While tools like ambient AI scribes have made AI a common term in healthcare, the next frontier is automating high-volume operational tasks. To get there, you have three options: build your own solutions, buy off-the-shelf products, or partner with a specialized vendor.

Understanding Agentic AI

Agentic AI represents a sophisticated convergence of multiple technologies working together to create human-like interactions that can complete complex tasks autonomously. Unlike simple chatbots or single-function AI tools, these systems integrate multiple technologies, including large language models, AI-generated voice capabilities, speech transcription and new standards like MCP for connecting AI systems to software.

Here are some real-world healthcare applications of agentic AI:

• Appointment scheduling 
• Prescription management
• Password resets 
• Insurance collection
• Bill processing

Artera data reveals that a substantial 45 percent of call center inquiries revolve around appointment verification, cancellations, and rescheduling. These are prime candidates for AI automation.

These AI agents work around the clock, 24/7, delivering consistent service and taking care of routine tasks that used to require human staff. The technology has matured to the point where it can deliver human-like experiences that often outperform traditional call center performance in speed, accuracy and experience.

Build vs. Buy vs. Partner 

AI Tech Stack: “The Metal” 

Before we dive into the three approaches, let’s take a moment to break down the key layers needed to build an AI Agent. Think of these layers as building blocks, often provided by different vendors and serving various needs. I like to refer to this AI tech stack as “the metal.” 

• Large Language Models (LLMs): Understands & generates human-like text; there are many model providers, and the best depends on the use-case and modality (e.g. Gemini Flash 2.5 or OpenAI Realtime are the lowest latency as of this writing)
  • Vendors include Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini), Meta (Llama), X1 (Grok), Deepseek (R1), Kimi (K2)
• Orchestration: Foundation layer that simplifies the process of integrating large language models with tools, while providing base observability and scalability for your agents
  • Vendors include AWS (Bedrock, Strands), Google (Vertex AI), Pipecat, LangChain
• Real-Time Voice: Includes two core services, often provided by distinct vendors depending on the use case. Speech-to-text (STT) transcribes audio into text, text-to-speech (TTS) turns LLM text output into spoken word, most typically using an “AI-generated voice” that is lifelike and infinitely customizable.
  • STT vendors include Google, Deepgram, Nuance and many others
  • TTS vendors include ElevenLabs, Cartesia, Murf, and many others
• Telephony: The core gateway connection into all the telecommunications and email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) providers. For the most versatile agent, you will want to consider voice (PBX or SIP/VOIP), SMS, RCS, and email.
  • Vendors include Twilio, Sinch, Syniverse, Cisco and many more
• Tools: In healthcare, the “skills” you want your AI agent to fulfill (e.g. scheduling, prescription refill, insurance update) typically exist in the EHR/PM and are accessed via FHIR, HL7, SFTP or custom web services. As of this writing, best practice for leveraging tools involves creating a “translation” layer using an open standard like Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables large language models to interact reliably with outside software. Think of MCP as the translator that allows AI agents to speak fluently with your existing healthcare systems, ensuring they can access patient information, update records, and complete transactions with the same reliability as human staff, but with greater consistency and availability.
• Evaluation: A high-performing AI agent requires significant prompt engineering, wherein the instructions for the LLM are tweaked to reliably achieve the desired outcome.  Evaluation frameworks allow your agents to simulate “real-world” situations to test for accuracy, safety, helpfulness, etc., before being deployed to production. The best AI systems will further implement a back-end “judge” that feeds real-life transcripts into the evaluation framework for continuous monitoring and improvement.

Building In-House AI Agents

The first approach, building an AI Agent in-house, demands substantial technical expertise and financial investment. This involves engaging with the lowest-level infrastructure and meticulously integrating the various components listed above. By carefully stitching these together, one could construct a bespoke solution. 

In this case, however, constructing a bespoke solution means you must work and maintain direct relationships with core AI Infrastructure providers to find solutions tailored to your needs, navigating a complex landscape and purchasing from each of them individually.

Advantages:

• Complete control over tech stack and implementation
• Customization aligned with specific organizational needs
• Highest quality product (provided the right supporting team)
• Lowest transaction costs (provided large enough volume)

Disadvantages:

• $3M minimum ongoing annualized investment (minimum of 2 Devops Engineers, 2 Machine Learning Engineers, 2 Senior Software Engineers, 1 Product Manager + hosting and software spend)
• Need for specialized in-house talent across multiple languages, e.g. Python for ML, YAML, JSON and JavaScript for SWE, and being current on various AI-specific standards like A2A and MCP
• Ongoing maintenance, all while staying up to speed with the latest technology advancements and agility to replace as new benchmarks emerge 

Purchasing an Off-the-Shelf AI Agent (OEM Vendor) 

Alternatively, health systems can work with a vendor that essentially rebrands a horizontal provider’s technology as their own: a practice known as OEMing (Original Equipment Manufacturing). OEM vendors provide a wrapper around existing middleware platforms (e.g. Vapi.ai or Bland.ai) that facilitate the creation of AI Agents, but are not specifically designed for healthcare.

This approach can mean paying double the actual technology cost while limiting direct access to the latest innovations and updates of the core provider within the AI Tech Stack or “the metal.”

Advantages:

• Single point of contact/vendor to manage
• Faster implementation timeline compared to building in-house
• Lower upfront costs compared to building in-house

Disadvantages:

• Higher long-term costs due to markup on underlying technology
• Limited customization capabilities
• Dependence on third-party middleware providers
• Less secure (additional entry point into your systems) 
• Less agility and control 

Another more preferable option (assuming in-house expertise around AI integration standards and baseline development capacity) would be a healthcare organization acting as its own OEM and integrating directly with the middleware platforms mentioned above. This will reduce vendor costs, while increasing maintenance spend and providing more direct control over the end product.

Partnering with AI Healthcare-Specialized Vendors

To steer clear of the above issues, I suggest health systems skip third-party vendors and work directly with those plugged directly into the metal. 

Which leads us to the third option: contracting with a vendor focused exclusively on healthcare (healthcare-vertical providers), who have direct access to those in the AI tech stack. Specialized healthcare AI vendors typically invest millions or more in developing healthcare-specific solutions, understanding the unique requirements of healthcare interoperability, security, and compliance, while maintaining direct relationships with core AI infrastructure providers.

Essentially, these vendors orchestrate and bundle all of the AI tech stack components / technology into a simple solution for healthcare providers, making it the fastest and most cost-effective way to deploy AI Agents. 

Advantages:

• Healthcare-specific expertise and compliance knowledge
• Direct integration with core AI infrastructure
• Proven real-world deployment experience
• Shared investment in healthcare-relevant innovations
• Faster time to value with lower risk
• Many customization capabilities 

Disadvantages:

• Dependence on partner’s technology roadmap
• Limited control over underlying technology decisions

The Core Tradeoff: Control Versus Speed

At its core, the build versus buy versus partner decision comes down to a tradeoff between control and speed.

Building in-house gives you full ownership of your tech stack, deeper integration into internal systems, and full control of sensitive data. However, it often requires longer development timelines, and significant upfront and ongoing investment

Buying off-the-shelf may offer faster deployment and lower initial costs (versus building), but can limit your ability to customize, restrict access to core data, and create long-term scalability issues.

The more strategic approach for many healthcare organizations is to partner with a vendor that understands the unique complexity of healthcare systems. By working with Artera, health systems accelerate time to value, leveraging years of specialized expertise, a compliant AI infrastructure, and deep integrations already built for real-world deployment. This approach reduces risk and cost while giving you the flexibility to scale with confidence.

Choosing between these paths is not always a binary decision. In many cases, the optimal strategy is a hybrid model that combines the customization benefits of in-house development with the speed, scalability, and stability of a proven AI partner like Artera.

Lessons Learned

We’ve spent years investing in AI, and with the rapid rise of Agentic AI, we’ve quickly embraced, configured and deployed it for many of our customers. Here’s what we’ve learned along the way…

Technology Evolution Speed

The pace of change in Agentic AI is unprecedented. Technologies that required significant custom development just months ago are now available as standard features from major providers. This rapid evolution makes long-term technology investments particularly risky for organizations building in-house solutions.

Security and Compliance Complexity

Agentic AI systems are advancing at a rapid pace, requiring a fundamental shift in how we approach data security. Traditional static, point-in-time assessments are no longer sufficient. Instead, safeguarding these dynamic systems calls for continuous monitoring, robust multi-layered security frameworks, and a seamless integration of human oversight with AI-driven validation.

Real-World Deployment Value

The competitive advantage lies not in the underlying AI technology itself, but in healthcare-specific implementation experience. Understanding how to handle edge cases, manage patient interactions, and integrate with healthcare workflows requires extensive domain expertise.

Cost Structure Reality

The current pricing for AI solutions is unsustainable at scale. Similar to the dot-com boom, the current market is subsidized, with artificially low AI prices. When the inevitable market correction happens, many vendors won’t survive. Therefore, organizations must partner with vendors that are not only financially stable enough to withstand the crash but also have sustainable business models for long-term success.

Looking for more? Join the 12/9 healthsystemCIO webinar, Maximizing Value, Minimizing Risk: Operationalizing an Agentic AI Strategy, to discuss this topic more.

Today’s healthcare market is saturated with AI agent solutions, making vendor evaluation difficult for healthcare providers amidst similar claims and significant costs.

To simplify your evaluation, we’ve identified the top five factors that distinguish Artera’s AI agents today. Whether you’re new to AI agents or well into your research for a partner, we hope this distillation proves valuable.

Artera’s blog posts and press releases are for informational purposes only and are not legal or business advice. Artera assumes no responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of blogs and non-legally required press releases. Claims for damages arising from decisions based on this release are expressly disclaimed, to the extent permitted by law.

The post Agentic AI for Healthcare: Build, Buy or Partner appeared first on Artera.

These are fundamentally simple tasks that create bottlenecks in the system. Patients face long hold times, high abandonment rates, and limited access to care coordination outside business hours. Meanwhile, healthcare staff spend valuable time on routine tasks instead of focusing on higher-acuity patient needs.

Patient communication isn’t just a part of patient access; it’s the foundation of it. When we remove communication barriers, we dramatically improve access to care. 

I believe agentic AI is poised to accelerate the breakdown of common patient communications barriers – faster and more effectively than ever before.

Agentic AI: A Transformative Force for Patient Communications

Agentic AI represents the next major tidal wave hitting healthcare. Hundreds of companies are entering this space, with hundreds of millions of dollars being raised. The pace of change is extraordinary—faster than any technology revolution we’ve experienced in our lifetimes, including mobile, web, and social media.

We’re seeing new infrastructure upgrades that meaningfully advance the technology’s potential on what feels like a daily basis. This rapid innovation is driving improvements across the board—from reducing latency to improving background noise suppression. 

At Artera, we’re deeply committed to driving innovation in agentic AI. Over the past few months alone, we’ve updated our underlying infrastructure more than 20 times, achieving exponential improvements to product quality. Our latency now sits below 500 milliseconds, we’ve deployed dozens of MCP tools and servers, our continuous learning framework is in production and ingesting live transcripts, and we’re supporting multiple languages. These aren’t just incremental improvements—they’re transformational leaps that directly benefit patient care.

Deterministic AI Agents: A Stepping Stone to Autonomous AI Agents 

Despite significant technological advancements, our core mission has remained unchanged for a decade: making healthcare number one in customer service. To us, “customer service” refers to how patients experience care outside the four walls of a hospital or clinic.

Our focus has been specifically on communications—enabling seamless, asynchronous interactions between healthcare providers and patients, no matter where they are. The rise of artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how this experience will unfold in healthcare moving forward.

Our AI-powered, deterministic Flows Agents deliver two strategic benefits that align with our vision: 

First, it serves as a definitive knowledge base of proven pathways that have been hardened over many years across hundreds of institutions and for millions of patients. This knowledge repository is an invaluable tool for training fully autonomous agents.

Second, Flows Agents act as a stepping stone into fully autonomous AI. Healthcare operates under strict regulations, where technology—especially autonomous AI—can have life-and-death implications. Flows uses deterministic logic combined with natural language understanding (NLU) to guide patients through specific automated journeys. These pathways eliminate risks associated with hallucinations and jailbreaking, helping build initial comfort with AI among healthcare leadership, while creating a clear path toward full autonomy through our AI Agents. 

Where to Start: Automating Routine Interactions That Create Barriers to Care

Agentic AI offers the opportunity to automate the routine administrative phone tasks I initially mentioned, while making them available 24/7 at a quality bar that approaches that of real humans. By reducing the burden of simple interactions, we elevate staff to focus on higher-acuity patient needs, reduce hold times and abandonment rates, and ultimately improve access to care.

As system interoperability continues to advance, we’ll be able to streamline more routine patient tasks, creating a truly personalized, concierge-like experience for every patient while simultaneously reducing healthcare operating costs.

This enhanced accessibility will span all communication channels—voice, messaging, and web—ensuring patients can connect anytime, anywhere. At Artera, we’re excited to shape the future of patient communication, where every individual benefits from 24/7 concierge-like care.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same

While technology is changing rapidly, the fundamental challenges of healthcare communication remain the same. Patients need frictionless, asynchronous communication channels that allow them to engage with their care teams on their own terms and schedules. Providers, on the other hand, need efficient, automated workflows with the flexibility to involve human intervention when necessary.

I believe our decade of experience in tackling these core challenges gives us a distinct edge as we innovate with agentic AI. By building on a foundation of proven solutions and deep market knowledge, we not only leverage the potential of technology but also address the real, pressing needs of the industry. 

Today’s healthcare market is saturated with AI agent solutions, making vendor evaluation difficult for healthcare providers amidst similar claims and significant costs.

To simplify your evaluation, we’ve identified the top five factors that distinguish Artera’s AI agents today. Whether you’re new to AI agents or well into your research for a partner, we hope this distillation proves valuable.

Artera’s blog posts and press releases are for informational purposes only and are not legal or business advice. Artera assumes no responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of blogs and non-legally required press releases. Claims for damages arising from decisions based on this release are expressly disclaimed, to the extent permitted by law.

The post Agentic AI Impact: A Tidal Shift in Healthcare Communication appeared first on Artera.

I wasn’t around for the Space Race of the 1960s, but I can tell you exactly what JFK said in that infamous Rice University Speech (“We choose to go to the moon…”), who we were racing against (Russia), and who won (America).

And while I don’t know what it truly felt like to be around back then, I do know a little about competition – first as a young classical guitarist, then as an amateur triathlete, and finally as an entrepreneur. It is an intense, singular, do-or-die focus and there’s ALWAYS someone you’re competing against.

In July, I had a front-row seat to a crucial conversation about America’s future in artificial intelligence. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the USSR (space race), Ariadne (my guitar days), Nick (my triathlon days), and Aditya and Adnan (my entrepreneur days). America just had another Sputnik moment, although this time the race is for Artificial Generative/Super Intelligence (AGI), and we’re competing against China.

At the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in D.C., I had the chance to hear from President Trump and a broad cross-section of the administration on the consequential stakes of who wins in AI. The Summit, hosted by All-In Podcast and The Hill & Valley Forum, highlighted the opportunity for AI to reshape American industry, the global economy, and the important role of government in supporting our transition to an AI economy. Sessions were moderated by All-In Podcast co-hosts Jason Calacanis, David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya and David O. Sacks with participation from Hill & Valley Forum Co-Founders Jacob Helberg, Delian Asparouhov, and Christian Garrett. President Trump signed several executive orders and issued the White House’s AI Action Plan. In addition, we heard from both industry (Jensen Huang, Lisa Su) and government (Scott Bessent, Howard W. Lutnick, Doug Burgum, Chris Wright) on how the public and private sectors are collaborating to make sure we win this race.

Here’s my summary of their blueprint for success:

1. Unlock Energy Production

The energy demands from AI are many multiples beyond the energy our nation currently generates. The stark reality is that American energy capacity has largely stagnated since the 1970s, while other nations (like China) have rapidly expanded their grids. For America to secure its place as the undisputed leader in AI, we must accelerate our energy buildout. This administration is committed to reducing regulation and making it easier to produce energy, while remaining sensible as it relates to environmental protections. My friend Matt Riley has experience building many gigawatts of capacity – it might be time for him to get back to work!

2. Sensible Regulation

Today, AI is largely unregulated. As a result, there is a patchwork of thousands of state laws that are being proposed… This trend is of significant concern to technologists due to the potential regulatory burden of compliance (anyone else have data privacy flashbacks?). Although preemption (blocking the ability of states to regulate AI for a period of time) championed by Rep. Jay Obernolte was ultimately stripped from the OBBB, this administration has made it clear that they are in favor of common-sense federal regulation and will move quickly to introduce legislation. This ranges from protecting free speech, objectivity, and American values as well as promoting open-source and open-weight AI, ensuring that startups and academics have access to the computing power and models needed to drive breakthroughs. Yara Doumit and the bipartisan AI Gang are laying the groundwork for legislation in the Senate.

3. Trade as National Security

A week before the summit, NVIDIA announced that it had been granted permission by the administration to resume the sale of its H20 chips in China. Sounds surprising? Well, the administration made a compelling pitch that maintaining AI leadership means the rest of the world building on American infrastructure. In one of the most thought-provoking statements of the day, Jensen Huang said: “Imagine if Deepseek or Kimi k1.5 only worked on Huawei chips?” As we saw with Deepseek, trade restrictions can catalyze innovation.

To maintain American technological superiority, we need to ease overseas access to infrastructure, including the most modern chips for trading partners. Similarly, the re-shoring of key industries was positioned as a national security concern. We have outsourced the supply chain of raw materials needed across many American industries (i.e., construction, pharmaceuticals) and bringing capacity back within our borders de-risks this AI race and future races to come.

While strategies may differ, there’s a strong bipartisan consensus on this fact: America must maintain its global leadership in technology and shape the future of the AI economy. The stakes are incredibly high, with trillions of dollars on the line and the immense potential for AI to be a powerful job creator and catalyst for reducing our national debt. Our shared goal is to ensure the U.S. is on the winning side of this AI race, which includes being a reliable trade partner, cultivating a robust AI talent market, and building the foundational technologies – like advanced semiconductors and energy infrastructure – essential for AI innovation.

It’s a great time to be alive, now back to work to make sure America wins this race!

The post AI Leaders in Healthcare – Our Sputnik Moment: Insights from Guillaume de Zwirek appeared first on Artera.

When you type “patient engagement” into Google, you are inundated with hundreds of companies and solutions. Despite serving a variety of unique purposes, these companies are wrapped into a single category: “patient engagement.” By grouping these companies under the same “patient engagement” umbrella, we’re doing a disservice to the industry and creating a more confusing experience than it needs to be. 

What is patient engagement – really? I recently shared my thoughts at ViVE 2024 as part of the Tech Innovation Showcase. 

In my presentation, I shared…

• Proprietary research on the state of patient engagement today 
• Four core components of a modern patient engagement system
• My market map that groups vendors by category to help you make sense of the crowded “patient engagement” market

Below is a recap and key findings. 

Artera: 9+ Years with a Front Row Seat to Patient Engagement 

I’ve been studying patient engagement since before patient engagement was coined as a term – and before TCPA had an exemption that allowed for many of the workflows we rely on today. 

I’ve had the great fortune of scaling Artera, since I founded it in 2015, and work with some of the most amazing healthcare organizations. We now handle over two billion communications across 100 million active patients per year, working with 800+ healthcare facilities and federal agencies, as well as 50+ partners in our marketplace. 

At Artera, for 9+ years, we have a front-row seat to the ins and outs of patient engagement. We’ve seen a lot of the things that can go wrong with patient communications – whether it is broken or unorganized workflows, spamming patients with duplicate automations, lab results and survey requests. 

But we’ve also seen a lot of things that can go right, such as quick help with tech support, clinical triage or urgent assistance. 

All of this shows that customer service in healthcare matters – and impacts patient engagement, deeply. 

Proprietary Research: The State of Patient Engagement Today 

Our team recently conducted a body market research to look into this:   

First, when you deliver a broken communications experience or if you don’t have a handle on what’s going on across your vendors and service lines enterprise-wide, you are priming your patients to leave (or be stolen by a competitor).

Additionally, patients on average have 11 different vendors that are independently messaging them throughout their care journey – on a fragmented and disjointed basis. This could mean a specialist solution, appointment reminder system, patient portal, etc. are all competing for your patient’s attention in a way that is both confusing and frustrating for the patient. 

Due to the broken communication experience they’re provided, nearly half of patients do not pay their bills on time. While patients want to communicate via text with their provider, if we do it poorly, they will leave. So, how do we make sense of this all? 

Patient Engagement Framework: The Communications Highway 

Patient communication is nuanced and complicated – there are a lot of vendors looking to communicate with your patients and a lot of workflows you may want to create. The greatest analogy I’ve come up with for this is a highway – a complicated and multifaceted system that requires a robust infrastructure. Like this: 

Let’s dive into the four building blocks of the highway and make a connection to the core components of the patient engagement system: 

1. Gateway with APIs: For a highway, the first thing you’d need to construct is a wide road that goes from point A to point B, ideally managing a lot of traffic going in the same direction. In the patient engagement universe, this requires adopting a common infrastructure – a single communications gateway that manages all of your patient outreach. Vendors like Artera, Twilio, Cisco and Syniverse offer such technology, known in the industry as a “Communication Gateway.”

2. Vibrant Marketplace: With all good highways, you need good on-ramps and off-ramps to let drivers pull off depending on their needs. Patients have a similar experience in terms of their unique care journeys. In the patient engagement space, you need a framework for letting vendors and tools onto your system – a suite of APIs and a rich and vibrant marketplace that enables your patients to be taken on the right journey. Artera manages this type of marketplace, as do more traditional players like CRMs and EMRs, although they typically do not have communication APIs available to those partners.

3. Rules & Master Preference Index: It’s not enough to have on-ramps and off-ramps if no one knows they exist, so you need to have road signs. In the patient engagement universe, we call these rules; we believe healthcare organizations need to make a strategic decision around governance – how frequently communication is going out, what outreach should be prioritized, etc. 
4. Normalized Data Store: It’s impossible to know what’s going on every minute on a highway, but speed traps can help reduce major accidents. In patient engagement, we call this a normalized data store – a comprehensive inventory of all communication data spanning across the patient journey. Your entire universe of solutions should route their engagement data into a single data warehouse, so you can analyze and identify what’s working, what’s broken, and how to fix it.  

Patient Engagement as an Infrastructure 

Now that we’ve looked at the core components of a patient engagement system, let’s come back to the original challenge: we have seemingly infinite vendors classified as patient engagement, but very few who actually offer the core building blocks necessary to deliver a great patient experience.

Just as owning a high-quality camera doesn’t make one a professional photographer, having a feature that allows you to communicate with patients doesn’t make you a patient engagement company. Even our industry research groups struggle with this problem – the Best in KLAS leader for patient engagement is a billing company (a wonderful one too, I might add) that, to my knowledge, doesn’t offer any of these core capabilities!

Whether it’s through Artera or someone else, we believe the future of patient engagement should provide patients with:

• easy and logical access
• all their communication in one place
• the right communication at the right time
• and the appropriate tools to opt in or out of outreach

And we believe this is only possible if communication is thought of at the infrastructure layer… something that every technology solution needs to build on top of. 

Now it’s time to work together to make this new patient engagement framework a reality.

To view my ViVE 2024 presentation, please check out this page.

The post ViVE 2024 Recap: What Is Patient Engagement? appeared first on Artera.

• How Artera Harmony and the Artera Marketplace are integrating vendors across the ecosystem to orchestrate a streamlined patient communications experience
• The Value of Being Customer-Centric in the Healthcare Industry and Beyond
• The Future of Artera Harmony, which lies in delivering visibility and orchestration to health systems to deliver greater business results and happier patients 
• Advice for Founders, including focusing on product-market fit, ensuring a scalable sales model and remaining customer-centric despite being pulled in many directions

Listen to the full episode on the Health Podcast Network, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or Google Podcasts. Below is a full transcript of the conversation. 

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: Hi everyone, I’m Alex Merwin from AWS. Welcome back to the AWS Health Innovation Podcast. Sometimes as a patient, navigating the health care system feels like a maze. Today, we’re joined by Guillaume Deswarak, the co-founder and CEO of Artera. 

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: Earlier in my life, I tried to become a professional athlete. I was on my own for the first time with an acute issue and was told I was at risk of sudden cardiac arrest. So I was going in and out of doctor’s offices. I was flying all over the state trying to get answers so that I could continue working out. And it was frustrating. I loved my doctors. I loved the facilities. But the process of coordinating my care was super, super burdensome. I had to be on the phone between the hours of 8 to 5 or no one would answer. I could rarely get my questions answered the first time they would bounce me around.

So I just wound up basically having a second full-time job trying to coordinate my care. In the meantime, the rest of my life was being done asynchronously through text message. So I thought to myself, why are we not doing this in health care? I mean the closest thing I can point to is the robo calls I get at 6 pm reminding me to show up to my appointment and to press one to confirm. And to me, that was a travesty. So how can we turn on real asynchronous modern two-way communication in health care?

How can we make health care the very best industry when it comes to customer service? That was the problem statement. Perhaps naively since I didn’t see anything solving that in the market. I thought how hard can this be? Why don’t I go out and build this myself? So. That’s the Genesis story. Here we are 9 years later. I think that makes me close to a veteran now in health care. I think a decade mark is where I can claim that accolade, but that was the start.

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: Were there any parts of your background beyond being a musician and an athlete that informed your approach at Artera? What industries did you think were doing a fantastic job for communications? 

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: Yeah, this might sound silly in retrospect, but I thought the airlines did a pretty good job back then. A better job than I was experiencing in health care. Hospitality did a really great job in terms of customer experience and Even then, I didn’t think they were doing a great job. I thought there was a lot of room for improvement. For me, the ideal experience is you ask a question, you get an answer, and you’re confident that someone’s going to respond to you 100% of the time and that it won’t take that long. To me, it should be that simple. Let’s get rid of all the BS between the patient and the answers that they need.

I did some market research and the market research showed pretty unequivocally that there were 3 industries that were consistently rated the worst in terms of customer experience. Health care was the third worst. I’m hoping that if I revisited those studies it would be better now.

The federal government nnd then cable companies take second and third. You have the ultimate monopoly and how times have changed there, right?

Yeah, yeah, cable is actually a lot better now, the fiber wars are always here in Santa Barbara. I think it’s Frontier and Cox are battling for market share. It’s no longer a monopoly and it’s amazing how much better customer service gets when there is no longer one player in the game. So I love competition. So going back to your question, what is it about my background that I think carried through to Artera? It is the competitor. I want to do great work no matter what I do. To me delivering product, being a musician, being an athlete is not worth doing unless you can deliver something significantly better than anybody else in the market. You have to believe that. And then you have to have the grit to be able to put in the time – to actually deliver that, make that a reality. 

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: So tell me about Artera harmony. Tell me about this amazing solution you’ve created.

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: I mean, if the story didn’t give it away, were a communication company focused exclusively on health care and focused exclusively on patients. So we wanna make health care the very best industry when it comes to customer service. And we want patients to get that concierge-like experience no matter what their needs are. Unfortunately, or fortunately, in our case, health care is a lot more complicated than airlines or hospitality. There are hundreds of specialties that you could go to. There are thousands of diagnoses that could be applied to a patient and there are a lot of different organizations that you could go to then you layer in the payers and the pharma companies and life sciences, it is way more complicated than I ever thought.

We’re effectively a middleware solution that sits below every single one of those systems. We handle all the traffic. So every piece of communication, whether you’re an insurance company, your primary care provider, your cardiologist, the rev cycle department, the vendor that has a Let’s use baby scripts as a pregnancy app that they want you to download because your your partner is going through pregnancy. All of those different solutions go through our infrastructure. We’re Effectively air traffic control. I know all the people who are trying to communicate with the patient. We give the health system control over what should get to the patient and when. The patient can respond to anything.

Our bots will close the loop if we have high confidence interval that we know the answer or we can make an API call to direct you to the right services. And one that can’t happen, we put you to a live human being. What does this look like for a patient?

You have your hospital or the contact in your address book, you can text them about anything and you will always get an answer and you’ll get the right answer. And what do the hospitals get? They get conversion. When you orchestrate the perfect experience for patients, they are more likely to do what you tell them.

The alternative is 20 different departments, your payer, your health system, all the vendors. Calling you, texting you willy-nilly from different phone numbers you don’t know what to do you don’t know where to get help. It’s that classic example where someone’s calling 1 800 whatever and just yelling agent at the phone. Just get me to a human being please because this 0 0 0 0 0 0. Yeah, we saw that problem for health care and the result is conversion.

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: I moved to the UK in 2015 and the first time that I interacted with the health system here, I just discovered 111. So 111 is a non-critical care line that you can call to speak with an agent who’s going through a triage decision trip that is pretty much all it is. Depending on where you spit out, you might have a credentialed RN call you back and do the qualification and they can refer you into what we call the A and E but the ER in the US. So, how far do you go? You mentioned that depending on the interaction with the body, you pass a certain confidence interval and you can be handed off to a healthcare professional. Can you tell me where the solution stops in terms of diagnosing a condition and pulling people from the health system to do that?

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: So there are infinite capabilities. And configurations for our system. So we were very purposeful about building this technology stack out as a platform that is configurable. So you can actually build out complicated decision trees in Artera like the one that you’re describing with 111 and you can tag and route and assign people as options in those trees. As a company, we don’t hire clinicians and physicians so we do not build those pathways. The customers build them themselves. 

Now having the privilege of being in business for almost 9 years and having Hundreds of customers – we’ll probably have a thousand customers next year – we have now seen the workflows that work really well. So recently with our new platform, Artera Harmony, we’ve actually started templating the best practice workflows. For example, we might have a customer who’s built on an amazing workflow around Medicaid redetermination or COPD management and will actually templatize those for our customers. We’ll show what the results are and anybody else in our user base can clone those to those to their environment, customize different steps of the tree and activate it for their patient population and see how the results compare to others. So we have customers using us for clinical pathways. They usually build that themselves and then the templates become the content repository for the rest of the user base to leverage.

That’s hugely exciting because one of the biggest challenges with the US healthcare system is the immense fragmentation, right? And I mean, this can be as insane as 2 hospitals across the street from one another, right? Using completely limiting beyond the same HR, deployed at different times with different consultants, different schemas, and they might as well be distinct solutions altogether. And this is neat because what you’ve created is a way for these healthcare provider organizations to collaborate with one another to share best practices in a meaningful way that really doesn’t require doing a full HR integration, passing back and forth, patient data, getting the required consent, getting the same reimbursement networks. So it’s pretty clever. 

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: Can you tell me a little bit about the different types of customer personas that use Artera  Harmony that you know? How do you segment your customers internally?

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: Yeah, so we have the traditional enterprise health systems. These could be academic facilities or otherwise, we then have large independent, usually specialty focus groups that could be a large cardiology chain ophthalmology chain things of that nature so large private practices we do a lot of work with federally qualified health centers. That’s an area that is especially meaningful to me. My mom worked in CHCs her whole life with underprivileged populations, big Medicaid populations. And then we do a lot of work with children’s hospitals. So it runs the gamut, the ambulatory and acute.

I would say there’s more usage as a whole in ambulatory. That’s where kind of a lot of that visit volume happens and then you were put into the acute setting, but really across the board and those are the 4 main segments. So, enterprise Health Systems, specialty groups, federally qualified health centers and community health centers, and then children’s hospitals.

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: So at Amazon, we’re customer-obsessed and we love hearing about customer stories and trying to find the little hints and secrets in there to help inform our approach and how we develop products and services. Can you tell me about a few of your customers? Can you share a few stories and how their use of Artera has changed how you think about developing the product?

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: So I’m happy too, but I want to comment on your customer obsession thing first because I am such a believer in that as well. I talk to a customer every single day. I was on the road last week. I did 5 states on the East Coast, probably 3 customers a day that I was speaking with. This is So ingrained in our DNA, it’s the most important thing.

We launched our first Customer conference last year. We brought up, you know, a couple 100 people together for the first time. And the epiphany I had at that conference was I’m customer-obsessed, right? And I’m talking to all these folks one-on-one, but they actually want to talk to each other. And I haven’t had that unlocked yet. So this idea that we were just talking about with the content and templatizing those and making those available to the base. We’re starting to think about ways to help our customers interact with each other because there’s so much learning there as well. It’s not just you and I at Amazon and Artera. It’s also our customers engaging with each other. 

I’m glad you said that. So as you can imagine, because I’m talking to a customer every day, I’m learning a lot of things every single day. I’ll just give you an example. We are starting to do more work in population health and value-based care.

And this is an area that we’ve been interested in for 3 or 4 years. I hope the American health system pushes further and further into the BBC arena has been a little bit slow to adopt. And this recently got steam. We have a pilot going out right now with 5 different health systems and it got steamed when we realized that we had dozens and dozens of customers that were using us for BBC use cases and we had no idea. We just did a query of our data and we were like, oh my gosh, this customer is using us for annual wellness visits and well-child visits and chronic care gap campaigns. We had no idea. So we sat down with them and went, how can we do this better for you? You’re already using us for this. What are the gaps that would make this even easier and more effective? And that has turned into a new product for us. And we just weren’t looking, we were talking to them, but we weren’t looking at what they were doing. So that’s one example and I’m really excited. About the work that we’re doing there.

Another is we had a customer who had a problem with leakage. So they were referring their patients for specialty care and those patients were going out of network basically to get that work done. So they edited one of the workflows in our builder. And they made one small edit. Which is when the patient said, no, I don’t want you to help me schedule my appointment with imaging. They asked why. And the results were astonishing. This was a group in Wisconsin. And the number 2 answers for why were transportation and lack of access to warm clothes. What an unlock! And now they have a coat program, like a free coat program, and we should see that move the needle in terms of those patients staying with that system. To, you know, complete that additive care. So those are the stories that really excite me and just the agility with which they can make those changes in our system.

And now, going back to the very first point I made, and now we just need to evangelize that to the rest of our base to elevate the entire industry to perform at that level with those new insights.

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: Gui, you’re 9 years into this. Entrepreneurial journey as a co-founder. It sounds like people have always been customer-obsessed. This is something that’s in your DNA, but can you tell me about how that customer obsession and how you maintain it has changed over the last 9 years as the organization has grown. How do you ensure that the rest of the organization has that same customer obsession and how is what you do today with the broader organization different than what you were able to do when you were just a few employees. I asked because we have a lot of early-stage founders listen to the podcast and it’s a kind of thing that of course you can be customer obsessed but then you get into the day-to-day work and there’s this ask, but it’s really expensive to license that technology or we’re gonna have to deprioritize these features or we need to raise capital and we know that this investor really wants to see this new relationship. Come on board before they’re gonna react. There are pressures that come on board, so I’m curious to hear about how you manage those trade-offs and how you’ve had to adapt your approach over time.

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: So I’m gonna give you a learning. And then I am going to give your audience a hack. So my learning is that I was customer-obsessed at the beginning. We found product market fit. And immediately it was about scale.

Like know the problem, we know the buyer, we know we had value, let’s get this to as many people as possible and frankly, the vast majority of my time shifted to thinking about that and getting market share. And I think I made a mistake. We’ve been very successful, so it’s, it’s hard to complain, but I wish I had reserved at least 30% of my time – I think that’s the lowest you should go in terms of time with customers back then – to continuing that relationship because I think we would have launched new and different products sooner. Because I would I would have known what the future looked like in the mind of my customers and I missed that for a couple of years. I came to the realization during COVID that needed to change. And I was meeting with my executive business partner and I posed a challenge to her, which was how can we create a system here at Artera where I am talking to a customer every day – and I can actually deliver on my commitments to that customer? Because the problem is scale, right?

I’m in 10 hours of meetings a day. Realistically, that is what my day looks like. So I don’t have time after a 30-minute or 1-hour meeting with a customer to do the 5 follow-ups, send a follow-up email to the customer, get 5 teams racing, and make sure those insights actually turn into action. So we actually designed a system and we call it the executives engagement program. And I hold myself to the standard and then all of my executive team is also expected to meet with some subset of customers – it’s probably at a minimum on a weekly basis or a monthly basis. 

And I actually do all those meetings with my business partner. She is able to chase a lot of those action items for me. So I’m moving on to the next meeting. She’s actually putting those into practice. I have a draft email that I can send at the end of the day to the customer – I tweak it a little bit. I get it out the door. Every customer has my cell phone number. I pick up every number and because I now have a system in place behind the scenes where if somebody needs help, I’ve got somebody who can turn that into action. And it really delivered and feel free to dig in on how we actually turn this into practice, but we have a whole practice that before every customer meeting, I have a 2-page briefing sheet. Or the main points of contact, where they using us for, what do they want to use this for? What are their problems? If there’s one thing that you could get out of this call, what would you want me to do with this customer?

So I’m reading a two-page document before every meeting. I’m having the meeting. Then I’m sending a summary to all of our internal teams. I’m sending a recap to the customer and then a couple weeks later I’m following up with a customer to make sure we have delivered. We have delivered on our promises. And they’re probably getting a handwritten thinking note for me a month later. That was literally the level of intensity with which we take this customer obsession and we’ve had to build a process out of it. That’s the only way that you can do this at scale.

So in Amazon, there’s something called the question mark escalation. So when I started at Amazon advertising, I, this is like the dreaded thing you don’t want to happen and it happened with our team. So we managed to program, we deprecated a feature, we didn’t communicate appropriately with customers. And so there was a customer who was materially impacted by this and they emailed Jeff at Amazon. Calm and they expressed their disappointment and that email was forwarded by presumably Jeff’s office. I don’t know if it actually is just Jeff. To the, you know, director of our business unit with just a question mark, right? That triggers a process that ends with a narrative review. Where you identify the root cause of what is going on with that customer and that durable mechanism, which was a tool that’s inspected at adopted to make sure that it never happens again. So they always have good intentions if you believe that people are good and have merit you can accept the premise that we all have good intentions. So if I make a mistake, it’s like, I, I had good intentions. Of course you had good intentions, right? Yeah. The way you fix a problem verbally over time is by deploying and implementing a mechanism.

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: So that’s music to my ears. The other thing is that provides a really interesting talent development opportunity within your team because I don’t know how you select and fill those sponsor roles and if you rotate them but you know for your star achievers internally you know that’s a fantastic way to get exposure and visibility with the executive team and you’re developing your internal talent pipeline. You look at the GE model and CEOs are always recruited internally. What are you doing to support and develop your next batch of leaders?

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: You know what? That’s a good point. We’ve had a lot of our executive team in the layered down. It was developed internally and I’m probably proudest of that. We still use one other hack from Amazon, which helps with mobility internally, which is the memo format. We used to do decks for everything. Everything’s a memo now. Everything we write, is a 3 to 6-page memo. If it’s any longer than 6 pages, it’s 2 different meetings, 2 different topics. Like it’s too much information.

And we have a strategic meeting every week and we review 3 or 4 memos. We document all the decisions and it is amazing how effective it is because 2 months later, we’ll revisit a decision and we’ll realize we weren’t aligned. And then literally we raise our hands and we go, let’s look at the memo. And then see what the memo says we agreed to. And we can usually figure out where the disconnect happened. So it’s been such an effective model for us. I also adopted that too late. So I wish I adopted that 2 years into this company. It took me I don’t know, 7 and a half years. I probably activated that model about a year and a half ago. But it’s a great opportunity for folks who aren’t on the executive team because we have team members write memos and send those to our team. We review them. We have a discussion with them. We make a decision. And every time we review a memo, we end with a decision. There’s always a decision. So it’s such an effective model. And it democratizes information and knowledge sharing as well.

Not everybody has the extroverted personality type to say host a podcast on health innovation just kidding but not really see but there are individuals who have different personality types and they may not feel and frequently don’t feel comfortable being in a room of 12 people. And saying a idea. Or they may not have the space to war feel encouraged. And with a written narrative, they have a format that they can communicate in a way that is just the same as everybody else, right? It’s democratized. And it’s also more difficult to hide bad thinking in writing, whereas a great deck and great slides. May not be a very good idea, just very well delivered, but as soon as you read it written down, see very easy to see.

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: Let’s shift back to Artera Tell me about the marketplace and the role of the marketplace within the Artera Harmony platform. So what’s it all about and how does it make the whole worth more than the sum of all the parts?

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: Yeah, so if you go back to the problem statement from earlier, which is health care is complicated. A lot of things need to be communicated to patients. They never come from one system. They come from a lot of source systems and the status quo today is every system can communicate on their own fashion. The idea of the marketplace is to make it plug-and-play. To route all of those vendor communications through our platform so we can take over. We have a series of APIs that can deliver communications on behalf of those vendors.

So again, let’s use kind of example of rev cycle, right? You’re a hospital, you’ve purchased some sort of payment processing tool and patients are expected to download an application to pay their bills. In the status quo, that patient will get a text from a random 5-digit code telling them their bill is ready. Very few patients tend to respond or click or act because they say it looks and feels like spam. In the marketplace example, those communications would be delivered via our platform – they would come from the hospital’s phone number in the same thread as every other interaction that you’ve had with the hospital, you can either pay your bill directly by clicking on a link or you can respond and say, hey, what is this about?I actually disagree with my coverage. And they’ll be routed to a human being. So we close the loop.

So our marketplace already has 40 best-of-breed healthcare IT vendors. Our API’s are open – they’re accessible to anybody, so you don’t have to be in our marketplace to use them. And it delivers just that, which is unifying communication. It’s a win-win. Our hospitals can integrate these solutions a lot quicker. We don’t have proprietary standards and the vendors. Frankly save time and money because they’re not having to build their own communication stacks and the patients win because they’re getting communications from a trusted source and they can engage and they can be routed to a human being when it’s appropriate.

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: Can you give me an example of a partner with whom you have a better together story where you know having the benefit of that inherited trust because the communications coming from the same number really helped them out. Anybody come to mind? 

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: Yeah, I can give you a couple. Intake forms is a great one. So, there’s a solution called tonic that delivers really amazing rich interactive registration forms and a bunch of other kind of intake type forms for the patient. And again, in the status quo example, they’d either be texting or emailing you from their own phone number. Tonic is not a texting or emailing company. There a forms company. That’s what people pay them for their best to breed at that – And success for tonic is getting the maximum percent of patients filling that out before they arrive at the point of care.

So we deliver those communications natively via our platform. Patients again get that text in line with everything else they’ve received. They tap on the link. We pass through all the parameters that need to be passed through so they were taken through that rich experience they can complete the forms. We know whether the form has been completed or not. So we can create hierarchy rules where we remind the patient, hey, it looks like you haven’t completed this paperwork yet, your appointments in a couple hours. Can you finish the form? That’s a great example. Response rates went up significantly. 

Another good one is satisfaction forms after the visit. There’s a company called Refugee that does great work here. Again, it’s delivered natively. When the Visit is finished we get a trigger from the EHR that says the visit has been completed, patient gets a text. Hey, can you rate your experience? Tell me about the provider, all of that. All those questions, all that information is coming from that downstream partner. So there really are infinite use cases and a ton more to get excited about. 

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: Tell me about your ambition for the future. So what do you want to see from you and your team in 5 years’ time? Where are you going?

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: We want to deliver on the mission. Right? I want unequivocally for the average American to go through their health care experience and for it to feel totally seamless. We’re not there yet. So where’s the biggest gap? 2 things, visibility and orchestration. Our customers and frankly our non-customers. I really have very little visibility into what’s going on in their organizations. They know that their patients are getting a lot of communication. They’re not sure where it’s coming from. They’re not sure when it’s happening and they have no idea. 

We’ve released a series of tools recently that provide that visibility. You can search for any patient in our system and see every single communication that has been sent to them from every practice and from every vendor that’s integrated with Artera. We’ve opened up new capabilities including extracts for vendors that won’t integrate with us. I think would be a great example. So we have an epic extract that provides a ton of value to our customers. That’s the visibility piece. We’ve also delivered new reporting dashboards that show them aggregate level. Visibility across their entire system. So I can log into one place and see I have 200 patients that are clearly getting overcommunicated with. Here is the impact it is having. Now the next question is, what do I do with this information?

So that’s the visibility, which nobody has. Everyone’s blind. We’re changing that and we’ve launched tools to deliver that for our customers. The next piece is orchestration. So I now have insights. Now, how do I actually fix the things that aren’t working well? So our new platform is introducing this concept of rules, orchestration rules. Where you can actually create master criteria that will suppress communications, prioritize communications, create limits: hey, do not ever let one of my patients receive more than 10 communications in one day.

I’m just giving you a random example. Hey, if a care gap, a bill, and a satisfaction form or all queue to go out at the same minute on the same day, prioritize the care gap, suppress everything else, and alert my team. So the orchestration is what is going to allow our customers and our prospective customers to actually deliver that premium experience, right? Because they will know what’s going on and now they can actually act set the rules and they will see the impact on conversion rate, the impact on patient satisfaction, and so on and so forth. Just less anxiety for patients. I mean, there’s there’s bill anxiety and financial anxiety that can be associated with treatment. And so the ordinal delivery of these messages can really have a big impact that you do not want to get your financial billing information before the course of treatment that could really materially impact the adoption.

Let me give you a practical example, right? I have 2 young kids. I have a daughter who’s a year and a half. I have a son who’s 3 years old. When my daughter was 4 months old. One night it was maybe 2 in the morning. Her breathing was super labored. It sounded like she was breathing out of the straw. And we were about to go to the ED. What did I do? I pulled out my phone. I texted my pediatrician. Right? Using our software, just text the phone number said, hey, my daughter has super labor breathing. She hasn’t been sick. I’m going to the ED. What should I do? So I sent that text, what do you think happened? Our system saw that. Followed a workflow which was this sounds urgent it’s after hours it needs to go to on call nurse it was routed to a nurse a minute later had a phone call, Hey, I just got your text. You need to go outside with your daughter. And if the breathing gets better within 3 min, you probably don’t need to go to the EDs. I forget what the thing is RSV or something like that. If it doesn’t get better, go to emergency care.

She saved me a trip to emergency care. If I was on a risk-based contract. She just saved her organization, I don’t know, 3 grand? I don’t know the average cost of an ED visit is. So the real world applications of delivering great care are phenomenal for patient access. They’re phenomenal for return on investment and savings. And there’s a thousand other examples like that, that that’s what I want 5 years from now. I want that for every single use case for every single patient in America. It’s a lot better than opening up chat bots and saying, hey, you know, this is what I’ve got.

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: Now speaking about that in generative AI, one of the challenges with these large language models is they’re not interpretable and it’s almost as if we need to do new fundamental science. On the nature of mind, if I can even use that term on these LLMs. And so we’re pretty far from this being software with medical device. You know, I mean, like it’s really tempting to think of it as a clinical decision support tool, but I just don’t see it. I mean, it obviously nothing’s been approved yet and I just with how the technology works. I think we got a ways to go. But with the work that you’re doing, I think there’s actually quite a lot that could be done there.How hard is it for your customers to actually write the content that is going up through the messaging platform? Are there opportunities to optimize that content delivery for different patient personas or demographic groups and could generative AI be used to help alleviate the burden because not many hospitals have teams of copywriters? Have you thought at all about this? And is there a role for generative AI in Artera’s future?

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: So we have a whole team focused on this, but we’ve been very cautious about putting the cart ahead of the horse, so to speak. There’s a lot of marketing hype around AI being used. We’ve chosen to stay styling and just do our experiments at the end of the day. Our only objective with these experiments is to increase conversion. Conversion could be patient getting the answer they need, the care they need or not having to talk to a human being.

I’ll give you a couple examples of some of the things you’ve experimented with. I need to send a care gap message to every single patient who is eligible for a colonoscopy and that might be a workflow that I’ve written out with a series of questions. Now I have a lot of information about all my patients. There might be a hundred 1,000 patients who get that communication in any given year. Now I don’t have the time to create 100,000 different versions of that based on Alex’s zip code, socioeconomic information, background in terms of coming to seek care and being responsive and engaging, but you can give those criteria to an LLM and you can say, give me a version of this workflow that is more likely to convert for Alex. And you can imagine that at scale, 100,000 times, if that can increase the response rate from 70% to even 72%, it is very meaningful. So that’s one example. 

Another example is the really the classic simple use case of auto-complete. This is what Epic is doing with their in-basket, right? It’s suggesting responses for their physicians. I’ve got, I believe it’s 30,000 active hospital users on my software every single week. These are call center workers back office. These are mid-levels and they’re responding to patients, right? So we are testing with these same ideas. The patient asks a question, we suggest a response. The beauty of this model is that we can actually train the model because the staff sees the suggested response and they edit it and they send it and that is training our model. So we actually have this amazing workforce that doesn’t work for us of 20 or 30,000 people every day who will be able to see these suggested responses and train the model and at some point The confidence interval is going to be near 100% and we’ll just send it to the patient.

But we’ve been very cautious. Health care has wonderful staff. In some cases, you could argue that with modern technology, it’s even overstaffed from a call center and back office perspective.

So let’s put those folks to use. Let’s elevate their pay grade. Let’s get them responding to higher acuity patient questions. So that’s what we fall back on and those are the folks that are gonna be training our system to automate more and more of that journey.

[QUESTION, ALEX MERWIN]: So, when we wrap up today and as you go home, you hang out with your kids and you think you’re thinking back on this conversation – are there any questions you’re going to wish that I had asked you? 

[ANSWER, GUILLAUME DE ZWIREK]: The question that will come back to mind is ‘What would I do differently or what would my advice be to somebody who is at various stages of their Startup journey, whatever startup means, right?’ 

Uber was a startup until it went public. So I think there’s a pretty broad definition for that term. So that might be the question. Yeah. There are some things we did right. So looking at the very early days, look, the truth is starting and running a company is a roller coaster. And you will do things wrong and the things that you do wrong shape you and make you a better leader and make you a better company. They probably have more influence on you being a successful company.

Now, as a whole, you need to do more right than you do wrong if the roller coaster is going to keep going up. In the early days focusing on finding that product market fit and then really making sure you had a scalable sales model is key. I mean so many founders who spend too much time to see if they have product market fit and they want to go on to the next thing.

The best products rarely went in health care – in any industry for that matter. It’s the products that can get distribution and can get used that win.

So that has to be figured out in the early days. So that would be my learning lesson number one and I’m fortunate that I stumbled into that naturally and didn’t learn anything dangerous mistakes. And then the second lesson, which we kind of already talked about, is At some point, you’re gonna get pulled further and further away from your customers and that will cost you. So threading that needle and realizing when you need to create systems to get in front of your customers and spend that time is really important. So. I guess they audience already learned this today, but there’s my summary and I hope that provides some value to somebody. 

[FINAL THOUGHTS, ALEX MERWIN]: That’s fantastic. You’ve left me inspired. I hope that everybody’s rethinking how they communicate with patients and get in touch with you soon.

The post World-Class Customer Service in Healthcare: A Discussion With the AWS Health Innovation Podcast appeared first on Artera.

I founded Artera in 2015 with a mission: make healthcare #1 in customer service. Today, Artera proudly supports 750+ customers who facilitate 2.2 billion annual communications for 68+ million patients, and invests over $33M/yr in R&D and Customer Experience to deliver the best product in the market.

Despite this strong traction, we haven’t achieved our mission…yet. This week we are one step closer with the announcement of Artera Harmony. It’s our most comprehensive platform update ever, and a culmination of our work and learnings for the past eight years.

8 Years to Harmony 

For the past eight years, we’ve been building, listening and learning from our customers. Our team has been deeply rooted in what may seem like a niche area of healthcare to some – patient communications; but to us, it’s everything.

Quite literally, we’re obsessed. And with all good obsessions, we’ve been studying, observing and analyzing it for years.

And over the past year, I’ve become acutely aware of a problem that (likely aggravated by COVID) has spiraled out of control: an abundance of technology systems, specialties, and providers who are all competing for attention from the same patients.

Over the last year, our team has conducted market validation, 1:1 discussions with 50+ health providers and I personally conducted listening sessions with 100+ customers. These efforts yielded several consistent themes:

• The average health system has over 11 digital health vendors that communicate (e.g., text, IVR, etc.) independently with patients.
• Often, these digital health vendors are managed by different departments within the health system, with limited-to-no awareness of competing communication workflows or messaging backlogs.
• There is limited-to-no coordination of message importance, timing or cadence, resulting in communications appearing out-of-order and lacking context.
• Many patients feel “over messaged” and report message fatigue, resulting in poorer response rates and adherence.

We Heard The Problem Loud & Clear:

Too many texts from too many numbers and vendors, totally uncoordinated. And no true solution to the problem.

Health systems have had to make the trade-off between:

(a) an “all-in-one platform” with inferior products, useability, and returns, and

(b) multiple best-of-breed systems that take too much overhead to manage and get working cohesively together.

Until now.

Introducing Artera Harmony

Artera Harmony is an open system that orchestrates patient communication by integrating a hospital’s digital vendors, managing communication workflows from multiple stakeholders, and delivering communication to patients in a single unified and cohesive communication thread. It is what I first dreamed of when establishing Artera, a vision that has been years in the making and is finally mature enough to introduce to the world.

I recently chatted with HIT expert Jessica DaMassa from WTF Health (What’s The Future Health) to share our vision for Artera Harmony. I’ve shared this conversation below.

Five Cornerstones of Artera Harmony

Artera Harmony has five components that equip healthcare providers with the ability to deploy cohesive and unified patient communications:

1. Developer Portal: Makes it easy for digital health vendors and providers to quickly integrate into Artera to send communications to patients
2. Staff Console: Delivers an intuitive platform for staff to easily manage all patient communication in one place
3. Conversation Builder: Allows staff to independently create and automate multi-step communication workflows (e.g recalls, referrals, surgery prep, education etc), eliminating manual work and freeing up their valuable time
4. Conversation Manager: A rules interface that allows hospital administrators to manage all of their communications with patients – whether designed within Artera or another digital health vendor – to create the best experience possible for patients (eliminate over messaging, prioritize certain workflows over others, etc)
5. Intelligent Analytics: A robust analytics platform where you can view communication performance across all digital health solutions and workflows, this includes predictive models with recommendations on where to optimize, and performance benchmarking to similar specialties

Powered by the Artera Marketplace

Healthcare is inherently closed as an industry (just look at the friction involved in adopting open standards). At Artera, we believe the quickest path to solving healthcare’s challenges is by collaborating with others. We aim to set the bar for collaboration and open standards, and it’s why we founded a marketplace: an open platform that brings together the best companies in their respective verticals to deliver communications in a thoughtful, coordinated way. This will drive optimal outcomes.

The Artera Marketplace spans the patient journey with partners across Population Health, Scheduling, Intake, Patient Education, Care Pathways, Billing, Forms, Patient Surveys and more. At launch, this includes 30+ digital health vendors, like Arcadia, Blockit, Bright.md, Flywire, Gozio Health, Tonic, WebMD Ignite, and Xealth. We welcome others, including our direct competitors. Please contact me or check out our Marketplace page to get started.

Below is a discussion with Dan Dodson, MBA, MSMI, who leads innovation at UNC Health, about his shared belief in vendors working together to solve healthcare’s most pressing challenges.

What’s Next with Harmony

We are fortunate to have more than 25 Artera customers already using components of Artera Harmony via Artera’s Beta and Early Access programs which test and validate the functionality across different production deployments. Our full Artera Harmony solution will be generally available in the second half of 2023 and we cannot wait to unlock the full potential of the vendors being used across our 750+ customers, representing more than 17% of the facilities across the United States.

– Guillaume

The post Introducing Artera Harmony: Our Most Ambitious Platform Yet appeared first on Artera.

At a Glance:

• Origins and Mission: Founded in 2015, WELL Health’s mission is to revolutionize patient care coordination and make healthcare the leader in customer service.
• Evolution and Achievements: WELL Health has been renamed to Artera; we power over 1 billion patient-hospital conversations and handle 40+ million patient interactions.
• Future Vision and Rebranding: The new vision is to create connectivity across the healthcare ecosystem for healthier patients and efficient organizations.

Where We Started:

In 2015, I started WELL after an unnerving personal healthcare experience. I was fortunate to be treated by amazing physicians, nurses and staff, but the process of coordinating and managing my care was terribly inconvenient and inefficient — everything required a phone call. 

Back then, you had to call between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. only to land on a phone tree, that would eventually get you to the front office (if you clicked the right buttons), who might leave an electronic message for your care team, who would eventually call you back from an unrecognized number you wouldn’t answer… which meant you had to start the whole process over again. 

Freeform texting wasn’t technically legal for healthcare purposes (this soon changed). The vast majority of the burden was on the patient — and to me, this felt backwards. 

With healthcare’s deep resources, infinite market and mission-driven employee base, it could be the #1 industry in customer service — and that became my mission. I picked a common, recognizable company name to get us started: WELL Health. 

Where We Are:

Seven years later, we proudly power over 1B conversations between patients and hospitals each year — touching more than 40 million patients. Like everyone else, we are emerging from the largest pandemic in human history, and in spite of all those challenges our platform has helped customers deliver the level of service I originally imagined:

For us, healthcare only delivers #1 customer service when a patient gets convenient access, on their terms, and in a reasonable timeline. Yet, it’s not only the patient who benefits. 

Where We’re Going:

Our vision is to create connection across the entire healthcare ecosystem – not just during one point in time, or one piece of the journey – to enable healthier patients, more efficient hospital staff and more profitable organizations. 

It may seem counterintuitive that delivering amazing customer service actually saves time and creates profit but this is precisely what we’ve found: 

Hello, We Are Artera:

Today, we are rebranding to a name that better reflects this vision: Artera 

Sending a text message doesn’t equal great communication. To deliver a truly connected patient experience, the Artera Platform unifies disparate information, links disjointed messages, and manages communications flow, rhythm and routing, across the entire healthcare ecosystem. This arrives for the patient in a single, intuitive experience, allowing the patient to respond on their terms and their timeline. For hospital staff, this reduces busy work so they can focus on more meaningful work.

We’ve seen from our 500+ customers that the Artera Platform can produce healthier patients, more efficient staff and more profitable organizations. We believe this trifecta is the standard all patient communications technology should be held to.

Behind the Artera name and colors:

Artera (ar – tair – uh) is derived from the word artery and represents a heart. In fact, when the “a” in the Artera logo is rotated, it becomes a heart.  The heart has always been an important symbol to us. The heart is the primary organ of circulation — pumping blood throughout the body, controlling your heart rate, rhythm, blood flow and pressure, and sending nutrients to your other organs. It’s vital for function and connection — just like the Artera platform. 

Artera’s main brand color is Purple: a combination of Red and Blue. 

• Red often symbolizes life and responsiveness; Blue often symbolizes security and comfort. 
• Arteries are red, veins are blue.
• Purple is also associated with compassion and imagination.

The Artera brand color of purple combines all of these symbolic attributes.

Patient Communication is the Heart of Healthcare

Just like a heart, the Artera Platform is the primary orchestration engine for any health system – routing communications to the right places while managing the flow, rate, volume and rhythm of communications between patients and providers. 

Just like our brand color, our platform is responsive and secure, while delivering comfort to patients when they get a response from their provider. 

Meet the Arterians

At the end of the day, patient communication is the heart of healthcare, and our employees are the heart of Artera. We wouldn’t be who we are today without the profound and thoughtful contributions of our team. We’ve had a lot of fun over the past several weeks and months co-creating our new brand identity, including our new team name – Arterians – crowd sourced by our amazing employees. I couldn’t be prouder to stand alongside each of these Arterians on our journey. 

Join Us On Our Journey

The desire to connect is inherent in all of us. Patients want to be cared for; and doctors want to care for them. We aim to power that connection. 

We continue to learn everyday from our customers – doctors, nurses and hospital staff, the modern day heroes who are building a healthier society treatment by treatment, appointment by appointment. We invite you to join us on this journey as we continue to evolve the Artera platform to deliver the future of patient communications. 

~Guillaume

To learn more about Artera, watch this interview with Jessica DaMassa at WTF Health.

The post A Change of Heart: WELL Health Rebrands to Artera appeared first on Artera.