Organizations can gain perspective and direction with healthcare trends in 2024 by reviewing how core business objectives and industry themes began to form patterns throughout the year. For Authenticx – for artificial intelligence (AI) and healthcare – 2023 defined how technology will impact industry outcomes. Healthcare is nuanced, personal, and competitive. Finding innovative ways to be best positioned in a dynamic industry can maximize opportunities to understand the customer while growing in a demanding market.
Understanding how your organization can leverage these five healthcare trends is essential to business objectives, resource allocation, growing your customer population (limiting churn and retaining them), and strategic action. Healthcare leaders can better respond to the voice of the customer when they are informed by the literal customer voice, backed by industry-specific data and AI. While adopting AI and other innovative technology (like machine learning) can seem overwhelming to maintain, the positives are outweighing the potential negatives – and healthcare is taking notice.
Authenticx leaders have been voicing healthcare trends expected in 2024, and how tech and innovation are driving core, central themes. These five central themes include increasing calls to:
- Combine AI innovation with healthcare
- Reestablish the patient at the center of healthcare
- Personalize and digitize care and medicine
- Identify health disparities and access issues
- Maintain and secure data and personal information
These five trends signify that customers are talking, they want to be heard, and organizations are ready to listen – and to listen with tools and solutions that will meet business outcomes with healthcare customer outcomes.
AI, ML, and Healthcare Come Together
Technological innovation and generative AI boomed in 2023. Across industries, companies began to rapidly apply these tools into their products, services, and experiences. In healthcare, there has been more hesitancy – but that is changing. Healthcare is ready to bring AI and machine learning (ML) into their organizations. According to Healthcare Dive, AI opens the door for healthcare to become more aligned and coordinated, allowing it to grow efficiently among stakeholders and patients alike. And Authenticx has been creating and refining industry-specific AI models since 2018. Over the past year, our leadership has been voicing how AI and innovation are revolutionizing healthcare.
Everything boils down to listening to patients. By systematically analyzing every word and using ML tools, we can gain valuable insights into the patient journey. These algorithms can detect tone and intent, indicating emotions such as frustration and confusion. By effectively using unstructured data, leaders can make informed decisions for actionable insights.
Amy Brown, Founder & CEO
The healthcare system is complex. Ultimately, the industry is being asked to keep an eye on everything, so people are starting to develop best practices. We have data scientists figuring out how to engineer with tools like generative AI and large language models to get the right insights to our clients in healthcare by having the answers we need to synthesize them.
Eric Prugh, Chief Product Officer
Patient-centricity Reestablishes and Realigns
The post-COVID world intentionally placed more emphasis on how the customer experience evolves. And although organizations established more customer-centered approaches, 2023 presented new tools (like AI) that motivated the industry to adopt an integrated experience – connecting the patient experience (care and medicine, treatment and delivery, insurance plans) with the employee experience (retention and burnout, coaching and training, empowerment and purpose). This is summarized simply by Harvard Business Review breaking down how the industry will benefit when its systems meet and are built from customer preferences. Authenticx has placed a spotlight on patient-centricity and our leadership has shared how reestablishing the voice of the customer (and employee) in healthcare is key to driving human-centered solutions with actionable insights.
Conversations hold incredible value. The magic happens when we go beyond just surface-level understanding and truly connect with others. Leaders who focus on their purpose, listen closely to their employees, address their patient needs, and promote connections between teams will begin to develop a healthy commitment to their impact.
Amy Brown, Founder & CEO
Investing in conversational AI supports employees and operations, but customer-centricity goes beyond implementing new technology – it requires a culture change and storytelling. And unstructured data analytics ensures leaders hear from both customers and employees.
Leslie Pagel, Chief Evangelist
Enter the Next Era
We showcase how AI impacts healthcare and how Authenticx is helping drive change in our work with globally recognized healthcare organizations.
Care and Medicine Get Personalized and Digitized
AI allows more organizations to harness and unlock the meaning behind unsolicited feedback data. According to Forbes, personalized healthcare leads to a better use of resources to meet outcomes for both the business and patient. Customers expect their healthcare experience to obtain a level of digital interaction and services (such as telehealth, chatbots, and patient portals). These tools also have the power to give insight into each healthcare sector (payer, provider, life sciences) by streamlining access to patient records, telemonitoring, and encouraging interoperability in each step in the healthcare journey. With industry-specific data analysis and AI, Authenticx is leading the way in being able to provide categorized and real-time insights to organizations to personalize their services from patient conversations.
Companies seeking personalized customer experiences are facing demands to adopt a strategy around both qualitative and quantitative data. Innovative tools, like AI-driven recordings and speech analytics, have the power to capture the patient emotion and sentiment behind words, and use those factors for training needs via acoustic algorithms.
Leslie Pagel, Chief Evangelist
Gleaning insights from millions of unstructured healthcare data points results in better outcomes and more positive experiences for patients, helping healthcare professionals provide a compassionate approach to patient care.
Michael Armstrong, Chief Technology Officer
Health Disparities Uncover Access Issues and Need
Too often, the industry is riddled with issues of complexity. And most of these voices discuss underrepresentation and bias, access to services and health deserts, and difficulties in understanding highly nuanced terminology and rising healthcare costs. The healthcare population is diverse, and their needs mirror the individuality of each patient. Forrester has even explained that health plans are starting to nontraditionally expand to better remedy the affordability and accessibility for patients. Unlike surveys (noting how customers felt about a service, product, or care experience), AI can be leveraged to listen at scale to the full population of customers through conversations (omnichannel – chats, phone calls, emails, etc.). Developing a comprehension of how inclusive and representative data is can help pave the way – for not only how to immediately act to resolve these issues – but also inform organizations how to collect data ethically and responsibly. With AI trained from actual healthcare conversations (like Authenticx), the more likely it is that less bias will show in results that direct decision-making.
The American healthcare system is complex and nuanced, from regulations and requirements to benefits and industry jargon. These present numerous challenges for patients. By embracing cultural competency and seeking to understand the diverse lives of patients, organizations can work towards eliminating unconscious biases and addressing social determinants of health.
Amy Brown, Founder & CEO
AI relies heavily on high-quality datasets to function effectively. Ethically, AI is neutral – however, cognitive biases in data and algorithms can negatively impact patient outcomes and exacerbate health inequalities. To ensure accuracy and reliability, the healthcare industry must prioritize objective datasets and qualified human labelers for training and review of AI models.
Michael Armstrong, Chief Technology Officer
Information Security and Data Privacy Lock Down
Healthcare is unlike other industries that can commonly focus on a singular area of expertise. With the numerous intersections in healthcare, there comes the need for diligent planning and intentional execution of security, privacy, and compliance. More and more, healthcare is being targeted for breaches and information leaks – making the entire customer population vulnerable and susceptible to personal data being stolen, sold, or used illegally. According to DentistryIQ, trust and security are uniquely tied to one another, and healthcare must be vigilant in their measures to protect data and information. The need for healthcare to have their systems heavily safeguarded is clear. As technology is more relied on, the more calls there are for this AI innovation to be regulated, too, and leaders must be prepared to act swiftly.
We must build security into everything we do – AI’s growing demands in healthcare require consistent, yet flexible privacy laws to adapt as AI innovates in the industry. Organizations must protect customer data with an ongoing diligence from vendors securely collecting and storing patient data and developers addressing algorithmic bias. Decision-makers must evaluate the safety and security of all AI tools while regulators create actionable guidelines for healthcare.
Michael Armstrong, Chief Technology Officer
AI’s rapid rise raises regulatory concerns. We must examine who will oversee and create regulatory processes. For healthcare specifically, companies need to ensure ethical and responsible decision-making from leadership to limit biases from developers and vendors and control the training data used in AI models prompted directly by customer conversations.
Eric Prugh, Chief Product Officer
Leverage Industry Trends to Prepare and Strategize
With responsible AI implementation, healthcare organizations can limit bias while creating a more intentional customer-centric approach, placing the experiences of patients and employees at the center of decision-making. This allows employees (agents and doctors to insurers and pharmaceutical manufacturers) to have the resources they need to be attentive and to personalize each experience, limiting burnout and increasing satisfaction metrics. Doubly, customers then can have increased access to healthcare via digital tools (like telemedicine, portals, and virtual appointments), which allow their journey to meet less disruption and create trust through empowerment and ease. Listening at scale to volumes of conversational data with AI is the next era – and it is here already.
Healthcare is ready for innovation. Ready to center the customer experience. Ready to discover personalization and digital tools. Ready to address health disparities facing patient populations. And ready to implement secure and compliant measures to best analyze and collect data while protecting private health information. Join the next era of customer listening in 2024.
About Authenticx
Authenticx is the new standard for humanizing conversational intelligence in healthcare by analyzing millions of customer interactions (like voice, chat, or emails) to surface immersive and intelligent insights at scale. Authenticx was founded to aggregate, analyze and activate customer interaction data to surface transformational opportunities in healthcare. Using existing data that’s likely being stored and ignored in your organization, Authenticx reveals hidden barriers, motivators, and strategies so healthcare organizations can make confident, data-backed decisions. In 2023, Authenticx was ranked No. 349 on the Inc. 5000 recognized as one of America and Indiana’s fastest-growing private companies.
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