The discussion featured insights from industry leaders:

• Syed Mohiuddin, SVP and Chief AI Transformation and Strategy Officer, United Health Group
• Stephen Nash, Co-Founder, Southern Pediatrics
• Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO and Co-founder, Artera

Moderated by Anthony Guerra, founder and editor-in-chief of healthsystemCIO, the panel explored the practical realities of deploying agentic AI, from high-level strategy to on-the-ground implementation. The discussion provides a roadmap for organizations attempting to optimize resources and achieve operational improvements without increasing headcount.

The Strategic Imperative for AI Agents

The panel agreed that the adoption of AI is no longer optional; it’s existential. De Zwirek noted that AI will fundamentally rewrite technology investments across healthcare. The primary driver is the need to solve persistent problems, such as administrative waste, clinician burnout, and disjointed patient communication.

Nash emphasized this point, stating that the goal should not be to deploy agents for their own sake, but to address “burning pains” within an organization. For his pediatric practice, this means tackling challenges in charting and patient communication.

Most of these early AI opportunities are concentrated around high-frequency, high-friction workflows.

In large enterprises, Mohiuddin noted, the scope for agentic AI extends to administrative and clinical domains alike. Agents can be designed to not only provide “explanations” of past events (such as claim denials or benefit questions) but also to execute “actions,” such as guiding users through next steps or supporting claims processing. These applications help reduce the processing time for tasks like care-gap outreach and benefit alternatives, moving population health initiatives forward at much greater speed and scale.

De Zwirek described practical success in using AI to reach large patient populations and drive high rates of successful scheduling. This would reduce weeks-long processes into a matter of seconds, further illustrating AI’s potential as a force multiplier.

Governance and Interoperability as Gating Factors

Scaling AI in healthcare requires discipline akin to workforce management rather than iterative software trials. Mohiuddin stressed that successful deployment depends on rigorous frameworks for governance, design, and observability, paralleling the thoroughness involved in hiring, onboarding, and monitoring new staff. Leaders must fully understand what their agents are tasked with, institute controls for their activities, and monitor performance continuously.

De Zwirek reinforced the necessity of preemptive risk reduction, designing real-time evaluation systems and drawing on best practices from AI-driven software development, where architecture and review processes are central to preventing errors from affecting workflows at scale.

Perhaps the most critical challenge to real-world implementation is interoperability. As the panel noted, even when vendors partner closely with health systems, integration often remains the customer’s responsibility, especially in fragmented provider landscapes. Agents need reliable, timely access to EHRs, practice management systems, and downstream platforms to be effective. De Zwirek’s experience highlighted why Artera invested in building robust internal integration capabilities, and cautioned that pursuing full in-house development is only viable for organizations with significant scale and resources.

Mohiuddin added that both “speed to start” and “speed to completion” matter; often, success hinges on the last mile of integration. Leaders should treat agentic AI initiatives as vital strategic investments tied to organizational priorities, competitive advantage, and the specialized needs of their teams.

Leadership, Workforce Readiness, and the Human Element

Technology alone isn’t enough. The panelists reminded listeners that successful AI adoption demands strong leadership, transparent communication, and cultural readiness. Nash advocated for clear internal messaging that connects new tools to tangible outcomes, supporting staff in understanding how AI solutions translate to less administrative overhead and more meaningful time with patients.

Workforce preparation is equally crucial. Mohiuddin recommended formal, hands-on training for leaders and technical teams so they move beyond awareness to genuine fluency. Broad-based education helps surface governance needs and inspires safe experimentation, positioning organizations to identify both opportunities and risks.

Webinar Takeaways for Healthcare IT and Application Leaders

Interoperability and data accessibility are prerequisites for success

Agentic AI’s utility is limited by an organization’s ability to connect systems and deliver timely data.

Start with high-friction, high-impact workflows

Workflows such as documentation, messaging, scheduling, and care-gap management are solid places to start. This is where outcomes are measurable and value is quickly demonstrated.

Establish governance at a level that matches operational risk.

Invest in robust evaluation, monitoring, and controls before agents move into production.

Plan for the last mile

Whether integrating tools, adapting workflows, or managing organizational change, realize that internal effort is required in parallel with any external partnership.

Build broad-based AI fluency and align adoption with staff and patient outcomes.

Invest in training, encourage open knowledge sharing, and keep a sharp focus on benefits to clinicians and patients alike.

The message is clear: AI-driven automation offers health systems a path through resource constraints and operational complexity, but optimization requires bringing together the right processes, technologies, and people. As de Zwirek urged, now is the time for healthcare leaders to learn, experiment, and help move the industry forward by sharing lessons and building momentum beyond early adopters.

To view the recording of this webinar, Maximizing Value, Minimizing Risk: Operationalizing an Agentic AI Strategy (Sponsored by Artera), please click here.

The post Operationalizing Agentic AI in Healthcare: A Webinar Recap 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.

As AI agents become more sophisticated, the need for secure, structured communication between agents and systems has never been more important. Enter Model Context Protocol (MCP) – a new approach that’s redefining how AI agents interact with external systems while maintaining strict security boundaries.

While traditional APIs have served machine-to-machine communication well, they now fall short when it comes to agentic AI interactions. MCP fills this gap by providing a specialized protocol designed specifically for AI agents, complete with built-in security features that help prevent data spillage and reduce hallucinations.

What is Model Context Protocol (MCP)?

Model Context Protocol is a new standard for connecting AI models to external tools, data sources, and services, so they can more effectively communicate. Essentially, it functions as an API designed specifically for AI agents. Developed by Anthropic as an open source protocol in late 2024, MCP has quickly gained traction across the industry, despite being less than a year old.

Think of MCP as the evolution of how systems communicate. Where REST APIs and GraphQL handle traditional machine-to-machine interactions, MCP creates a structured pathway for agents to access system capabilities without compromising security or data integrity.

The protocol operates on a simple but powerful premise: instead of giving agents direct database access or unlimited system permissions, MCP creates a controlled interface that defines exactly what an agent can and cannot do. This approach fundamentally changes how we think about agent-system integration.

What are the Three Pillars of MCP?

MCP architecture consists of three core components that work together to create a comprehensive communication framework:

Pillar #1 Tools (The Agent’s Capabilities)

Tools represent the specific actions an agent can perform within a system. These are discrete functions that agents can call to interact with external services. Each tool has a defined scope and purpose. An agent cannot perform actions beyond its available toolset, creating natural boundaries around what’s possible during any interaction.

For healthcare applications, tools might include:

• Finding open appointment slots for rescheduling
• Booking new appointments
• Processing referrals
• Triaging patients to appropriate care levels
• Canceling or confirming existing appointments
• Escalating complex cases to human staff

Pillar #2 Resources: Static Information Repository

Resources encompass all the static information an agent needs to function effectively. This includes structured data like databases, documents, and reference materials that don’t change frequently. Resources provide agents with the contextual knowledge they need, without requiring real-time database queries for every piece of static information.

Common examples of resources include:

• Provider directories with doctor locations, specialties, and working hours
• Facility information like building locations and available services
• Parking and navigation details
• FAQ databases
• Policy documents and care recommendations

Pillar #3 Prompts: Contextual Communication Guidelines

Tied to the available resources and tools, prompts define how agents should respond in specific situations. They’re pre-written response templates that ensure consistent, appropriate communication based on the context of the interaction.

For instance, when an appointment scheduling tool returns no available slots, the associated prompt might guide the agent to say: “I couldn’t find any available appointments for your preferred time. Would you like to adjust your date range?”

This component ensures that agents maintain professional, helpful communication even when systems return unexpected results or errors.

These three pillars of MCP architecture (tools, resources, and prompts) create a comprehensive framework that addresses the key challenges of agent deployment: capability definition, information access, and response consistency. This structured approach not only enhances security but also improves the reliability and predictability of agent interactions.

Security Through Structure: How MCP Protects Data

One of MCP’s most significant advantages is its approach to security, which operates on multiple levels to protect sensitive information and prevent unauthorized access.

Hallucination Mitigation

Traditional agent implementations often gave AI systems direct database access, creating opportunities for hallucinations when agents generated plausible-sounding but incorrect information. MCP addresses this by normalizing data exchange and reducing ambiguity.

For example, when an MCP server receives a specific date from an agent, like “September 26, 2025,” (rather than sharing the numbers in a different order, such as 26-09-25), there’s little to no room for misinterpretation. The MCP can translate the data into its own specification for the agent, providing structured, verified responses, rather than constructing replies from raw database queries. This structured approach significantly reduces the likelihood of agents fabricating information (hallucinations).

The protocol also limits agents to only the information explicitly provided by the tools they call. If a tool is designed to verify patient appointments, it returns only verification status – nothing more. This prevents agents from accessing or inferring additional data beyond their designated scope.

Data Containment and Access Control

MCP creates strict boundaries around data access through its tool-based architecture. Agents can only access information through predefined tools, and each tool has specific parameters and return values.

This approach prevents data spillage in several ways:

• Limited scope: Tools only return the specific information they’re designed to provide
• No direct database access: Agents cannot make arbitrary queries or access raw data
• Structured responses: All information comes through controlled, formatted channels

If someone attempts to trick an agent into providing unauthorized information – like requesting a patient’s social security number – the agent simply has no tool capable of retrieving that data. The response would be: “I don’t have the capability to access that information. Would you like me to forward you to a human to answer that?”

Preventing Jailbreaking Attempts

Jailbreaking occurs when users try to manipulate agents into providing information or performing actions they shouldn’t. Classic examples include convincing an AI that harmful requests are actually for fictional purposes or creative projects.

MCP’s architecture makes jailbreaking significantly more difficult because agents physically cannot access information beyond their tool capabilities. Even if an agent were somehow convinced to attempt unauthorized data access, the underlying system simply doesn’t provide that pathway.

For healthcare applications, this is particularly crucial. Even if an agent hallucinates and generates a fake social security number or medical record number, that information isn’t sourced from actual patient data – it’s purely fabricated and can be detected and flagged by monitoring systems, like Judge LLMs.

The Future of Agent-System Communication

Model Context Protocol represents a fundamental shift in how we architect AI agent interactions. By providing structured, secure communication channels, MCP enables more sophisticated agent capabilities while maintaining strict security boundaries.

Many tech companies, including Artera, are already implementing MCP servers to integrate agent interactions with their platforms. This growing adoption suggests that MCP is on track to become a standard protocol across the tech industry, similar to how REST APIs became ubiquitous for web services.

While MCP shows great promise, we’re prioritizing security as the protocol continues to mature. For example, our MCP server operates within a controlled environment, accessible only to authorized agents, rather than being publicly available on the internet. 

As the protocol matures, we anticipate enhanced security standards, broader industry adoption, and more sophisticated toolsets that enable agents to handle increasingly complex workflows. I believe that organizations – such as Artera – which adopt MCP early are well-positioned to leverage these advances in agentic AI while maintaining robust security practices.

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 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 Model Context Protocol Explained: The Key to Agentic Healthcare appeared first on Artera.

As the SVP of Technical Operations at Artera, my mission is to uphold the highest standards of security while fostering a culture deeply rooted in data protection. Given the dynamic nature and rapid change of the agentic AI landscape, we have a unique opportunity today to ensure that our security protocols remain agile and resilient in the face of new challenges. If this past year has taught us anything, it’s that as AI agents become more advanced and independent, the risks of data breaches, hallucinations and leaks can escalate quickly. 

So, what does this mean from a security standpoint? Data security today – in this new era of agentic AI – requires a fundamental shift in strategy, and can no longer rely on static, point-in-time assessments. Instead, it demands continuous monitoring, multi-layered security frameworks and the integration of human oversight with AI-powered validation. 

Healthcare providers seeking agentic AI solutions need partners who truly understand this and have built robust security systems designed specifically with agentic AI in mind. 

Why HITRUST Alone Falls Short in the AI Era of Healthcare

Traditional frameworks like HITRUST are a solid starting point for protecting healthcare data, but they just can’t keep up with how fast agentic AI systems evolve. While HITRUST shows a commitment to safeguarding PHI, securing agentic AI requires a whole new approach.

Here’s the thing: agentic AI doesn’t play by the same rules. These systems are constantly learning, adapting and making decisions on their own. What worked yesterday might not work today, and something secure this morning could have vulnerabilities by the afternoon. A one-time security assessment just doesn’t cut it anymore – we have to be vigilantly guarding the way that AI is using our data. 

It gets trickier when you factor in how AI models get updated, retrained or tweaked between security reviews. Every change can bring new risks or behaviors that weren’t there before. Traditional frameworks simply don’t have the flexibility to keep up with these rapid changes, leaving organizations open to threats that didn’t even exist during their last compliance check.

Beyond Compliance: A Comprehensive Multi-Pillar Approach to Security

Just relying on HITRUST isn’t enough anymore. Working with vendors with multiple certifications gives you stronger, layered protection. That’s why leading health tech companies are choosing a mix of certifications to handle the dynamic nature of AI security.

I like to think of it as a jigsaw puzzle—each certification is a piece that shows how committed an organization is to keeping its systems safe and secure. Here are my “cliffnotes” on the different certifications we prioritize at Artera:

• HITRUST: the foundational layer for healthcare; demonstrates a commitment to safeguarding PHI 
• SOC 2 Type 2: third-party audit that highlights strong internal controls around data and systems – it’s a key signal of operational maturity for the business as a whole
• ISO 27001: general framework that provides the foundation for information security management systems in place
• ISO 27017: certification that specifically addresses cloud service security
• ISO 27018: certification that focuses on personally identifiable information (PII) protection in an organization’s environment
• ISO 27701: certification that covers privacy management and an organization’s commitment to keeping any privacy-related information confidential 

As you can see, each certification plays a different role. When these pieces come together, they create a multi-pillar approach to security. 

At Artera, we’re not just meeting these standards—we’re also pursuing FedRAMP High authorization, which is the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program’s most rigorous security baseline for cloud services handling highly sensitive government data (in fact, Artera recently achieved “in process” FedRAMP High designation). 

So why does this matter? Pursuing FedRAMP High status reflects our commitment to the highest level of security protocols, elevating our approach to data protection and enhancing our understanding of the evolving security landscape. 

Security Considerations for Evaluating Agentic AI Partners

So, what security certifications should health system leaders focus on in this rapidly evolving agentic AI landscape? What questions should they ask their potential partners? Where should they focus their time? 

Beyond those certifications listed above, health system leaders should focus on three fundamental areas when assessing potential agentic AI vendors: data containment, spillage prevention and hallucination mitigation. 

These represent the most significant risks unique to AI systems, and require specialized approaches that traditional security frameworks don’t address.

In addition to the preventive measures mentioned, continuous monitoring and real-time alerts are essential while agents are active. 

Building a Culture of Security, Not Just Compliance

While no system is ever 100% secure, we can do a lot to protect ourselves by using every available safeguard and holding ourselves accountable. The goal is to keep both internal and external threats from compromising our systems. Just as important is having a clear audit trail so we can handle any issues that come up. Above all, we need to protect the healthcare data with all we’ve got. This includes fostering a culture of security and continuous improvement. 

At Artera, I’m proud to say that security isn’t just a checkbox or a compliance exercise. It’s a core business principle and vital investment. Over the past few years, I’ve witnessed a remarkable cultural shift within our organization. Security has become a collective effort embedded in everything we do.

I’ve observed a growing interest in security across teams, functions, and employees. Colleagues are asking insightful questions, actively expanding their knowledge, and sharing valuable security insights throughout the company. What stands out most is the heightened curiosity and engagement. It’s both inspiring and encouraging to witness this level of commitment.

Preparing for the Future of Agentic AI Security

As AI continues to play a bigger role in healthcare, keeping systems secure is only going to get more complicated and more important. The organizations that prioritize strong security partnerships now will be better positioned to take full advantage of AI’s benefits while keeping patients’ trust intact.

When choosing an agentic AI partner, it’s a good idea to focus on vendors who not only have solid security measures in place today but are also committed to staying ahead of future challenges. I encourage providers to look for vendors who stay on top of AI security trends, invest in research and innovation, and can quickly adapt to new threats with effective solutions.

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 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 Why HITRUST Certification Isn’t Enough for Agentic AI Systems: Insights from Artera’s SVP of Technical Operations 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.

At Artera, we’re leveraging AI-powered virtual agents to redefine patient engagement and workflow optimization across health systems – blending our depth of healthcare expertise, a decade of experience and robust library of validated workflows. To explore the vision, strategy and technique behind our AI solutions, we sat down with our CTO Ashu Agte.

Here’s what he had to say about Artera’s strategy for building virtual agents. 

Now is the Time for Agentic AI in Healthcare. Here’s Why.

Question: Why is now the right time to introduce Virtual Agents?

In a recent discussion with Artera CEO Guillaume de Zwirek, he outlined two key reasons why agentic AI in healthcare is taking off at the moment: first, the current hype around AI, which brings fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) of being left behind, and second, financial pressure and an economic need to address rising costs and labor shortages in a time when interest rates are high and increases in reimbursement pressures are forcing health systems to rethink resources. Artera CTO Ashu Agte believes another major factor is also contributing to the need: the introduction of “(LLM) Model as a Service (MaaS).” 

Ashu Agte: At some point in the last six to nine months, the term “(LLM) Model as a Service” (MaaS) started becoming a commodity in the AI world, leading to a major inflection point. Essentially, with platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic, there is no need to build your own model – those solutions have made it possible to build on top of them, now called AI Engineering, enabling users to build AI-based products without extensive in-house expertise or infrastructure. This has created a lot of commodity and cost efficiencies, in addition to faster acceleration across the entire agentic space. Rather than building a model from scratch, we can scale our AI technology faster and more efficiently – this is why we decided now is the time to jump into this. 

What Sets Artera’s AI-Powered Virtual Agents Apart?

Question: Tell us about what AI agents are at this company, and why they’re different from chatbots or simple automation tools. What is our strategy all about? 

Ashu Agte: Not all AI is created equal. Many companies advertise AI solutions that are little more than advanced chatbots. What sets Artera’s virtual agents apart is our focus on going beyond basic conversations. There are three critical pillars to Artera’s AI strategy. 

1. Reasoning and Context: Our AI virtual agents don’t just respond to questions; they analyze context to understand intent and provide meaningful solutions, turning conversations into a multi-step dialogue. Our agents have the ability to interpret the intent and determine which actions to recommend based on information from our database.
2. Autonomy and Action: Beyond providing information, Artera’s AI agents are capable of completing actions like scheduling appointments, processing cancellations or managing prescription renewals by using a variety of APIs. This isn’t about replacing human interaction but enhancing efficiency by handling repetitive administrative tasks autonomously. 
3. Workflow Focus: Our AI agents are designed to handle communication end-to-end across the entire patient journey, covering tasks such as patient outreach, eligibility checks, scheduling reminders and form submissions. We can have multiple of these use cases stitched together under one agent with just one user supervising. 

Our Approach to Building Safe and Compliant AI Agents 

Question: Can you talk about Artera’s approach to building agents and the underlying technology from a safety standpoint?  

Ashu Agte: As I mentioned before, we are not building or training LLMs – for now, we are sticking with out-of-the-box LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. (aka “MaaS”).

Our approach to building agents is designed to progressively enhance an agent’s capabilities and focus, outlined in a four-step framework: 

• Foundational Agent: The first step is essentially the foundational agent, which would be very similar to ChatGPT. If you ask that agent any question, it would answer – it’s not healthcare-specific. It’s also not performing any actions or doing anything specific to Artera or healthcare-related items. 
• Artera / Healthcare Agent: To add more purpose to the foundation, we would turn the agent into an Artera / healthcare agent, where we would provide it prompts and instructions to only have conversations about healthcare-related items, and refine from there.  
• Use-Case Specific Agents: The third step is to take the Artera / healthcare agent and turn it into use-case-specific agents. When all the healthcare context is inherited, we would turn one agent into a scheduling agent, adding more instructions and integrating it with the Artera Harmony system so that it can take necessary actions by calling APIs. 
• Customer-Specific Agents: The last step is to take that use-case specific agent to a customer, add knowledge base from them and customize the template to fit their brand and deploy them effectively. Adding the knowledge base step is achieved by using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

These are essentially the four steps of evolution to provide a more customer-specific purpose. To create this purpose, there are techniques that are used to ensure accuracy: 

• Prompt Context Instructions – use in all of the phases to make sure the agents work 
• Adding the Knowledge Base – ask customers to provide knowledge and information in a structured format, for a use-case specific agent 
• Fine-tuning – eventually (potentially 2-3 years in the future), when we have a significant amount of data, we could fine-tune the models into even stronger ones 

The Artera Advantage – AI in Healthcare

Question: What would you say is Artera’s advantage in terms of building these type of virtual agents?

Ashu Agte: The future of virtual agents in healthcare is both inevitable and exciting. However, not all solutions will survive. To be successful, companies need at least one of three things: unique tech, unique data or a strong distribution network. 

At Artera, we’ve already developed large-scale integrations with healthcare systems, giving us a distribution advantage. As I previously mentioned, the actions agents need to perform will rely on seamless integrations with EHRs and various other vendors within a health system. Thanks to our advanced automations and features, we’ve established strong connections with EHR systems and other vendors across our 900+ customers. By adding a layer of agents on top of this foundation, we can effectively leverage and maximize the potential of our existing technology. These existing API integrations give us the unique data advantage. 

What does this mean? Artera has two of the three things required to be successful, which will reduce our barrier for entry into health systems.

Additionally, we are focused on maximizing value for our clients to ensure long-term success. The hype around AI might encourage quick purchases, but renewals will only happen if the technology consistently delivers results, whether by reducing costs, improving patient engagement or increasing operational efficiency. This is at the forefront of our minds when building.

From a compliance standpoint, our systems are meticulously designed to meet HIPAA compliance standards, including collaborations with trusted partners like AWS and Twilio (both of which are fully HIPAA compliant). To ensure the highest level of privacy, our knowledge base and prompt context instructions are built to neither process nor store any patient-specific data, such as PHI or PII.

These are the exact reasons why Artera is in a unique position to help enable AI agents at health systems across the nation. 

Want to Learn More About Artera’s AI Agents? 

In terms of AI, we’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible today. Above all, our focus is on providing value at every stage of the healthcare process, from appointment scheduling to post-visit follow-ups. We will continue to help solve for the key challenges health systems face every day with our AI-powered solutions. 

Agentic AI in Healthcare: A Broader Industry Perspective

As Artera advances its virtual agent strategy, it’s important to understand the broader framework that defines agentic AI in healthcare. Agentic AI refers to intelligent systems capable of independently performing tasks, making decisions, and solving problems with minimal human oversight. These agents represent a significant leap forward in healthcare innovation—driving automation, personalization, and efficiency.

Key characteristics of agentic AI include:

• Autonomy & Decision-Making: Agents are designed to act independently using contextual cues and internal goals—reducing the need for constant supervision.
  
• Personalized Care: By analyzing individual health data and behavior, agentic AI helps tailor care plans and predict patient needs.
  
• End-to-End Automation: From patient intake to post-visit follow-ups, agents can handle administrative workflows, communication, and data entry.
  
• Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics: Integrated with IoT devices and EHRs, these agents support early intervention, smart alerts, and even assist in diagnosis.
  

The impact? Improved clinical outcomes, reduced operational costs, enhanced access for underserved populations, and less burnout for healthcare staff.

At Artera, our AI-powered virtual agents are engineered with these agentic principles in mind—augmented by 2B+ patient interactions, deep EHR integrations, and strict HIPAA compliance. We’re not just following the trend—we’re setting the standard for safe, scalable, and outcome-driven agentic AI in healthcare.

Interested in learning more? Discover how Artera’s virtual agents can elevate your organization and take patient engagement to the next level.

The post What Makes Artera’s AI-Powered Virtual Agents Unique? Insights from Ashu Agte. appeared first on Artera.

We spoke with Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO and Co-Founder of Artera, to discuss why agentic AI is gaining traction, how it’s being deployed across the industry and what the future holds for this innovative technology.

The Case for Agentic AI in Healthcare

Q: Why do you think providers are showing heightened interest in agentic AI now?

Guillaume de Zwirek: From my daily conversations with providers, it’s clear that agentic AI is gaining interest for two primary reasons. First, there’s financial pressure. Persistently high interest rates and increases in reimbursement pressures are forcing healthcare organizations to rethink how they allocate resources. Second, there’s a fear of being left behind. AI has been dominating the media, creating urgency among healthcare providers who want to stay in step with innovation.

That said, every provider is at a different stage in their AI adoption journey. There are those “window shopping,” fighting to stay relevant with their boards and teams, while others are enthusiasts ready to build an agentic workforce. Regardless of where they stand now, one thing is abundantly clear: agentic AI will play an integral role in the patient experience in the future.

Q: What common use cases are you seeing for agentic AI and where does it have the most potential?

Guillaume de Zwirek: There are a few natural places where agentic AI in healthcare has potential, and is particularly promising in areas like call centers with specific use cases, such as scheduling, billing support, test results and Rx refills or management. These use cases have the potential to save thousands to millions of dollars, in addition to improving operational efficiency while giving patients quicker and more empathetic support.

For example, our team at Artera has already seen tremendous success with our Co-Pilots. Healthcare providers can save revenue and countless hours of staff time in these areas while dramatically improving the patient experience.

How Artera is Leading the Charge in Agentic AI

Q: How is Artera contributing to the adoption of agentic AI in healthcare?

Guillaume de Zwirek: At Artera, we meet healthcare organizations wherever they are in their AI journeys. Whether they’re testing AI’s potential or jumping in with both feet, our solutions allow them to seamlessly integrate agentic AI into their daily operations at their own pace.

We offer three distinct agentic solutions:

1. Co-Pilots: Tools that support human staff by helping automate and streamline patient communications.
2. Flow Agents: Rules-based agents that supercharge your staff, streamlining workflows and automating routine tasks.
3. AI Agents: Fully autonomous, intelligent agents (voice and text) that streamline operations and support decision-making (working alongside your team).

With these tools, we aim to redefine patient interaction and operational efficiency while addressing the unique challenges healthcare providers face.

Q: What sets Artera apart from other AI-powered virtual agent companies?

Guillaume de Zwirek: The agentic AI market today is noisy, with many companies claiming to offer similar services. Providers should focus on three factors to distinguish the best players:

• Rich integration capabilities with their EHR systems.
• Proven market distribution that allows for quick activation.
• Validated workflow experience that ensures the AI is ready for healthcare, not being “trained in real-time” using providers as guinea pigs.

Since the tech itself (AI agents) is generally commoditized and not a huge differentiator, healthcare providers should look for differentiation based on those factors – in addition to cost.

At Artera, we’ve built our solutions directly for healthcare, leveraging decades of industry expertise. This dedication has helped us gain the trust of over 900 healthcare organizations and 100+ providers already using our Co-Pilots.

A Closer Look at Artera’s AI Co-Pilots

Q: What exactly are Artera’s Co-Pilots, and what do they do?

Guillaume de Zwirek: Our Co-Pilots include two AI-powered solutions designed specifically for healthcare teams. I talk with providers every day who are working hard to deliver a great experience to their patients and drive organizational growth. But sometimes, it feels like a zero-sum game. Our solutions are built to support meeting patient needs while also driving operational efficiency and revenue growth. Providers shouldn’t have to choose one or the other.

1. The Staff AI Co-Pilot: Helps healthcare staff manage patient communications faster and more accurately. It includes three skills – with more coming. The language capability, in particular, eliminates language as a barrier to care, instantly making a provider’s patient access team fluent in more than 100 languages.

“One of the stickiest features of the Staff Co-Pilot is the language translation. We’re seeing thousands of real-time language translations into Spanish, Chinese (Cantonese & Mandarin), Vietnamese, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, and Pashtun, and many more,” said de Zwirek.

1. The Insights AI Co-Pilot: Designed to help healthcare organizations make data-driven decisions, this Co-Pilot analyzes patient engagement data to provide actionable insights and timely recommendations via the Artera Homepage.

Overall, these tools empower healthcare teams to work more efficiently while delivering higher-quality patient care. Today, over 85 healthcare providers have deployed the Artera Staff AI Co-Pilot, and nearly 30 healthcare organizations have deployed the Artera Insights Co-Pilot. In total, the two Artera Harmony Co-Pilots have been deployed by more than 100 healthcare providers, while we continue to attract market interest and onboard new customers.

Q: What kind of feedback have you received on these tools?

Guillaume de Zwirek: The feedback from healthcare providers has been overwhelmingly positive. Staff using the Staff AI Co-Pilot consistently report that it “makes their jobs easier.” Meanwhile, users of the Insights AI Co-Pilot describe it as “effective at meeting their needs” and “valuable for simplifying workloads.”

One success story comes from Micheal Young, VP of Operations at Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic. He shared how the Staff Co-Pilot allows his team to seamlessly translate inbound and outbound messages, freeing up time for meaningful patient interactions. This kind of feedback reinforces the impact our solutions are having across the industry.

“The Staff Co-Pilot has been an invaluable tool in strengthening our connection with our patients,” Micheal Young, vice president of operations at Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic, said in a statement. “It allows our staff to seamlessly translate inbound and outbound messages, freeing up more time to focus on meaningful, high-value patient interactions.”

Interested in Learning More About Agentic AI in Healthcare?

Agentic AI is shaping the future of healthcare by enhancing efficiency, reducing costs and improving patient outcomes. Artera enhances every stage of the patient journey with AI-powered virtual agents (voice and text) designed for healthcare. Trusted by 900+ provider organizations—including specialty groups, FQHCs, large IDNs, and federal agencies—our virtual agents support front desk staff, streamline workflows, and engage 100 million patients annually.

Interested in seeing how Artera’s AI-powered tools can enhance your operations and workforce? Schedule a demo today and experience the benefits of AI-powered virtual agents firsthand.

The post Why Now for Agentic AI in Healthcare: A Q&A with Guillaume de Zwirek appeared first on Artera.

Introducing Artera’s AI Co-Pilots

Artera’s two new offerings—Staff AI Co-Pilot and Insights AI Co-Pilot—are poised to make a significant impact across health systems. While each is designed with distinct functionalities, their shared goal is clear: harness the power of AI to streamline processes, enhance decision-making, and ultimately, improve patient outcomes.

Staff AI Co-Pilot: Empowering Healthcare Teams

The Staff AI Co-Pilot is designed to uplift healthcare staff by equipping them with tools that make communication faster, more precise, and more efficient. According to Agte, “The idea behind [this Co-Pilot] is that we want to provide skills to staff users so they can be more efficient, make decisions better, and operate faster.”

Key Features of the Staff AI Co-Pilot

1. Real-Time Language Translation
   With translation support for 98 languages, inbound and outbound messages can be instantly translated. This removes the need for third-party services, enabling real-time patient-caregiver communication. Guillaume noted how vital this feature is during critical situations, such as when a patient expresses suicidal ideation. “You need to know what the patient is saying right away,” he emphasized.
2. Message Simplification
   Typing a long message? The AI can condense it into a short, concise version that fits character limits and resonates better with patients. Guillaume humorously recalled the famous saying, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter book,” highlighting why brevity matters.
3. Autocomplete Suggestions
   Much like Gmail’s smart features, this tool predicts and completes sentences, simplifying repetitive tasks. However, unlike generic tools, Artera’s AI is trained on healthcare-specific data, ensuring its suggestions are contextually accurate.
4. Conversation Summaries
   Staff can now quickly summarize past conversations, saving valuable time. Whether it’s catching up on communication or transferring notes to electronic health records (EHRs), this feature ensures seamless information flow. According to Agte, “This eliminates the need for two sources of truth for health systems.”

Impact on Healthcare Teams

By automating routine tasks and providing real-time insights, the Staff AI Co-Pilot could improve staff efficiency by as much as 50%, according to Agte. It not only lightens the workload for healthcare teams but also allows them to focus on what they do best—caring for patients. “Simplicity is better,” he emphasized, pointing to AI’s ability to cut through complexities and deliver results.

Insights AI Co-Pilot: A Guardian Behind the Scenes

Where the Staff AI Co-Pilot supports frontline workers, the Insights AI Co-Pilot operates in the background, serving up actionable data to improve operational workflows. With this tool, Artera is taking the guesswork out of healthcare management by introducing smart, proactive insights.

Key Features of the Insights AI Co-Pilot

1. Smart No-Show Predictor
   Could AI help prevent missed appointments? With Artera’s no-show predictor, the answer is likely yes. Leveraging behavioral patterns, this feature flags patients at high risk of missing their appointments. It can even generate custom workflows, sending reminders or encouraging patients with tailored messages. “It’s better for your health” or “A no-show fee applies” could be the nudge they need to show up.
2. Next Best Actions
   This feature acts as the perfect troubleshooter. By analyzing anomalies, such as patients receiving an overwhelming number of messages, it flags issues and suggests corrective actions. Guillaume shared a real-world example, recalling a case where a surgical tool bombarded patients with 80 texts due to a system error. “Today, nobody knows,” he explained, emphasizing the transformational impact of catching such incidents early.

Impact on the Industry

The Insights AI Co-Pilot’s ability to aggregate and interpret large volumes of communication data—be it from Artera’s systems or external platforms like EHRs and billing systems—is a game-changer. With this 360-degree view of patient interactions, health systems can preempt potential errors, maintain patient trust, and optimize their operational strategies.

The Future of AI in Healthcare Communication

Both AI tools underscore Artera’s mission to enhance experiences for patients and healthcare teams alike. What’s particularly noteworthy is how these solutions are deeply informed by years of data and tailored specifically to healthcare’s unique challenges. Agte described how their custom-built AI is hosted within their own firewall, ensuring compliance with HIPAA and HiTrust standards. Security, privacy, and accuracy truly lie at the heart of these innovations.

Looking ahead, de Zwirek and Agte hinted at more to come, including bidirectional EHR integration to further simplify workflows. These advancements not only showcase the immense potential of AI in healthcare but also point to its future as an indispensable tool for innovation and care.

A Final Thought

Artera’s AI Co-Pilots demonstrate the power of technology when built with empathy, knowledge and a clear sense of purpose. From facilitating instantaneous multilingual conversations to preventing no-shows and overcommunication, these tools are redefining what’s possible in healthcare communication. Whether you’re an industry insider or new to AI advances, it’s hard not to be excited about a world where patients and healthcare staff are empowered by such intelligent, intuitive solutions. Artera’s vision makes one thing clear—AI is not just reshaping healthcare; it’s revolutionizing it.

Want to listen to the full discussion? Check it out here.

The post All About AI: A Conversation with Artera Leaders Guillaume de Zwirek and Ashu Agte appeared first on Artera.

Career Journeys

While all panelists have experienced different career journeys, three significant themes were highlighted collectively throughout the discussion: a strategic selection of mentors and the value of mentorship, the seizing of growth opportunities and the importance of advocating for oneself.

Having been guided by key figures at various stages of her journey, Shillington pointed out the transformative power of selecting the right mentors – people she admired within her department – emphasizing the pivotal role mentorship played in her career. She also shared a compelling story of how she proactively drafted a business plan for a role she believed she could excel in, demonstrating initiative that led her from a Director to a Vice President within a span of just two years.

Oveys shared her serendipitous entry into healthcare and underscored the importance of seizing opportunities for learning and networking. She highlighted how aligning with people in roles she aspired to and advocating for herself helped her transition into product management—a field she passionately pursued despite initial uncertainties about her path.

Mujumdar’s narrative complemented the other panelists by reflecting on both the challenges and opportunities she faced as an individual contributor. She recounted the significant influence of a hands-on team lead early in her career, who not only mentored her but also encouraged her to share her knowledge with the team, thus establishing her leadership and teaching abilities early on.

Strategies for Career Progression

Collectively, the panelists stressed the necessity of being one’s best advocate, recognizing business needs and the importance of self-coaching and seeking feedback for continuous improvement. Their stories illustrated not just the hurdles women face in ascending to leadership roles but also the strategies and mindsets that can facilitate this journey.

The panelists agreed that demonstrating your value – even in a nontraditional way – and developing as many transferable skills as possible is the key to making yourself the “obvious” choice when it comes to progressing your career or securing a promotion.  

In order for career progression to occur, however, there must be a business need, Oveys suggested. At the end of the day, it’s critical to  “make changes that benefit you,” she said. If you take an inventory of where you want to be in 5, 10 and 15 years, try and work backwards from there to see where you’d like to grow – in the timeframe set for yourself. 

Mujumda also urged the audience to perform a critical self-assessment of their career aspirations and how current roles align with these goals. Such introspection, combined with constructive conversations with supportive managers and an expansive network, can pave the way for meaningful career development, she suggested. 

Shillington emphasized the importance of making yourself “visible” – excelling in the role you’re given to get deemed as a high performer and high-potential employee. Additionally, another key quality to aim for is to be “coachable” – this means asking for feedback and identifying gaps in your capabilities to reach for that next level in your career.

Addressing Microaggressions

On tackling microaggressions, the speakers shared personal anecdotes and strategies for addressing subtle biases and inappropriate behaviors. From maintaining professionalism in the face of unwarranted comments to leveraging light – but direct – communication to challenge and educate, their experiences highlighted resilience and the necessity of creating an inclusive workplace culture.

Above all, all three women recommended speaking up, addressing the issue and staying empowered to push back on something if necessary. Even when it can be difficult, take it upon yourself to have a one-on-one conversation, ask for clarification directly or seek out help from a manager to resolve the issue. 

Balancing Family and Work

Parenthood – as with any major life event – can have a significant impact on one’s career and working life.

All three panelists experienced a shift in their career journeys when becoming mothers. They gracefully discussed the reality of balancing parenthood and work, sharing strategies on how to manage time more effectively, set boundaries and more. 

Honing time management and prioritization skills at work, implementing house strategies such as meal prepping, and seeking support systems both within and outside the workplace, were all deemed critical by our speakers. They also noted that taking time off, going for walks and taking time to prioritize oneself is vital to a healthy work-life balance and reducing burnout.

Final Thoughts

Concluding the panel, the leaders shared their reflections on avoiding career stagnation and the importance of seeking new challenges and learning opportunities. They underscored that acknowledging and learning from missteps—whether staying too long in a role or not seizing leadership opportunities early enough—can lead to significant personal growth and professional advancement.

The event also featured a segment on HR resources and career development strategies, where Nicole Ossey, VP of People, provided valuable information on leveraging company resources, such as learning stipends and development plans, to support personal and professional growth.

Overall, this panel not only celebrated the achievements of women leaders at Artera but also offered practical advice and encouragement for others looking to forge their paths within their career. The shared experiences and strategies highlighted the multifaceted journey to leadership, underscoring the importance of mentorship, advocacy, resilience and continuous learning in achieving professional success.

Interested in learning more about Artera’s ERG programs or careers? Learn more here.

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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.

Here, we get to know her a little better with a few quick questions on her background and plans for the future: 

Tell us about your professional background?

I started my healthcare IT career at a startup, after about four years as a collegiate coach and educator. I came into healthcare IT as a receptionist, and five and a half years later was a vice president. 

This company was acquired by HBOC, which was then a powerhouse in the revenue cycle space for health systems as well as an electronic health record (EHR) that was sunsetted. HBOC was later purchased by McKesson, and I was one of the very first people to get that VP role at a corporate level, and that career at McKesson lasted 19 years in a variety of different leadership roles

Can you tell us more about your time at McKesson?

While at McKesson, I was general manager of a clinical consulting business that I grew exponentially over a  seven year period as its leader. I led the customer education group, and led a group of what we called “Enterprise Account Managers” back then, which we call customer success today. 

Where did you go next?

From McKesson, I went to Leidos, which was a great crew. They are a big company as well, with a commercial health division that did a lot of staff augmentation during the wave of implementing meaningful use. There was a division focused on consulting services, that I led that focused on optimization, system selections, and meaningful use consulting. 

I left Leidos after seven years and went to TigerConnect where I was the chief client officer – same role as WELL.   With all of these jobs, I have always been on the  post-sale side of the business. That’s my sweet spot. I love  working with customers. 

Why did you join WELL Health^®?

At TigerConnect, my goal had been to either help the company go public or get acquired, and that had happened earlier in the year. I’m goal-oriented, so achieving that goal and having that experience in my toolkit is pretty cool. I joined WELL because I am ready to do that same sort of thing – help the company grow and potentially go public. 

Is there anything in particular that drew you to WELL Health^®?

WELL has an amazing reputation in the market, and I’ve been following WELL for a couple of years. I’m a really mission-driven person. My mother was a cancer patient with a cardiologist and an oncologist, and they gave two completely different directives to her. It was Fourth of July weekend, and nobody would answer their phone or call her back. 

If she had a tool that allowed her to better communicate with her care team, I believe my mother would still be with us today. Sadly, she passed from an infection after having to make multiple hospital trips due to poor care coordination and communication between her various specialists and her.

That’s why it’s so important for me to make an impact on the patient experience. That’s what my career has been for the past 15 years or more, and I love waking up and having that opportunity to make an impact. 

What keeps customers in the healthcare industry happy? 

First, we need to recognize that healthcare providers are under a lot of stress. They’re facing a lot of demands financially, there are operational challenges, pandemic staffing shortages, regulatory changes, and more. So they have a lot going on. 

I think what they’re looking for is a partnership with their vendors, and they’re looking for an experience where they can have a trusting relationship around the reliability of that vendor. Getting to that trusted advisor space is a wonderful place to be. So the spirit of partnership, I believe, is really important. 

What excites you most about what’s ahead? 

We’ve got a lot of work to do as we grow – people, processes and technology are all going to have to scale. I think that’s the opportunity that’s in place. If our goal is for our customers to have great customer service, we’d better have great customer service and support as well. We need to be on top of that, and there are a lot of opportunities to improve the customer experience with WELL.

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