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Today on Newsday.

would you rather have.

You're hip operated on by the organization that, you can get an appointment. You can work with efficiently or the one where you're on hold. Your call has gone into some voicemail box. Nobody's called you back. There's going to be very direct effects on your revenue if you're a CFO.

Now, let's jump right in.

(Main) All right, it's Newsday and today we are joined by Scott D'Entremont Chief Revenue Officer for Parlance.

Scott, how's it going? It's been a little bit of time since we talked.

We're pretty excited.

You guys are right smack dab in the middle of what everybody's talking about at this point, right? We're trying to create these personal experiences with all this data for something that we thought was going to happen as a result of meaningful use, but never really happened, but now it feels like we have the tools to make it happen.

And today, we've just come so far where we're really able to understand intent in these conversations. And that intent really then feeds into being able to do things like personalization. And as somebody in healthcare, it's great to see then that what we've seen in the consumer world is being brought forward into healthcare now.

So it's an exciting time for us.

All right. So we're going to hit this article and it's an interesting article. It's a Harvard business review article. Why isn't healthcare more personalized? Seems to be right in your wheelhouse, by the way. And the beautiful thing about this is two of these authors have been on the show before.

If he hears this, he can correct me. You picked this article and I'm glad you did because I'm having a lot of conversation about where's AI going and how is it going to enable us to do certain things? What jumped out on this article from your perspective?

I think one of the things, and I know, other organizations are looking past just how deep can you go into the record and pull out, appointment or tests that you may need to have or not have. And I think that's interesting. And I think that's going to really be important as we go forward.

And my average conversation with people will start much more we'd like to do stuff like this, but we're not quite ready. Lots of workflow stuff on the back end isn't in place, Scott, what's a practical way to get started? How do we better serve the people that are calling in and need to interact with us?

So I felt like these guys jumped forward a little bit, and it'll be interesting to talk about jumping back and saying, what are the building blocks to a good consumer experience that we're all talking about in healthcare now? And personalization is a big part of it. And it's just nice for somebody to know who you are when you call.

I'm going to take on different roles and I want you to convince me. So I'm going to start with the CFO. I'm the CFO, Scott, you're sitting across from me, the CFO. Why should I even care about personalization, right? Is that going to help the bottom line at all? Is it going to create more efficiency?

What am I going to get as the CFO of a health system?

That's why I started with the CFO, because the CFO is just going to look at you and say, eh, don't know. When I'm sick, I want to see a doctor and I want to, whatever. And what you're telling me is, hey, I can really make that a frictionless experience and I can create, a chat like interface for some of these things and we can enable your system to really speak back to the patient and make it a better experience.

But as a CFO, I'm sitting there going, where am I going to see that? Where's the dollars I'm going to see?

think where you're going to see it very straightforwardly is against sort of your competition. It's going to become the standard. It's well established that this directionally is something you'll be doing.

And when people have choice, they're going to follow those things. By having that navigation, it leads to better access generally that is going to lead to your patient base little bit larger and have a little bit less friction in dealing with you. And I think a lot speaks to the impression, would you rather have.

You're hip operated on by the organization that, you can get an appointment. You can work with efficiently or the one where you're on hold. Your call has gone into some voicemail box. Nobody's called you back. There's going to be very direct effects on your revenue if you're a CFO.

All right. So revenue speaks my language for sure. Absolutely. One of the things about personal, personalized experience is this whole idea of appointment. You just talked about access. And access is very interesting to me because I want to make sure that like they're trying to come to me.

I think one of the things about personalization that really strikes me is not the technology per se, but that the organizations take the time to think through those things. Why does it take six months? Is there a way to get around this problem? In order to do something digitally, you have to think through it.

That's true. And, knowing which channel you want to interact with me on, if I was in queue potentially for an appointment and on a waiting list. Maybe the healthcare system doesn't know that, hey, if you text me and say, hey, I got something open, then I'm going to just reply yes and fill that slot more efficiently.

as well. by having a relationship with me that's personal yet technical, it can lead to a lot more opportunity for me to have better care.

I think it like, I, as a patient, want to have a conversation with my health system as an entity.

I just want to get on a chat interface and go, find my health record. You have my health record. Find my health record. What are some things you recommend? And it says Bill, you're 57 years old. When's the last time you had a colonoscopy? And I say, this time. We should probably get that scheduled.

Here's some appointments. Would you like? I'd like to have a, literally, an ongoing conversation with my patient. With my health system and have it respond to me as if I'm talking to Nurse practitioner at the least but potentially a physician and I realize I'm talking to a technology But more and more that technology is getting better at just I mean look telling me I need a colonoscopy based on you're this age and you haven't had one in five years.

Yeah. Yeah. Not that heavy a lift. Not that heavy a lift. And I think there's just a lot that's unique about healthcare too. Oftentimes, it might be mom calling and mom has got three kids then underneath her.

And knowing, she's probably calling about the child that has the upcoming appointment tomorrow. And rather than needing to sort out, who this is, why they're calling, just being able to more quickly get into that conversation and help her take care of that piece of business, I think is going to really improve loyalty and make that relationship more intimate.

All right, let's put you in front of physicians. Physicians, nurses, they're maybe a little skeptical, they're worried about, you're going to take away my job or that kind of stuff. We're not talking about taking away their clinical job. We're talking about really streamlining a lot of administrative type aspects of it, aren't we?

Are clinicians more open to these kinds of solutions, given we've gone through the pandemic and they've experienced burnout, they've experienced shortages, they've experienced, not enough clinicians to manage it, or is it still pushback because, hey, look this feels like it's going to take my job at some point in the future?

Yeah, we haven't heard that where we hear some sort of skepticism pushback is just does it work, it's just not enough of it around yet, as we get successful customers and kind of start, getting people to talk about it more publicly, we're seeing adoption really lift up, but it's really

We're even seeing new, executive positions just to look at AI being brought to bear and there's this overhead of analysis paralysis. So that's the thing that we see a little bit more than as a vendor of these services we'd like to see. We'd like to see people just going, hey, we're ready, but we know it just, it takes a while to prove it out.

I facilitated a discussion at a recent event around the economics of AI. And it was interesting to listen to the health systems. putting words in their mouth here, but it felt to me like they were saying, look, AI is a feature. Like I have this tool to do this, and this tool to do this, and this tool to do this.

And we're seeing it show up in those tools to facilitate the next level of reasoning so that tool can do even more than it did before. Is that how you think about AI?

We've been looking to help people navigate healthcare systems using your voice is where it all started for us. And there was a technology stack that did that, AI has made it possible to have intent be part of that. It's made it possible to integrate with backend systems where you can do actual work and sort of transact business, if you will, rather than just direct person to the right human.

And additionally, are we just caught up in making sure we're using the latest and not thinking about where it fits best?

That conversation at that round table was really interesting. There was almost a we're not shopping for AI. Let me say it that way.

It's it's not like we're going out to the market saying, hey, we want some AI, give us some AI. It's coming to us. The EHR partners are pulling it in and bringing it in. Oracle has a big push towards it. Epic has a big push towards it, it's not something they have to go out and learn how to train a model or that kind of stuff. It's configuration. It's they're just clicking buttons and saying, turn this one on, turn this one on. And then they have little levers and dials to, fine tune it, but we were worried that we would have to develop all of these skills and it's turning out that it's being built by somebody else like I don't have to learn how to build a car to drive a car.

And they look to vendors to provide things that make things better for them. They're not looking to build it all. Here and there, once in a while, I bump into someone that goes, Oh yeah, I've got guys working on this. And we go, they're working on other stuff too. And this is maybe not the place for you to invest.

It's much more about, who can do what for you and how it's going to positively impact, your patient community and your clinicians.

Yeah, it's interesting. This article in the roundtable was a start small, think big, but get started mindset. And, hear that in healthcare, and I think of how slowly we've moved in other areas.

From a facilitator standpoint, I just asked them, Is AI a game changer? I wanted to know, when you say, Start small, think big, do you really think it's a game changer? And they all looked at me and reluctantly said, Yeah, it is. Maybe not in its current form, but it's, Yeah. It's a game changer, yes.

And it just opens up. Much more access to the communities that are underserved, not everybody has a computer, or the bandwidth, particularly in rural communities where 45 percent of people still don't have good bandwidth, to go on a portal, and to be sophisticated enough.

to navigate the healthcare system. AI gives you the ability to let people call in on whatever device they happen to have and say, hey, this is what I need to do. It can better handle different languages and dialects. It's just really game changing.

I think it's even more today. We recently hosted a focus group at CHIME and it was striking. I IT leaders in the room from both really rural places. Can you say that again,

please? Really rural.

Really

rural places. I barely got through it the first time, Bill. And I had people in some of the leading markets in the U. S. And it's like they have the same job title, they have very different challenges to overcome. You had people with almost limitless resources to the extent, or would certainly appear so to the rural guys and the rural guys are just trying to figure out how to turn the lights on.

You got to be able to be physically present. So we, all need to come together to make sure those kinds of places continue to exist and improve upon, as you mentioned, whether it's different pay models or other ways in which they're supported. The pressure on those organizations is real. We see it every day.

Fantastic. Scott, it's always great to catch up. Any we're recording this before Thanksgiving. It'll air right after Thanksgiving. are your plans for Thanksgiving? Anything exciting?

Hosting a dinner of about 10. I'm on my way out now to pick up the turkey, which sounds like it would be easy, but I've got some picky eaters that only eat organic.

I basically price shopped the turkey last night and had a sleep on it before I go make what seems to be quite a substantial investment. I want everybody to be happy on Thursday and I'm going to dip my toe in.

We just had our staff meeting and we were talking about, what was distinct about your table.

They're like, oh that is the best stuff ever I'm like really, I shouldn't talk about this on a healthcare podcast, but have to figure out a way to try that at some point. like a good time. If you need the recipe, I know who has it. Alright. Very good.

Thanks, Scott. Great catching up with you.

Thank you. You too, Bill. Take care.

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