Today we have another interview in action from the conferences that just happened down here in Miami and Orlando. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health, a set of channels dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged. We want to thank our show sponsors who are investing in developing the next generation of health leaders, Gordian dynamics, Quill health tau site nuance, Canaan, medical, and current health.

Check them out at this week. health.com/today. Here we go. All right. So here we are 5 20 42, and, , we are here with a handful of people. We're here with Jeff storeman Memorial healthcare system. Isn't

Broward or south Broward hospital district

hospital. And, , Patty Hayward is with Talkdesk and we actually talked on the new station just, , just last week.

, so that was fun. We're going to talk about something a little different this time. We're going to talk about the wild west. Of healthcare, which is the call center, the contact center. And, , you know, my experience with this is I remember coming in and go what's our contacts offers. I said, which one?

I'm like, what do you mean? Which one does like, well, first of all, we had seven or eight contact centers and then they're like, well, this one's running this and this and this. I'm like, all right. So I'm being asked now to pull all this information in and coordinating experience and all the social, but I don't think you're shaking your head.

Like

th it's the world I'm living right now. I mean, how many, how many call centers do I have? I think I had 17. I now have one consolidated major call center with a bunch of smaller call centers, but they're all standardized now on the technology, which is a huge win.

All right. So we going to talk a little bit about talk to us if people are wondering, , talk to us as a sponsor of ours, I want to Jeff to come on.

And, , and discuss a little bit about what, what it looks like to consolidate those call centers. That's not a, , it's not a project for the faint of heart. If there's a, there's a fair amount of workflows around that and whatnot. But the reason why I want you here is we're going to talk about this platform because.

Oh, the call center. I got to pull it together. I got to pull together these 50 things and you guys have a nice little cloud standalone solution. That's what I'm looking at is comparable to what I would get through Salesforce, Salesforce. So I think that's really interesting. Talk about the wild west. You have 17 call center.

Somebody says, Hey, give me. Gimme a common experience for the,

for the, well, unfortunately there's not a common experience, right? So that's the problem. The wild west is you call you can't text, you can't chat and you can't communicate with us any way. Our consumers want us to communicate. So to get us there.

Exactly where we are. , it's all over the place. And so the experience has been less than, less than good. You have to know someone in the healthcare system to actually get an appointment versus actually going through a call center. And I think we're not trying to just couldn't we're not trying to just fix the call center.

We're trying to fix access and access to the big animal. So to your earlier point, it's the wild west. And, , we're just, you know, nipping at this little by little. So, what are you seeing in

healthcare?

Yeah. You know, I see, , folks really there's an array, right? So when you think about where healthcare is with contact center versus other industries pretty far behind, right.

And they have an idea of like what books you read and you know, what trucks

yeah, absolutely. And to try to bring, I mean, think about there is no more personal areas and health care delivery. It's, it's so important that we provide a more personalized journey and a more helpful. Right. , and, and, you know, we've all been patients, we've all tried. We've all had parents or children. I had to access and it's hard.

So to, to be able to provide that more personalized journey, to not have to re-explain yourself, every time you get transferred to, you know, to have all of that kind of come with you is

so important. Let's talk about the experiences. I'm a patient of a writing and I have to, , I want to start my digital journey at home.

I have a couple of questions I want to ask. And I come to your website. Is this integrated at all with your website yet? Not yet. Is that, is

that part of the, yeah. So the whole omni-channel experience of integrating with our website, using this as a digital front door. Thinking about this, not just from a contact center, an access point, but as you talk about customer relations, relationship management, so CRM capabilities incorporating all of that and integrating it with our epic environment is where we are today.

So it is integrated with epic, our EHR.

One of the things I find is people think about this and they end up creating silos. They go, all right, well, I've got this bot on my website. I got this thing on my context. And now you have to embed all these things together, as opposed to thinking about it, ballistically and say, are we need to experience platform?

So when he goes to our website, they ask some questions, they type those questions in there's a, there's a bot there, but the escalation goes straight into the contact center. The contact center can then escalate to a phone call, , and so forth. And that's, I mean, that's sort of the. Really, you have to start from an architecture standpoint and say, what are we trying to build?

And what are all the different solutions we're pulling. Talk a little bit about

destination. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you see out there, there's been a lot of folks wanting to create these different experiences. Right. And we sort of had this unintended consequences of creating silos of communication versus having a uniform.

Platform for communication, which is really important. You know, we want there to be this journey that you can see. So if somebody starts with a chat on the computer and then decides that they want to then call, we have all that information, we can see what they were asking. We can understand. Absolutely.

Because you have your PA we're integrated into the record, your phone number as part of that, we authenticate you to be HIPAA compliant and make sure that. You know, you're, you're not somebody else that's using your phone and trying to access your information. So it's very important that you're having all of those different aspects of being secure.

And then, and then really being able to show things like next best action, so that you're being more proactive. You know,

when, when I've talked to people about this, they're like, oh, privacy and that kind of stuff. Like, look in security. I access my bank via, make a phone call. They say, well, authenticate who you are.

And I think that with my voice, like dial in some special code or when I just say. Yeah, my voice sends up to you, my password. Oh, your, your bill. And they'll let you in, there's a security aspect of this and a privacy aspect, but essentially on the other side you have consumer say, how come every time I contact your health system, you have no idea who I am.

It's like, I'm introducing myself for the first time

all the time. And so I think that's the, that's the, that's the, like you said, the Nirvana of this is creating the experience that it's just. And taking the friction out of healthcare where it's such an overused term. I know, but really taking it out and looking at how we can get to a more standard platform.

We have, I don't know how many different vendor solutions in play right now. And everyone's trying to solve this conversation. This issue, right. Of consolidation, standardization, simplification. , and I think at the end of the day for us where we're going from a development standpoint with talk desk, from an experience standpoint, it's going to become a talk desk, epic environment for us.

There are a lot of other vendors today in play, as you know, but the chat bot, , the other solutions that we're doing relative to texting. To appointment reminders, all of that ultimately is going to live in epic and, or talk to

us. So you're just not only like a contact center solution, it's an Omni channel communication.

Correct. So I wouldn't be able to do all the, , the reminder text I would be able to do. It's interesting how important texting is people they want, they want to do that digital front door, but at the end of the day, almost 98% of people, no tax understand tax interacted all the time. And it's almost a preferred way to interact with

your health system a hundred percent.

And you know, I mean, healthcare we've been so far behind in texting and so we've had one way texting for a long time relative to. Appointment reminders, but now having the ability to do two way texting, actually talking either to a bot or to a real person, I think will be a game changer for us.

That's interesting.

The, the omni-channel aspect of this, I'm talking about the digital front door. So I have a lot of CEO's now that are. Opponents of, of my chart, breaking it down or rebuilding it. And they're putting there essentially that the model is to create an experience around it. Not that my chart was bad, it was just sort of, , acute care centric focus.

And they're saying we need to do forearms around the consumer a little bit more. Are

you heading? So, I mean, just in the last two years, our, my chart volume, like everyone feels the pandemic has gone through the roof, which is a good thing. More and more people are using my chart. We haven't said today that we made a decision that we're going to get away from it and put a wrapper around my chart, a new front end.

We're still utilizing my chart as that front end, as our portal solution, we think it can solve a lot of needs. , we've talked to a lot of other vendors to think about this, but again, our focus is going to be, let's utilize my chart. Let's be epic first strategy. Let's be a Talkdesk first strategy. And let's try to make everything work as well as in their first.

Yeah, that's interesting. It's , you know, as we, as we have these conversations, people are probably saying, well, why doesn't he do this? Well, The reality is we're coming through a payment and we're trying to do all these things at the same time. There's limited resources. You have to, you have to focus them through.

You're going to flip up how

big is Memorial. So we're about two and a half billion dollars in revenue, six hospitals, 2000 beds across those six hospitals. , so we are the south Broward hospital district. So Broward

is Miami

Broward. North of Miami. So Fort Lauderdale Hollywood.

Okay. So that is real. It's not rural.

It's fair enough. It's pretty urban and whatnot. Your population is older or something. Our

population is really diverse. I mean, you would think given south Florida, it's an older population. We get the snowbirds, our volumes go up in the, in the winter time clearly. , No. I think our it's a pretty diverse population, , young families and a lot of Broward county.

So

I was just at the reason I'm asking that question is when you look at a technology platform, you have to consider the different and then

the new generation. So we're, we're kind of catering to two at all. And so when you talk about texting, for example, a lot of people would say, Hey, but the older generation is not good at texting.

That's not true. We're seeing that our older general. And the last as much with us as anyone else,

, homeless population. Yep. We

do have a fairly significant homeless population. So our population health and value based care programs, , and our primary care initiative is very much catered to the underserved.

, but yeah, we, we, we kind of have it all in south

Florida. Really good. Let's just having an interesting conversation with a CIO. We were talking about. We're talking about access. You're talking about reaching that population. It's like, how do you fix the homeless population? And it really comes down to, from a technology standpoint, there's a handful of things you can do.

But at the end of the day is really coordinating with people who are going to be on the ground and out there with them until I, I don't, I don't know what the technology solution is.

Yeah. I wish I did. I mean, maybe we can all solve that together, but I mean, that would be a nice one because there is a good population that comes through our emergency departments all the time and getting in touch with.

You know, it's funny, even the homeless population seem to have cell phones. Yeah.

Well, Patty, I, I was really impressed. I mean, we see this, this, , demo going behind us. I was really impressed because I was one of those people who had, you know, the Cisco call center and I had the Salesforce, , integration with that and whatnot.

And the thing that killed me on that list, I had these here and fees here. They weren't small fees to companies at one point fair amount of money for this. And then I was looking at what you did. I was like this talk this much. It was really kind of elegant and really buttoned up for

absolutely. And, and you know, her, when we look at the provider side and we look at what you guys are doing, the things that we've put together in that workspace are really tailored around it.

And it's really meant to not duplicate the age or as you've heard from Jeff, like epic first, we know that epic, Cerner, whatever the EHR is, that's where the system of record. And so we want to be able to recall the information and be able to present it in a very actionable way to the agents. , but not duplicate and then have everything else go back in.

So then, well, the physicians see that there was an interaction at the call center in some way. I

mean, they'll see notes of, you know, if there's something that, that they need to, but if they

don't then absolutely, absolutely. That's going to be important. I think a lot of times you go to see your doctor and they assume that the person is coming in and assumes that doctor would know that, Hey, I just had this interaction with the call center and they give me information on medications or prescription drugs.

I mean, they're not a doctor, right. You go too far, but they might say, Hey, and then they sort of expect the doctor to know that

and worse yet they sometimes come in a patient will come into a doctor. Yeah. Hey, I waited on your call center for an hour and they're coming into the doctor office visit already upset.

So I think we're trying to solve, and we talked about this previously, but we're not just talking about technology here, fixing call centers and technology is a big part of it. And it's such a foundation for us, but the operational piece of this and the way in which we're consolidating resources from a people process and technology component is really how we're pulling this all together.

Thank you for your. And I've always pledged another great interview. I want to thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. It is phenomenal that you shared your wisdom and your experience with the community, and it is greatly appreciated. We also want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders, Gordian dynamics, Quill health tau site nuance, Canon medical, and current health.

Check them out at this week. health.com/today. Thanks for watching. That's all for now.