How AI is helping to improve patient care in the healthcare industry

This is a repost from CareMinds, which features a podcast with Ashu Agte, the CTO at Artera, about how AI is helping to improve patient care in the healthcare industry. You can view the full podcast here.

We dive into the world of healthcare tech. In this episode, we dissect Artera’s innovative solutions for reducing administrative burdens, enhancing patient experiences, and streamlining communications.

Join us as we explore the challenges of interoperability in a regulated space and discuss the future of healthcare communications with generative AI. Our guest, with a rich background in scaling startups, also shares insights on effective tech team growth and leadership qualities.

Podcast Recap

00:00 – Intro
01:30 – Defining problem space Artera
03:02 – Patient’s perspective
08:13 – Reducing the Admin burden
12:33 – Generative AI in chat interactions
19:51 – Conversational AI trends
22:56 – Companies that exited

[DANIEL] Ashu, you have spent more than 20 years in software development and for the past decades you’ve been exclusively in executive positions at different startup companies. The topic of today’s podcast evolves around the communication which is extremely important when it comes to patient to physician interactions and anything in healthcare. In particular, we would be looking at the aspect of communication that sometimes is overlooked and could cause an additional factor of stress and could amplify negative emotions. You’re currently the CTO of Artera, a company streamlining patient communications by integrating solutions across EHRs and EMRs and the supporting infrastructure. What is the definition of the problem space that Artera is working with?

[ASHU] When Artera started 8 years ago the mission was to make healthcare number one in customer service. If you stack rank NPS scores of customer service the lowest one is government, second lowest is communication, internet and cable providers, and then the third lowest customer satisfaction is in health care. It is very ironic that the word ‘care’ is in healthcare but it’s the third lowest when it comes to patient satisfaction. The company’s mission is to solve two angles of healthcare: the health system and patient experience. Essentially, we want to reduce the administrative burden on the staff at the health system and be able to orchestrate and sequence the communication across one tool and streamline communications to improve that patient experience.

[DANIEL] How does Artera bring value from the patients perspective when they are constantly receiving messages from all sorts of services?

[ASHU] We collected data across 800 of our customers and found that the average number of vendors that send messages to a patient is 11. So imagine 11 different vendors texting a patient from a short code, from bill pay to post discharge to post visit to appointment reminders, and more, at different times of the day. There’s there was a complaint from a patient that received 60 text messages in a day from a number of different vendors. One of the things that Artera decided to focus on is that we would send messages from the hospital’s or the health system’s phone number, not a short code, so they are coming from a number that patients can trust. We built a set of APIs that all these vendors call which does two things: 1) all these messages are now going with the health system’s phone number and 2) each health system has complete visibility into all the messages that are going to the patients. Right now, staff members do not have a unified view of what is being sent to patients, so there is no way to make it a better experience. Consolidating short codes to a traditional 10-digit phone number is the first step into how we are changing the narrative on improving the patient experience. Eventually there has to one consolidated conversation from one phone number which will improve the patient experience a lot because there aren’t multiple threads happening in the conversation. An example we can look at is United. When you fly with United, they do not communicate to a customer across five different short codes. It’s all across one number through customer care. That’s the place we want to start moving into that every health system.

[DANIEL] How does Artera help reduce the administrative burden that comes with having from so many vendors?

[ASHU] There are a lot of manual tasks for the administrative staff. Think of time before Artera with appointment reminders. Staff would would go through tomorrow’s appointments, call every single person to remind them the appointment. The patient might pick up the phone or they might not pick up the phone and staff has to leave a voicemail. It’s time consuming and they are not meaningful conversations. Artera has built a classic workflow system where the staff members can build a workflow specific to appointment reminders. For example, there could be a 7-day, 3-day, and 1-day reminder flows where it text message goes out 7, 3, and 1 days before to remind the patient of the appointment. The staff doesn’t even have to pick up the phone, they can communicate over text, voice, or email, based on patient preferences, and Artera will route that traffic. Ultimately, we partner with our customers so that any type of workflow within a patient’s interaction with healthcare teams can be designed and created. These automated workflows have reduced tons and tons of administrative manual.

[DANIEL] Can you touch base on the current state of generative AI and its amazing capabilities of not only processing but generating content specifically related to the patient communications?

[ASHU] What is a little more complex and nuanced about healthcare tech is all the regulations, like customer consents, data privacy, and HIPPA. We have to navigate some of the data compliance issues also with AI machine learning models and data science strategies. We take huge pride in making sure our number one thing is that we we honor customer consents and HIPPA regulations. When I think about ai.ml by NeevCloud | GenAI Inference Platform strategy it has to be twofold: there is a generative AI strategy like commodity APIs (think OpenAI) and second is metadata and how they come up with their own ML models. In Artera’s world, generative AI comes in handy. For example, we have 109 languages that we support in communication and before generative AI, we were using Google translate. We learned that generative AI has a better algorithm on emulating conversations so we are trying to explore is generative AI a better tool over just a simple Google translate API that we get from Google. Another area we are looking at using generative AI to help summarize all the conversations that take place between patients and put it as metadata. We can feed that conversation to the APIs and get a summary back which saves a ton of time for staff to not go through each individual message. What will be really interesting is generative AI will create a sentiment from a patient’s conversations and create a profile based on their preferences. For example, genAI can identify a patient’s appointment time preference is between 4 to 5PM on Thursdays because the last 20 appointments were all in that timeframe. We can now present that as an option to the patient like “you prefer Thursdays between 4 and 5 and there’s an open appointment 2 weeks from now on Thursday between 4 and 5. This allows healthcare providers to understand their patients from a 360 degree point of view. Building these models is where I think the investment needs to go so that we can optimize the whole engine for each patient.

[DANIEL] What do you see are some of the conversational AI trends to streamline communications?

[ASHU] I would say that optimizing the workflows with learning models on what’s the best outcome for the patient is going to actually help a lot because the workflow trees can get overly complex. If patient responds with this, create this tree. If patient says yes, create this, if she says no, create this. Having the dynamic ability to build those trees and build those flows to optimize these patient experiences will be very helpful. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that there is a an appointment coming for a patient and there is a 7-day appointment reminder message that goes out. The model knows that over the last two years this patient has missed 50% of their appointments without communicating or responding back. Should the model follow their standard 7-day, 3-day, 1-day reminder model or knowing there is a 50/50 chance this person is going to forget and not show up to the appointment that it should do something else? I think dynamic workflows is where the biggest impact is going to be so we can use patient history and preferences to create personalization that I was talking about and I think that is where the key is now.

[DANIEL] What are the common denominator in terms of success factors that takes a startup to an exit stage in your opinion?

[ASHU] I’ll flip this around and talk about what I look for so that I know the company has a good foundation to go to that stage. I look for three things. The first thing is the mission and the vision – is there enough clarity on why the company exists and what problem they are trying the solve? The second thing is, does the leadership team have the drive and the grit? In startups, you have to be resilient because you have to go through a lot of changes. If I see the leadership teams have it, then the rest of the organization has it as well. I say this a lot, that most of the times organizations teams take the personality of the leader directly or indirectly in some way. The last one is is the company culture. I fundamentally believe that having a stellar culture is extremely important for any company to succeed because it’s the glue that holds the company together. Nobody sees it and it’s taken for granted. It’s a quality without a name, it’s a membrane that connects every single thing because in those situations we know how people are behaving without us being there, we know how the decisions get made because that’s the way the culture is of a company, we know that people are going to own what they say deliver what they do, etc. Having great culture is what pulls people out of rollercoasters and dysfunctions. The culture comes and saves the day to help navigate murky waters. The culture helps to solve problems when we have to work with each other. Every startup I worked at that went through an exist had these things in common.

[DANIEL] What would be your top three advice for somebody who’s considering to progress their career in a similar fashion?

[ASHU] The first one is having an empathetic leadership mindset. An example to illustrate is that I could be in a situation where there is a couple of leaders are having issues with each other. I have one choice to let them vent, option 2 is get them in a room and have a conversation, option 3 is I have individual conversations with each of them separately, and option 4 is I make a decision for them. Having empathy is that I will go through these four options in my head and evaluate them all. I’m going inside my toolbox to find what is the best tool for this particular situation. This is also called situational leadership style. The second one is servant leadership, which is the mindset of I’m here for this team and these individuals and these leaders so they are successful. If it’s the reverse mindset, it becomes a top-down organization and in my experience, especially in the engineering world, it really doesn’t work that great. “I’m here for them, they are not here for me” creates a dramatic difference in every single decision the engineering leader makes. That leads to the third advice which is any engineering organization has to be empowered. There has to be structures in place where there are some high level rules of the game. Like soccer and football, there are rules to the game but every team plays it differently and they have enough freedom within those rules to strategize and figure out how to optimize. So being able to let teams come up with their own process creates an empowered culture where it is 80% bottoms up and 20% top down.

[DANIEL] What things have worked within the organizations that you worked at that helps with scaling?

[ASHU] The first thing I would say is it’s the culture of growth. I don’t specifically mean that it’s always about promotions and people climbing into titles. Growth is that someone has to be ability to keep trying, keep learning new things, figuring out which doors are closed, fail early fail fast right so table stake things are to make sure the organization has career ladders and job profile and regular career conversations. Growth could be that someone is a backend engineer and realized they don’t want to be a front-end engineer, or a backend engineer wants to become an AIML engineer, or someone brings a new strategy on how we can test our product. These are all growth aspects within the organization so I I feel like that continuous growth mindset and organization collectively is becoming better every day just a little by little by little is extremely important. The second one is again going back to the concept of empowerment. At Artera, we created triad model so our team of engineers work closely with a triad consisting of an engineering manager, a product manager, and a product designer. This small group creates thriw own road map with deliverables. I fundamentally believe in this triad model of collaboration is I have seen a lot of schisms and divides between product and engineering teams, which have held companies back because they are not making decisions together. The last thing is purposeful Innovation. A lot of organizations become a feature factory: new ideas are not bubbling up within the organization on how to creatively look at problem solving because engineers gets the requirements just build with them. There is no innovation because just giving a specification and being asked to implement it does not have room for creativity. We want to tell the teams that here’s a problem, you decide how to go and solve it as part of the discovery process and interviewing customers.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you can view another podcast by Ashu here.

About Artera:

*Artera is a SaaS digital health leader redefining patient communications. Artera is trusted by 800+ healthcare systems and federal agencies to facilitate approximately 2.2 billion messages annually, reaching 100+ million patients. The Artera platform integrates across a healthcare organization’s tech stack, EHRs and third-party vendors to unify, simplify and orchestrate digital communications into the patient’s preferred channel (texting, email,  IVR, and webchat), in 109+ languages. The Artera impact: more efficient staff, more profitable organizations and a more harmonious patient experience.*

Founded in 2015, Artera is based in Santa Barbara, California and has been named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company (2021, 2022, 2023), and ranked on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for four consecutive years. Artera is a two-time Best in KLAS winner in Patient Outreach.

For more information, visit www.artera.io.

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.