Digital Conversations

There are countless specialty products that get prescribed each day. In the specialty pharmaceutical space, patients often require additional support to access treatment, determine coverage of benefits, understand how to administer therapies, manage potential side effects, and much more. Case managers work directly with patients to enroll them in care programs and support them on their journeys to better health.

In this episode, Ron Lacy, VP of Products and Innovation at UBC, a leading provider of pharmaceutical support services, sat down with us to discuss how they help patients navigate complex care journeys that often accompany specialty therapies, and how they are innovating with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) to improve care outcomes.

UBC has integrated digital assistants into various patient support programs. By augmenting the human teams with automated conversational chatbots, UBC is delivering increased patient engagement rates and ultimately better outcomes for patients.

While we all need healthcare at some point in our lives, it’s ultimately a business that is at its best when it’s focused on the patients. Healthcare does not work as designed unless the patients are interacting with their providers to manage care in lasting, meaningful ways. Unfortunately, healthcare systems and workflows are primarily designed to support episodic, one-to-one interactions, which are increasingly becoming unsustainable and ineffective.

Jay Roszhart, President of Ambulatory Services at Memorial Health System in Springfield, Illinois has a point of view on what the root problems are, and he has a vision for the path forward. In this wide ranging discussion, Jay describes the impacts of consumerism and technology on healthcare and why things must change. He is executing a vision to reimagine patient engagement from its current episodic, high-friction state to one based on building long-term, ongoing relationships that are enabled through advanced, conversational technology.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted healthcare virtualization into a higher gear across multiple industry segments and workflow areas. Telemedicine might be the catch-all term for modern, digital communications between providers and patients, but a big opportunity awaits organizations — patient intake.

Greg Kefer and Justin Mardjuki sat down in our virtual studio to discuss how providers are finally doing away with paper and giving patients mobile solutions to share their health information, complete forms, and engage virtually. A virtual waiting room capability is one of the most promising innovations to emerge out of the COVID-19 crisis.

While healthcare has been on a virtualization march for decades, the COVID-19 pandemic has rushed forward significant changes in the way healthcare gets delivered. Front and center has been the emergence of telehealth services, where in-person appointments have given way to video calls. By some estimates, telehealth is up 83x over pre-pandemic levels.

In the episode, Greg Kefer and Justin Mardjuki discuss the telehealth phenomenon and how it fits into the broader virtualization push that’s transforming healthcare. There are countless patient touchpoints surrounding the actual physician interactions that are ripe for virtualization. 

Historically, the development cycle for new drugs takes years. It’s a process that includes several phases of clinical trials with patient volunteers. Many trials struggle or even fail because of the challenges in recruiting participants. Today, massive speed and scale are vital as the pharmaceutical industry races to find a vaccine for COVID-19 that’s safe and effective for everyone on the planet.

In this episode of digital conversations, Greg Kefer and Justin Mardjuki discuss new innovations in healthcare scheduling automation that have proven highly effective at large healthcare systems. Conversational technology that engages patients on their mobile phones can virtualize screening, education, and scheduling, which might provide the kind of communication horsepower required to supercharge the clinical trial process at a time when it’s needed more than ever.

Robert Neff, VP of Digital Solution Development at Jefferson Health, dialed into the Digital Conversations studio to discuss the state of innovation in healthcare. In this wide ranging discussion, we covered the current state of IT, the impacts of COVID-19, and how the pandemic has reset approaches to technology innovation across the healthcare industry.

Rob, who was recently recognized by Constellation Research as one of the IT leaders on their annual Business Transformation 150 list, also described how Jefferson Health approaches innovation in order to improve access for patients.  

As providers navigate the challenges of providing care during the pandemic, there’s also a long term financial impact that will likely ensure that a lot of the smart, effective technology solutions that got deployed in order to deliver care during COVID-19 will remain in place indefinitely.

The debate whether it’s better for enterprises to build or buy business software has gone on for decades. As thousands of companies started investing in commercial software suites, an innovation curve was created that no single company could match. The emergence of cloud added economic and configuration benefits to software that few buyers could pass up. Today, it’s rare to see companies developing their own proprietary business software.

With a new class of conversational software beginning to take hold, a number of companies face the build-buy decision once again. The simplicity of language-based human-machine interactions implies that a bot toolkit and good writing skills is enough to successfully stand up an effective conversational front end. Conversational AI actually represents the ultimate tip of the iceberg scenario.

In this episode, Greg Johnsen and Greg Kefer cover the history and evolution of the build vs. buy debate and relate it to misperceptions about what is really required “below the waterline” to deliver an effective conversational experience with a consumer — one that considers flow patterns, persona, voice, agile development, journey mapping, and other design techniques that engage, satisfy, and deliver outcomes.

Many governments are racing to hire tens of thousands of contact tracers to control the spread of Coronavirus infections. Human call center agents would be tasked with tracking down, contacting, and interviewing individuals that were in contact with individuals that test positive. By many estimates this could involve the hiring and training of several hundred thousand people.

While there is a need for human resourcefulness to investigate the various cases, the sheer numbers that will be required is an opportunity for technology. Unfortunately, most innovation strategies follow traditional call center models – making agents more efficient and maximize hourly throughput. What’s missing is the notion of driving 100x scale, without hiring 100x agents.

In this episode of Digital Conversations, Greg Johnsen and Greg Kefer discuss the challenge contact tracing initiatives face. The massive hiring and training required begs for different thinking. Digital agents that can conduct thousands of simultaneous conversations, collect answers, provide answers, and support other basic interactions can replace scripted human agents and deliver unlimited capacity. 

The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented surge of demand on emergency rooms around the world. Technology is playing a vital role in helping providers meet patient demand, while also complying with social distancing guidelines. Millions of non-COVID-19 patients still need to see their doctors, but will need to do so in different ways.

Conversational chatbots that rose to the occasion during the early phases of the pandemic are now taking on additional functions, serving as digital assistants that help patients navigate their care. Like the challenges retailers are facing, the experience of visiting a doctor must change and chatbots have the potential to reinvent the entire process so it’s safe and efficient for everyone.

In this episode, Greg Kefer and Greg Johnsen discuss the concept of virtual waiting rooms, where digital assistants help check patients in for telehealth and in-person appointments through mobile devices. Paper forms become digitized, patients are kept informed and providers can deliver a fast lane, direct-to -exam room experience for visits to clinics and offices. The concept of a waiting room filled with chairs and magazines may end up being a thing of the past, even after COVID-19 subsides. 

Supply chains are typically fairly rigid, well planned operations that are difficult to adjust quickly. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread, shortages in supplies have been well documented, with PPE for care teams being among the most pressing challenges. At Banner Health, their innovation group was asked to apply different thinking and find alternative ways to get vital supplies distributed and protect thousands of front line employees across their six state network of hospitals.

Two former supply chain executives, Greg Kefer from LifeLink, and Steve Lindsey from Banner, connected and discussed some of the ways the Banner Innovation Group (BIG) helped secure masks, face shields, sanitizer, and other vital PPE materials, condensing procurement lead times from months to a few days. Some of the efforts involved cutting and gluing assembly lines, while others involved advanced digital printing. But all of it required outside the box thinking that fulfills the BIG charter of providing novel, untested ideas and products to benefit the whole healthcare industry.