the proper permissions in Zoom to add new people to a trusted domain, so I wasn&t able to share my slides. We scrambled to find a workaround at the last minute while the assembled VPs and CTOs sat around waiting. I ended up emailing my presentation to their coordinator, calling in from my mobile and verbally indicating to the coordinator when the next slide needed to be brought up. Needless to say, it wasted a lot of time and wasn&t the most effective way to present.

At the end of the meeting, I said pointedly that if there was one thing they should walk away with, itthat they had a vital need to run an online fire drill with their engineering team as soon as possible. Because if a team is used to working together in an office — with access to tools and proper permissions in place — it can be quite a shock to find out in the middle of a major outage that they can&t respond quickly and adequately. Issues like these can turn a brief outage into one that lasts for hours.

Quick context about me: I carried a pager for a decade at Amazon and Netflix, and what I can tell you is that when either of these services went down, a lot of people were unhappy. There were many nights where I had to spring out of bed at 2 a.m., rub the sleep from my eyes and work with my team to quickly identify the problem. I can also tell you that working remotely makes the entire process more complicated if teams are not accustomed to it.

There are many articles about best practices aimed at a general audience, but engineering teams have specific challenges as the ones responsible for keeping online services up and running. And while leading tech companies already have sophisticated IT teams and operations in place, what about financial institutions and hospitals and other industries where IT is a tool, but not a primary focus? Itoften the small things that can make all the difference when working remotely; things that seem obvious in the moment, but may have been overlooked.

So here are some tips for managing incidents remotely:

There were many nights where I had to spring out of bed at 2 a.m., rub the sleep from my eyes and work with my team to quickly identify the problem… working remotely makes the entire process more complicated if teams are not accustomed to it.

If you&ve ever tried to buy the Harry Potter audiobooks, you probably noticed something kind of tricky: there are two very different versions. The version most widely available in the U.S. is narrated by Jim Dale. The U.K. version is read by Stephen Fry.

Which is better? I won&t get into that — thatsomething the internet has been arguing about for a decade+ now. I will say, however, that getting the Stephen Fry versions in the U.S. (legally) is usually a pretty big pain in the butt. Different countries, different distribution rights, different licensing — yada yada yada.

It got a bit easier today, albeit for just the first book: Audible has put the Stephen Fry version of &Harry Potter and the PhilosopherStone& up online, for free, until further notice.

Audible says itdoing this as part of J.K. Rowling#HarryPotterAtHome program, in which the author is &relaxing the usual copyright permissions& to make the story available to more children who are likely stuck at home during the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. The same program is allowing teachers to post videos of themselves reading the series aloud to their students (as long as iton a &closed educational platform&… so not like, YouTube) without worrying about getting into a copyright battle.

A few small catches:

• If you&re in North America and get hooked on Frytake on the narration, finding/importing the Fry version of the other books is going to be up to you. Even if you sign up for an Audible account, the rest of the series on Audible is read by Jim Dale. To be clear, Daleversion is verygood! Just know that itdifferent.
• It&ll work across laptops, phones, tablets, etc. with the caveat that itstreaming only, so plan on listening somewhere with an internet connection.

You can find the Harry Potter stream — plus a bunch of other family-friendly audiobooks as part of Audiblefree Stories program — right here.

As the floor drops out from under many startups, some tech companies are finding a path forward by meeting new government needs.

Among them is Palantir, a secretive government-friendly big data operation thatable to ingest vast amounts of information to visualize trends and track individuals — useful tasks as the spread of COVID-19 threatens to overwhelm healthcare systems and ravage economies.

In mid-March, The Wall Street Journal reported that Palantir was working with the CDC to model the potential spread of the virus. Forbes reports that CDC staffers are now regularly using Palantirweb app to visualize the spread of the virus and to anticipate hospital needs. According to that report, Palantir is eschewing dealing with sensitive personally identifying information in its coronavirus efforts, instead providing analysis of anonymized hospital and healthcare data, lab results and equipment supplies through a platform called Palantir Foundry.

In the U.K., Palantir is also providing the National Health Service (NHS) with COVID-19 data analysis through the companyFoundry software. In a blog post that mentioned the partnership, the U.K. government said that it will use Foundry &which has been primarily developed in the UK& to &[enable] disparate data to be integrated, cleaned, and harmonised in order to develop the single source of truth that will support decision-making.&

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Palantir is also pitching its analytics software to government officials in France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The company is apparently pitching both its Foundry software and a tool called Gotham, which is best-known for helping intelligence and law enforcement agencies track individuals, as in the case of the companywork with ICE. Those two tools are being proposed to European health agencies as a blended solution that could help countries get a bird&s-eye view of the pandemic.

As interest in surveillance technologies ramps up to meet the mounting crisis, privacy advocates are already sounding the alarm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation cautioned that &governments around the world are demanding extraordinary new surveillance powers& to fight the virus and urges close scrutiny of new relationships between governments and private companies that arise out of the pandemic.

Among those relationships: Palantirco-founder and chairman Peter Thiel is one of the Trump administrationmost prominent allies in the tech world. His sometimes controversial projects and investments generally attract attention, Palantir included.

Likely aware of its reputation as the shadowy tech giant that helps to power ICEdeportation machine, Palantir is apparently acknowledging the privacy implications of its new work. In a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal, Palantirprivacy lead Courtney Bowman asserted that privacy and civil liberty must be taken as &guiding concentrations& in any data-driven COVID-19 response, &not as afterthoughts.&

While it appears to be taking on a new role with the U.S. COVID-19 response, Palantir has worked with the U.S. federal government on infectious health threats for years. In 2010, the CDC used Palantir to monitor an outbreak of cholera in Haiti.

Some of that work is very recent. In late January, Palantir signed a $3.6 million contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to provide software for PEPFAR, a long-running international HIV relief program.

Neighborhood social networking app Nextdoor is rolling out a few changes focused on supporting local businesses. The COVID-19 outbreak has forced many businesses to close their doors, sometimes for good, while others are struggling to stay afloat. As a result, many Nextdoor users have been posting on the app asking how they can help support their favorite businesses during this time. These new updates will allow them to do just that — by buying gift cards from local businesses, donating to fundraisers or shopping from a business that remains open by way of pickup or delivery.

Buying gift cards from local merchants has quickly emerged as an easy way for customers to help their favorite restaurants and other businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.

New sites, like HelpMainStreet.com and SaveOurFaves.org, have launched in recent days to make this process more organized. OpenTablegift card marketplace waived its fees. Meanwhile, other efforts had their hearts in the right place but flubbed the execution — as with Yelpdisastrous implementation of a GoFundMe integration that didn&t allow participants to easily opt-out.

On Nextdoor, however, the app is simply being updated to allow the local businesses themselves to direct users to whatever websites or fundraisers they already have running.

For example, in the Business Profile section, the local merchant can now add a gift card website address to their profile. When Nextdoor users click the link, they&ll be directed to the page the business has set up for selling gift cards.

Even if the business doesn&t offer online purchases, it could simply add a page to its existing website that instructs users how to buy the gift card from them — perhaps by calling the business on the phone or reaching out on social media.

In addition, if the business is running a GoFundMe campaign, they&ll now be able to include that link in the &Story& section of their Nextdoor Business Page for Nextdoor users to see.

Their Nextdoor Business Page can also now be customized with their available take-out and delivery options, which is particularly useful for dine-in restaurants that just started offering to-go meals or delivery for the first time, but haven&t partnered with a larger delivery service like DoorDash, Grubhub or Uber Eats.

In addition, businesses that have been voted as a &Nextdoor Neighborhood Favorite& by the community will also now be able to post to the main Nextdoor news feed. Here, they can share updates to their hours, services offered or operations, which will be seen by a larger number of users.

Nextdoor has also added a Coronavirus Resource Center to help local business owners get updated news, information and actionable business advice in one spot.

The changes come only a day after Facebook launched Community Help for COVID-19, which allows local community members — including Facebook Pages used by businesses — to both offer aid and request assistance. But posts about supporting your favorite restaurant could easily get lost amid more critical calls for medical supplies needed by area hospitals or food banks in need of volunteers.

On Nextdoor, local businesses may instead find a smaller, but more targeted audience, where their real-life neighbors and customers are already engaging with one another.

This isn&t the first COVID-19-related update Nextdoor has rolled out. The company previously updated its app to include a Help Map for neighbors offering to help one another or in need of help themselves.

Okta, the popular identity and access management service, today used its annual (and now virtual) user conference to launch Lifecycle Management Workflows, a new tool that helps IT teams build and manage IFTTT-like automated processes with the help of an easy to use graphical interface.

The new service is an extension of Okta existing automation tools. But the key here is that IT teams and developers can now easily build complex identity-centric workflows across a wide range of applications. With this, these teams can easily automate an onboarding process, where setting up a new Okta account also immediately kicks off processes on third-party services like Box, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Slack to set up accounts there. The same goes for offboarding workflows and username creation. A lot of companies still do this manually, which is not just a hassle but also error-prone.

&Adopting more technology is incredibly beneficial for enterprises today, but complexity is a significant side effect of a changing technology ecosystem and workforce. There is no better example of the potential challenges it can create than with lifecycle management,& said Diya Jolly, chief product officer at Okta. &Oktavision of enabling any organization to use any technology goes deeper than just access; itabout improving how organizations use technology.Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows improves the efficiency and security of enterprises through its simple user experience and broad applicability, keeping organizations secure and efficient without requiring the complexity of writing code.&

Okta, of course, had lifecycle management features before, but now it is also putting its acquisition of Azuqua to work and using that companygraphical interface and technology for making it easier to create these automation processes. And while the focus right now is on processes like provisioning and de-provisioning accounts, the long-term plan is to expand Workflows with support for more identity processes.

As Okta also stresses, administrators can also manage very granular access across the supported third-party tools like assigning territories in Salesforce or access to specific group channels in Slack, for example. For temporary employees, admins can also set up automatic de-provisioning workflows that revoke access to some tools but maybe leave access to payroll services open for a while longer. There are also built-in tools for automatically managing conflicts when two people have the same name.

&Millions of people rely on Slack every day to make their working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive,& said Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer at Slack, one of the early adopters of this service. &Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows has significantly increased efficiency for us by automating the provisioning and de-provisioning of users from applications in our environment, without us ever having to write a line of code.&

This new feature is part of Oktanew Platform Services, which the company also debuted today and which currently consists of core technologies like the Okta Identity Engine, Directories Integrations, Insights, Workflow and Devices. The core idea behind Platform Services is to give Okta users the flexibility to manage their unique identity use cases but also to give Okta itself a platform on which to innovate. One other new product that sits on top of the platform is Okta Fastpass, for example, which allows for passwordless authentication on any device.