Healthcare Industry Insights Featuring Authenticx Voices in 2023

Read healthcare industry insights from Authenticx leaders.

Health IT Answers | More to say on AI in Healthcare in 2024

Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown contributed commentary in Health IT Answers on the topic of using AI to listen at scale to the actual voice of the customer.

Healthcare help isn’t about the chatbots
We’ve listened to over 200 million customer conversations this year. U.S. healthcare customers — whether Medicaid, Medicare, commercial or private — are not asking for more chatbots. Those features don’t equate to CX. Customers are asking for their questions to be answered, for their promises of return phone calls to be returned and for CX technology to work effectively so they don’t miss a medication dose. It isn’t that we don’t have a way to diagnose the problem correctly, we do — through conversations and the unstructured data they generate. Leveraging AI to analyze this unstructured data at scale will give leaders better insight into what’s actually happening in their customers’ experiences.

Our understanding of the problem is incomplete when we don’t factor in the literal voices of customers. Unstructured data was never accessible before, but it’s accessible now — in a way people can understand — with new technology and AI adoption.

Health IT Answers | Will AI Continue to Demand All the Attention in 2024?

Authenticx CPO Eric Prugh contributed commentary in Health IT Answers on the topics of AI models, the future of AI in healthcare, and the ethics of AI.

Implications of AI for healthcare in 2024 and beyond
It’s a foregone conclusion that AI will be adopted for the benefit of healthcare. We’ve seen healthy skepticism in specific healthcare sectors because of AI’s history, but now we’re seeing equally healthy optimism in people looking to solve complex problems. AI isn’t a silver bullet, and it won’t do people’s jobs for you, but it’s crucial to enable humans behind the healthcare system to be better at what they do, better serve patient experiences and achieve better patient outcomes.

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, has shown people what’s possible and given AI the exposure it needed to overcome the hurdle of adoption in healthcare. Concerns remain about how the models are trained and how AI reaches conclusions that we must be careful of. Adoption of AI is coming from more than the CIO now — like innovation leads pushing for AI as a part of their regular programs. We’re seeing use cases codified outside the IT department. There are plenty of use cases that AI solves that have actual, real utility to the organization, which is a net positive. Both feasibility and value are there.”

The ethics of AI
It’s important for those of us who build AI to take ethics into consideration. We need to install the guardrails to ensure an equitable process for training new models, defined processes for how we iterate and documentation for how we process feedback. We’re in a state of formation and pioneering what things should look like — and it’s a race. There’s always potential for bad things to happen when you’re moving fast, so collectively we need guidance in specific areas for AI that will help steer future developments. That won’t come to fruition in 2024, but we’ll see more norming and well-formed use cases and ideas.

MyCustomer | Deliver Better CX with Conversational Intelligence

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed an article in MyCustomer on the topics of the future of AI, CX innovation via data-backed storytelling and how leaders can keep a pulse on customer needs in 2024.

Clare Muscutt, founder and CEO of Women in CX, says, “Building a great customer experience doesn’t happen by accident, it happens by design.”

Most consumers would agree, with 80% indicating that customer experience is as essential as a company’s product or service.

But if the metrics aren’t tracking and the surveys aren’t garnering responses, how do teams know what strong CX actually means for their customers? How can companies design an ideal customer experience?

Humans use spoken conversations, texts and recorded voices to communicate every day. These unstructured and unsolicited data sources provide valuable and highly contextual insights that survey programs don’t reveal.

These insights influence various aspects of an organisation’s products, services, processes, technologies and people.

Healthcare Brew | Health tech companies predict AI trends for 2024

Authenticx CPO Eric Prugh contributed commentary in Healthcare Brew on the topics of AI models, the future of AI, healthcare complexities, and AI-focused job creation.

There’s so much complexity to the healthcare system, and ultimately, what you’re asking everyone in the industry to do is to keep tabs on everything—on all the processes, on all the controls, on all the compliance needs, on all the sorts of security and privacy things that are factored into that.

We have data scientists that are trying to figure out how to engineer how they work with tools like GPT or large language models—which are really a broad category—to get the answers that we need to synthesize the right insights to our clients in healthcare. I’m starting to see people trying to develop best practices, and that’s going to turn into a whole set of careers.

Healthcare Business Today | Conversational AI: Helping Healthcare Organizations Speak The Language Of Care

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed an article in Healthcare Business Today on the topic of conversational AI and listening at scale.

Author Yehuda Berg said, “Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble.” Words ease or escalate a situation, bringing clarity — or confusion.

When spoken with little thought, words lose their ability to offer comfort, empathy or support.

In healthcare, words matter. They matter a lot. And now, healthcare organizations can listen to millions of customer conversations at scale via artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This ability has elevated conversational AI’s role as a valuable tool for gathering business intelligence about the organization’s customers — and actively helping healthcare choose its words wisely.

Health IT Answers | Making Better Business Decisions by Listening to Your Customers

Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown contributed an article in Health IT Answers on the topic of the Eddy Effect and listening at scale. See this article in HealthcareNOWradio.com’s monthly round-up.

Much of the world has evolved to support people who like to figure things out for themselves. We’ve got YouTube tutorials on thousands of topics and the internet for everything else. Plenty of B2B companies offer their clients DIY options through customer portals and more. But in the complex healthcare world, DIY often won’t suffice.

When people attempt to navigate this industry, they can encounter issues as soon as they call for assistance. Welcome to the Eddy Effect™ — a seemingly endless loop of obstacles customers can’t escape. Customers become stuck in this loop every day, negatively impacting their experience, trust in the business and, ultimately, the bottom line.

To increase their revenue, maintain customer loyalty, improve customer retention and make stronger, customer-centric business decisions, healthcare organizations must listen to their customers’ conversations occurring in their contact centers. Why? Because these conversations contain the most relevant and potent insight on customer perceptions of your business.

MyCustomer | Make Better Business Decisions by Listening to Your Customers

Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown contributed an article in MyCustomer on the topic of the Eddy Effect.

Amy Brown provides real-life examples of how AI-powered analysis of customer conversations can transform healthcare businesses into being more patient-centric.

Many customers contact their healthcare or insurance provider when they have a problem. 

We’ve all been there, right? You have a question about your insurance claims statement, so you call the company, but the voice prompt has changed, and you can’t get to the person who can answer your question. Maybe you have time to stay on the line and figure it out. Maybe you give up, figuring you’ll try again later — or another day. Regardless, you didn’t get the answer you needed.

Enter the Eddy Effect™, which happens when an obstacle disrupts a customer’s expected or desired experience. And 60% of these disruptions are attributed to status check calls on claims and general treatment protocols from a healthcare enterprise. This phenomenon not only negatively impacts callers but the business as well because unresolved obstacles can impact business outcomes.

Managed Healthcare Executive | The Power of Words: AI Helps Healthcare Professionals Choose Their Words Wisely

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed an article in Diginomica on the topic of conversational AI and the voice of the customer.

Words hold power. They can escalate or ease a situation. They can bring joy or pain, clarity or confusion. Words affect customer perceptions.

Consider this scenario: A patient worried about an emergent health issue calls their provider. The call center agent says, “There’s nothing we can do, so we’ll have to refer you on.”

Wouldn’t it be so much better — and ease a patient’s worry — if the response instead was, “If your primary care can’t assist, we’ll connect you to a provider specializing in treating your area of concern.”

Granted, many factors contribute to the disparity in agent responses.

But one tool exists to help agents choose their words wisely: conversational AI (artificial intelligence).

Diginomica | Beyond Sentiment Analysis – Authenticx revivifies millions of customer interactions

Authenticx leaders – Founder & CEO Amy Brown, CTO Michael Armstrong, and Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel – contributed commentary via interviews with author Neil Raden in Diginomica on the topic of conversational AI and sentiment analysis. See Authenticx mentioned in the Diginomica weekly round-up article here,

Authenticx (or, Authenticx.com) is an Indianapolis-based company founded in 2018 dedicated to improving how healthcare companies engage with customers.

“Listening at Scale” provides the ability to “exponentially listen with confidence, aggregate topics, themes, and patterns from millions of conversations to drive relevant and impactful macro insights that enhance business outcomes and customer support.”

Using their proprietary machine learning and NLP algorithms, including, remarkably, labeling the data themselves, they go beyond inferencing and create tableaus, such as short videos and compelling storytelling of their findings and recommendations for presentation.

I spoke with Leslie Pagel, Chief Evangelist at Authenticx, Michael Armstrong, CTO, and founder and CEO, Amy Brown. Their comments and insights were compelling. Three topics interested me: Listening at scale, The Eddy Effect, and Moments.

“I was moved by their mission. Clearly, their business model proposes to save healthcare companies money and to improve their customer experience, but in doing so, they intend to make interaction a more pleasant and useful experience for all of us.”

Neil Raden, contributing author, mathematician, and consultant

InformationWeek | Should You Feel Good About Emotion AI?

Authenticx CTO Michael Armstrong contributed commentary in InformationWeek on the topic of emotion AI.

As artificial intelligence learns to interpret and respond to human emotions, IT leaders should begin contemplating how emotion AI could play a critical role in their enterprises and markets.

Despite its name, emotion AI doesn’t refer to an angsty computer. It’s actually the tag applied to a form of AI that, through training and machine learning, is able to analyze, understand, and perhaps even replicate human emotions, says Michael Armstrong, CTO at conversational intelligence healthcare developer Authenticx …

Emotion AI has multiple possible applications, particularly in customer service. “It can, for example, recognize the difference between an angry or an excited customer call, and route calls to the agent best equipped to address a caller’s concerns,” Armstrong says. The technology can also analyze comparable speech patterns to offer insights in real-time, including recommendations on how to handle a particular customer call. “It’s already used to detect insurance fraud, with AI using voice analysis to help detect whether someone calling to file a claim is lying.”

Healthcare IT Today | Emerging Technologies in Healthcare IT and Their Regulatory Considerations

Authenticx Chief Product Officer Eric Prugh contributed commentary in Healthcare IT Today on the topic of AI regulation and privacy.

There’s a general concern about AI because of how quickly its popularity has accelerated. Many of the currently trending AI models are trained on billions of parameters. Nobody really knows the origin of those datasets, so people are rightfully worried. There’s not been a ton of transparency from big AI providers on what information or data has even been used to train the models, and we are just getting to a place where feedback and improvements to retrain models in tools like ChatGPT can be selective and can honor specific security and privacy requirements.

We will need to closely examine what AI regulation might look like — and who will be responsible for creating and overseeing the regulatory processes. We can hypothesize about the potential issues resulting from healthcare organizations adopting and implementing AI into their processes, especially when it comes to privacy. As stakeholders within the healthcare ecosystem, we must be very mindful of how we use AI to help organizations gather the data and insights they need without mismanaging patients’ personal health information or sacrificing their privacy rights.

The key factors to consider as we look at regulation for AI—specifically for healthcare—are how AI companies maintain a responsible and ethical lens on recommendations and decisions, how they limit biases, the scope in which AI can be used, and how they control data being used to train and train models.

MyCustomer | Humans and Artificial Intelligence in Harmony for Healthcare

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed an article in MyCustomer on the topic of AI and humans.

Navigating healthcare can be a scary proposition. But by weaving together artificial intelligence (AI) and human interaction, healthcare organisations can achieve customer-centricity.

When humans work collaboratively with AI and are included in the machine learning (ML) loop, organisations can effectively hear the voice of the customer (VOC), elevate patient care, foster employee positivity and deliver a higher-quality customer experience.

Pairing AI with humans creates a win-win-win situation for employees, customers and the business.

Silicon Republic | Organizations Must Be Transparent About Data Collection

Authenticx CTO Michael Armstrong contributed an interview in Silicon Republic on the topic of data security and privacy in AI.

With extensive experience in engineering, data architecture, product development and business intelligence, Armstrong leads the company’s product engineering, infrastructure and AI R&D teams. He also frequently writes about AI in healthcare.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing in the current IT landscape and how are you addressing them?
The current IT landscape has multiple challenges we’re working to address. The first is data security and privacy, which are non-negotiable. Everything we design and build is encrypted and secure.

Another challenge we face is how to bridge the gap between users and AI, especially its last mile where we take neat toys and make them useable and practical. Our goal is always to develop and launch products designed to make customers’, patients’ and employees’ lives better.

Storing and computing at scale can be incredibly difficult. We hear a lot of talk about big data, but you don’t get there until you include unstructured data, which comprises about 80pc of big data. Unstructured data is where the richness lives, but it’s also the most difficult to mine, analyse and harness for insights.

TalentCulture | Leaders: Do You Connect Employees With Their Noble Purpose?

Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown contributed an article in TalentCulture on the topic of employee culture and noble purpose.

When employees feel disconnected from their jobs — or their work doesn’t bring a sense of purpose to their lives — they’re more likely to quit. Unfortunately, this is happening all around lately. Troubling signs like productivity theater and resenteeism are flooding the work zone. Clearly, many employees are struggling to connect their organization’s purpose with their own.

According to McKinsey, 70% of employees find a sense of relevance through work. This doesn’t mean people expect their job to define them 100%. But when personal and business purposes align, everyone benefits. Workforce engagement and loyalty tend to improve significantly. As a result, employees become more willing to advocate for their employer and recommend prospective applicants.

Why should leaders care? Because when you create a culture of psychological safety and compassion, you empower people to be authentic at work. This, in turn, drives commitment, satisfaction, and team performance.

insideBIGDATA | Evolution of Conversational Intelligence in Healthcare

Authenticx CTO Michael Armstrong contributed an article in insideBIGDATA on the topic of data analysis and conversational intelligence.

Healthcare’s adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has accelerated quickly. Data analytics has transformed the industry with insights from the information it gathers influencing how medical researchers, physicians, policy advocates and patients operate within the system. Data gleaned from AI improves healthcare in many areas, including:

• How organizations conduct medical studies.
• Patients’ understanding of the costs of health insurance and medical tests.
• Physicians’ abilities to make preventative recommendations to patients.

Organizations also leverage this data to understand patient pain points, identify where call center agents need more training, and uncover insights from customer experience and marketing.

But as the scope of data increases (with over 200 zettabytes of data in cloud storage worldwide by 2025), healthcare organizations will need more efficient methods to collect, evaluate and analyze it to gain insights for informing strategic decision-making.

insideBIGDATA | AI is Transforming Healthcare, But We Can’t Forget the Human Element

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed commentary in insideBIGDATA on the topic of AI and humans.

In the 21st-century digital world, the healthcare industry and its customers expect seamless, personalized and efficient interactions. But the healthcare journey is long and complex, involving multiple touchpoints with different departments and providers, creating barriers for customers to get the information they need. The growth of contact centers, chatbots, electronic health records (EHRs), social media and other factors have significantly increased the volume of communication within this industry, making it difficult for organizations to keep pace and meet patient expectations for ease and speed.

The vast amount of unstructured data healthcare organizations generate makes it virtually impossible for healthcare leaders to hear and resolve customer pain points. Industry-specific artificial intelligence (AI) is the solution. AI solutions built specifically for healthcare allow healthcare leaders to harness a source of data generated by customer interactions. That data can then be organized for purposes of listening to the patient journey, delivering improved patient outcomes and strengthening customer loyalty. Integrating AI into healthcare isn’t about replacing humans with machines but enabling and empowering human decisions. Complementing humans with machine support — and vice versa — is the core AI differentiator.

Dataversity | Domain-Specific AI Models Render Conversational AI More Effective

Authenticx CTO Michael Armstrong contributed an article in Dataversity on the topic of AI and conversational intelligence.

According to Gartner, 80% of executives believe organizations can apply AI to any business decision. However, an AI-based decision is only as effective as the training data on which the AI model is built. The most effective, advanced solutions focus on domain-specific AI and ensure training data used in AI models is highly accurate and reliable. Humans perform or supervise a labeling and tagging process to generate the training data. The more accurately a qualified human labeler tags and creates training data, the more effective and reliable the model.

Particularly important to conversational AI is the source of its training data and the data source’s relevance to the desired use case. AI models trained on non-industry-specific or publicly available data sources – like AI for all and open source – won’t (and can’t) consider the intent or meaning behind words used in different industries.

Many industries rely on AI models trained in the manner described above. Too many nuances become lost, resulting in: 

• Inaccurate, off-base interpretations of conversations’ meaning. 
• A lack of trust in the models to accurately predict and present reality. 
• User disengagement – and mistrust in AI’s ability to solve real issues. 

HIT Consultant | Why Today’s Patient Surveys Are Not Working for Healthcare

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed an article in HIT Consultant on the topic of patient surveys and conversational intelligence.

As more healthcare organizations prioritize and embrace a customer-centered care model, they’ve recognized the critical need to listen to — and really hear — their healthcare customers. Improving the quality of care requires accurate measurement and analysis of patient experiences. But while most organizations rely on Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT), these patient surveys miss valuable customer information and insights.

Healthcare providers have turned to conversational intelligence (CI) to gain a more comprehensive understanding of customer experience (CX). These tools make it easier to collect and analyze vast sums of data. In an industry where delivering positive CX is vital, the best insights on meeting customer expectations come from the customers themselves in the form of conversations, not patient surveys. And the best way to obtain, analyze and gain insights from conversations? Conversational intelligence.

Healthcare IT Today | RCM: Fixing the Old and Adjusting to the New

Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown contributed commentary with Healthcare IT Today on the topic of revenue cycle management (RCM).

The good news is that improving patient experience often has a compounding positive impact on improving cash flow and more efficient processes—thankfully, these business objectives are not mutually exclusive. The first step is to understand with a high degree of confidence the current customer experience and the root causes of negative experiences as well as the root causes of inefficient processes and barriers to cash flow. The best way to increase confidence is to collect statistically relevant data that is inclusive of leading indicators. We find that conversational data (call center conversations, including voice, text, chat, patient portal messages) is one of the best sources for leading indicators. It also provides a wealth of context that can be used to determine root cause analysis. For revenue cycle clients, listening to conversational data sources has been able to shed a light on the root causes of:

• Patient confusion on bills driving up inbound call volume
• User challenges with payment portals creating hurdles for customers trying to make payments
• Agent confusion and inconsistency in delivering instructions for payment or payment plans

MyCustomer | Looking Beyond NPS and CSAT Scores for Deeper Customer Insights

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed in an interview with Healthcare Business Today on the topic of NPS surveys and conversational intelligence.

As healthcare organisations continue focusing on and prioritising customer-centred care, measuring customer experiences (CX) has taken centre stage in re-analysing how historical metrics help improve quality of care.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys served a purpose five years ago, when the technology didn’t exist to harness the valuable insights that are shared when customers interact with a business. But today, survey-based metrics lack the credibility and confidence that the business needs to fund the CX strategy.

To rebuild confidence, healthcare organisations are turning to conversational intelligence for a more comprehensive understanding of customer experiences.

Healthcare Business Today | The Cost Of Missing Substantial Opportunities To Improve Healthcare CX

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed in an interview with Healthcare Business Today on the topic of NPS surveys and CX innovation.

Nearly every industry relies on Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to gather insights into customers’ feelings. Companies use this customer satisfaction metric, which began to enter boardroom conversations after the 2006 publication of The Ultimate Question.

NPS has served many industries well, with leaders depending on the metrics to:

• Learn about their customers, patients and employees’ perceptions of their experiences and the healthcare brand.
• Evaluate call center agents’ performances.
• Manage cross-departmental communications.
• Obtain a loyalty snapshot of the organization, individual services and even specific medications.

But in an industry recognizing its need to become more patient- and customer-centric, NPS metrics fall short. To engage more deeply with their customers, healthcare organizations must improve the efficiency of high-frequency touchpoints, including digital and human interactions. NPS surveys weren’t designed to identify customer pain points with the same granularity as the data generated from a conversation between the patient and the healthcare entity. 

For the healthcare industry to continue its evolution and provide the positive CX its patients expect, it requires more effective, innovative metrics to evaluate and gain insight from CX data.

pharmaphorum | Eliminating Disruption with Eddy Effect Metric Elevates CX

Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown contributed an article in pharmaphorum on the topic of the Eddy Effect.

Between ongoing drug shortages, navigating complex insurance benefits, understanding the confusing language of resources, and more, numerous hurdles slow — and even prevent — a patient’s access to medication.

Too many patients struggle to navigate pharmacy processes to get information and, ultimately, the medication they need. Understanding the Eddy Effect — a continuous loop of disruptions within the patient experience that stalls the preferred outcome — can help streamline this process and significantly reduce customer frustration, while improving their access to medicine.

And the critical strategy for improving the customer journey and helping patients access medication and information they need smoothly, efficiently, and with as little stress as possible? Listening.

Insights hidden in customer conversations help improve interactions between customers and agents, and the right technology can aggregate this information to understand precisely where people consistently experience friction. With AI-driven tools to gather and analyse data, organisations can identify disruptions, improve patient interactions, and reduce barriers to patient access to medication.

Drug Development & Delivery | How Conversational Data & Listening at Scale Improve Clinical Recruitment

Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown contributed an article in Drug Development & Delivery on the topic of listening at scale.

It’s no secret clinical trials have a recruitment problem. Re­search shows 85% of trials fail to retain enough patients. Recent news revealed COVID trials lacked diversity and female repre­sentation — fewer POC were recruited, and it’s common for women to be underrepresented in trials because of the potential risk to their fertility or impacts on future pregnancy.

Recruiting more diverse clinical trial participants shouldn’t be a secret — nor is it a problem to ignore. Without representation from all populations, researchers fail to gather the data needed to fully understand the effects of the drugs they’re developing.

One of the most effective ways to gather valuable, relevant, and useful information from a clinical trial is by listening to con­versations at scale. This approach isn’t just valuable for under­standing participants’ mindsets. It also helps researchers understand the psychosocial factors influencing and affecting a specific patient population.

Organized conversational data can answer questions about patient frustrations and fears and uncover transportation chal­lenges; caregiver, familial, and societal factors; and other social determinants of health (SDOH) impacting patients’ participation in a trial.

Dataversity | The Value of Data Analytics in the Health Care Industry

Authenticx CTO Michael Armstrong contributed an article in Dataversity on the topic of data analysis.

While the health care industry has lagged a bit behind other industries in adopting artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) – and rightfully so, considering very valid security and safety concerns – its leaders have undergone a mindset shift, recognizing the value of technological innovations and data analytics.

Since its implementation, data analytics has completely transformed health care, influencing how organizations do their jobs and provide care – and changing how researchers, policy advocates, and patients operate within the system. This data has improved health care delivery in myriad ways, informing the execution of medical studies, improving patient understanding of health insurance and medical test costs, and guiding physicians in their preventative recommendations.

Health care leaders have found another valuable application for this data:

• Understanding patient pain points along their health care journey
• Identifying training needs for call center agents
• Uncovering insights from customer experiences (CX) and marketing initiatives

Contact Center Pipeline | Data Analytics: The Rx for CX

Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown contributed an article in Contact Center Pipeline on the topic of data analysis.

Challenges, opportunities in using data analytics.

Of all the lines of business contact centers serve, healthcare is arguably the most important, for peoples’ lives depend on it, but also at the same time challenges exist. About a quarter of healthcare customers become stuck along their journeys daily, according to our Customer Voices Report.

Many reasons contribute to such a high rate of disruption. The American healthcare system, with its providers, insurers, and pharmaceutical verticals, is quite complex. Each has its nuances, regulatory requirements, and roles.

But what these participants share is the responsibility of interacting with customers every day — hundreds of millions of them — who need their help.

When customers must navigate multiple systems and different branches within the healthcare system, they may find themselves trapped by the Eddy Effect — one issue leads to another issue which leads to another issue.

Customer Experience Magazine | Creating and Measuring Value of Service: The Healthcare Industry Perspective with Leslie Pagel

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed in an interview with Customer Experience Magazine on the topic of CX innovation.

The healthcare industry across the world has entered an era of vulnerability. We are facing staff shortages, a cost of living crisis, and general anxiety among workers and patients. Maintaining a high standard of service has become increasingly challenging.

However, there is excitement regarding advanced technology integration in healthcare. Healthcare providers across the world now have a chance to integrate conversational AI solutions and level up the game when gathering and analysing patient feedback.

This further means that legacy systems of applying surveys to identify frictions have to be substituted with the innovation technology. But how ready is the healthcare industry for this transition? Our team talked about it to Leslie Pagel, Chief Evangelist Officer at Authenticx.

Applied Clinical Trials | Listening at Scale and Leveraging Conversational Data to Improve Clinical Recruitment

Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown contributed an article in Applied Clinical Trials on the topic of listening at scale.

How can managers ensure their clinical trial participants represent future patients?

Clinical trials have a recruitment problem. More than two-thirds don’t meet original patient enrollment for a specific trial—and 85% of trials don’t retain enough patients. With clinical trials accounting for almost 40% of the US pharma budget, totaling about $7B each year—and the cost of patient recruitment at nearly $1.9B or 40%—recruitment is a weak link.

One of the biggest hurdles project managers face—especially when they fail to attract enough participants—is ensuring their clinical trial participants represent the patients their drugs are designed to help.

So how do life science companies solve this complex challenge? They can start by listening to conversations at scale during the recruitment process. This approach offers an effective strategy for gathering relevant and useful information to understand participants’ mindsets and any psychosocial factors affecting or influencing specific populations.

Fast Company | Will you lose your job to AI and tech like ChatGPT?

Authenticx CTO Michael Armstrong was quoted in an article in Fast Company on the topic of AI.

“In the near term, AI is more likely to change the nature of jobs versus fully replacing them…A software engineer will spend less time writing code and more time understanding the business problem they want to address with their software. It will likely open the door for people with differing skill sets to excel.”

Michael Armstrong, Authenticx CTO

HIT Consultant | Bringing The Customer Voice to Life in Healthcare

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed an article in HIT Consultant on the topic of the voice of the customer.

Voice is a powerful tool. The average person speaks about 7,000 words daily (although anyone who’s spent time around young children knows that estimate is probably low). Yet amid healthcare organizations building a more customer-centric approach to customer experience (CX), many have not included a key piece of the CX puzzle: analyzing the voice of the customer.

The value of unstructured data

Healthcare organizations use a variety of existing touchpoints to connect with their customers. Surveys gather customer feedback, while word clouds provide a way to visualize information, but structured data from these sources alone doesn’t paint a complete picture of the customer experience.

Unstructured sources, such as conversations with customers, allow organizations to access unsolicited feedback and may include:

• Inbound calls to contact centers
• Chatbot and SMS messages
• Emails, online messaging and social media interactions

GDS Healthcare Summit 2023 | Listening at Scale: A Renewable Source of Insights to Drive Business Outcomes

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel presented at the GDS Healthcare Suumit on the topic of listening at scale for patient-centricity.

Join the virtual discussion on how strategic decision-making is being powered by tech innovation. This enables teams to listen at scale, and as a result, is changing how we understand customer emotions and behaviors to drive business outcomes.

Dataversity | Is Data the Achilles Heel of AI?

Authenticx Founder & CEO Amy Brown contributed an article in Dataversity on the topic of AI and dark data.

As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Add this 21st-century irrefutable fact: The world can’t live without data. With its numbers, characters, facts, and statistics – the operations performed, stored, and analyzed – data has become an irreplaceable facet of daily life. 

We use data to identify strengths and weaknesses. It helps businesses establish baselines, benchmarks, and goals to drive growth. It empowers people to make informed decisions, formulate strategies, and solve complex problems. And it enables leadership to understand behavior and address needs.

But organizations face a serious challenge: data silos. A Forrester study showed that cross-organizational, external, and internal data silos slowed machine learning (ML) deployments and outcomes, with 38% of respondents agreeing they needed to break down data silos across the organization and partners.

Enter artificial intelligence (AI), offering potential insights and opportunities across all industries, including health care – and the power to desilo data. But organizations often find themselves caught up in the idea of deploying AI but fail to take advantage of it. 

Ancients believed the legendary Achilles was immortal. Yet one exposed part of his ankle left the mighty warrior vulnerable in battle. Is AI similarly vulnerable, or can organizations protect themselves from the challenges posed by valuable untapped data? 

Health IT Answers | The Ethical Implications of AI and Data in Healthcare

Authenticx CTO Michael Armstrong contributed an article in Health IT Answers on the topic of AI.

From patient communication to cancer detection, artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) role across healthcare is becoming increasingly more prominent. Although its implementation increases the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare, AI also raises patient privacy concerns. In fact, healthcare breaches were at an all-time high in 2021, affecting 45 million people, according to Critical Insights’ 2022 Healthcare Data Breach Report. To safeguard patient information and communications, healthcare organizations must build a foundation of trust, compliance and transparency.

AI’s relationship to data

Global data breaches have reinvigorated the focus on healthcare data’s security and privacy risks as has the interest in current protections in place. With AI-powered products helping to facilitate the exchange of medical information between patients and medical team members, healthcare organizations must take all steps to protect individual information and privacy.

Federal and state regulations and laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) govern the data that healthcare organizations collect and use. However, HIPAA has its shortcomings because the legislation originated well before AI and ML’s wider implementation.

CX Scoop | It’s Time to Reimagine Customer Experience

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed an article in the CX Scoop on the topic of CX innovation.

Business has evolved dramatically over the past two decades, yet somehow customer and patient experience (CX and PX) are stuck using outdated methods and approaches that don’t tell the complete story.

In the mid 2000s, when CX became the battleground for market share, companies created teams of individuals who were responsible for the customer experience function. During this time, there wasn’t a Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), the CX Awards, or courses on CX, like there are today.

These individuals, these teams, were left to figure out CX independently.

While CX looked different from company to company, there were some common pillars that the profession focused on:

• Team, Resources, and Structure
• Data and Insights
• Communication and Culture
• Enabling Action and Outcomes

Smart Customer Service | Leveraging Conversational AI to Help Humans Understand Humans

Authenticx Chief Evangelist Leslie Pagel contributed to an article in Smart Customer Service on the topic of AI

Demands for personalized customer experiences have companies feeling pressure to adopt more customer-centric approaches. And customer service agents are under more scrutiny than ever, with more than 65 percent of people having higher expectations for good CX delivery.

However, these customer service interactions are bidirectional, with employees playing a critical part in the CX equation. Artificial intelligence-driven recordings and speech analytics offer valuable tools that determine the emotion and intent behind words, capture sentiment, and inform training needs by employing advanced acoustic algorithms to identify, measure, and evaluate speakers’ voice pace, pitch, tone, volume and other factors.

This sophisticated technology listens to the employee side of CX interactions, generating insights to offer employee support and training and helping leaders understand and connect with the needs of their organization’s patients and their communities.

Healthcare IT Today | Using AI Responsibly and Ethically in Healthcare with Michael Armstrong at Authenticx

Authenticx CTO Michael Armstrong contributed to an article in Healthcare IT Today on the topic of AI

From disease detection and treatment management to patient communications, AI plays an ever increasing role in the healthcare industry. While AI will increase effectiveness and efficiency, some worry about the cost. Will healthcare organizations sacrifice data privacy as they implement and rely more on AI?

Consider the numbers. In 2021, healthcare data breaches impacted 45 million people. The Department of Health and Human Service’s (HHS) Office for Civil Rights received reports of 63 breaches of 500+ records in September 2022. Those reports included 30 data breaches — hacking and IT incidents — of 10,000 or more patient records. One clinic’s database and system configuration files were deleted, affecting more than 3.6 million patients. The first six months of 2022 saw 337 security breaches affecting 19 million records and costing, on average, $10.1 million per incident — a 9.4% increase from 2021.

In a rapidly expanding era of AI, conversational analytics and data, healthcare organizations must build a foundation of compliance, transparency and trust dedicated to keeping patient information and communications secure.

Quality Digest | Using Speech Analytics to Increase Positive Healthcare Outcomes with Amy Brown at Authenticx

Authenticx CEO Amy Brown contributed to an article in Quality Digest on the topic of Social Determinants of Health

Listening to customers is critical for healthcare organizations to ensure they’re delivering high-quality care to their patients. Sure, the traditional methodology of doing so via surveys can increase customer retention and profitability. But much like evolving from analog to digital, there’s a better way to listen to patients.

Surveys don’t work. The responses nearly always lack context, and asking an already frustrated patient to answer a few questions skews the results.

Conversational intelligence—that is, using speech analytics to listen at scale—tells more than any written survey and is a must for all patient-focused healthcare organizations. While conversations happen in many places throughout a healthcare organization, contact centers already record customer conversations, making them the perfect place to apply conversational intelligence.

Let’s dig deeper into three ways conversational intelligence enables healthcare organizations—especially their contact centers—to use patients’ voices in the boardroom to increase positive outcomes.

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About Authenticx

Authenticx was founded to analyze and activate customer interaction data at scale. Why? We wanted to reveal transformational opportunities in healthcare. We are on a mission to help humans understand humans. With a combined 100+ years of leadership experience in pharma, payer, and healthcare organizations, we know first-hand the challenges and opportunities that our clients face because we’ve been in your shoes.

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