Hi everyone,
and thank you for tuning into the Becker's Healthcare podcast series.
I'm Brian Zerman, a v p client Content Strategy with Becker's Healthcare.
Today I'm pleased to be joined by Lance Maha,
senior director of Industry Marketing healthcare principal at RingCentral.
Lance, it's great to get a chance to speak with you again.
Hey, thanks, Brian. It's great to be back.
So, so let's dive right in here. Um, for,
for folks that maybe haven't heard you on the podcast before, can,
can you just get us started by, by sharing a bit about yourself, your role,
your organization, that sort of thing?
Absolutely.
I've led healthcare industry practices at four major
communications focused vendors.
So I focus on where communications and collaboration solutions can have
a direct and positive impact and improve health service delivery,
and most importantly, improve the overall patient experience.
Then currently as a leader within RingCentral's healthcare practice,
I work to really establish our cloud-based communications
platform in the industry as it continues to pivot and
digitally transform.
I also work directly with our industry solutions product management teams
to make sure that the voice of the customer is being heard loud and clear in
healthcare as we take new solutions to market. They also spend, uh,
quite a bit of time on go to market and also working on sales enablement with
our national sales team as well.
Excellent. Well, well thank you for walking us through that background. Uh,
I wanna start here with a, a question about,
about how technology is transforming dentistry and obviously the voice of the
patient is something you really, you really care about, and,
and I think technology is transforming in dentistry,
at least everything from procedures to, to advancing patient centricity.
So in your own work, what are some of the, the,
the top trends or innovations that B s O leaders,
dental practice leaders are embracing today?
Yeah,
I think I'd start by just letting everyone know that the six largest dental
service organizations in the country are RingCentral clients,
and I think they represent a big shift in this particular delivery environment.
So what they've done is they've,
they've all transitioned their legacy communications to the
centralized cloud-based service model that RingCentral delivers,
and they're able to do this so they can scale patient engagement across
their, their national network of practices. And collectively across these six,
it's over 5,000 clinics.
So this also lets each of the individual DSOs
manage their networks from a single d s O location,
but they're also able to dramatically scale patient engagement across these
networks.
This also allows them to achieve system and also cost center management
standardization. And this, this creates the,
the type of e economies of scale and operational savings that these
large organizations with extremely large distributed locations are,
are looking for.
And that's why pivoting to the cloud is a big part of digital
transformation and innovation in healthcare today.
Yeah, such a great point. Uh, uh, getting to that, that level of scale,
I imagine the cloud is just such like a essential component of that. Um,
can can you talk a little bit about why I am curious that that is Lance and then
wanna move to a, to a separate question about, about artificial intelligence,
which is of course a big hot topic, but, um, a a any additional insights to,
to why the cloud is so important here?
Well, I think DSOs are a perfect example. Uh,
they're experiencing a lot of growth and also consolidation.
So as they continue to grow their networks,
as they continue to bring additional practitioners
into their D S O umbrella,
it creates a urgency around getting those new locations
into their standardized environment. And with traditional technology,
it's extremely hard, uh,
to get all those front and back office systems online up and running
and keep those newly acquired locations and those practitioners focused on
delivering excellent dental patient care.
So that's a big reason why we've been so successful,
and that's why this type of centralized management across
agile site additions across a national scope is,
is such a great value and immediate, uh,
benefit to DSOs when they pivot their communications to the cloud.
Uh, appreciate those additional details there lads. Uh, so,
so let's get to artificial intelligence now, which is, uh,
of course AI's increasingly present in dentistry like, you know,
much of the healthcare industry is now.
Can can you talk a little bit about what areas you think dental practices DSOs
can really leverage this technology and also ahead of implementation, uh,
integrating AI-based solutions?
What are some key considerations leaders should think about that that might be
going overlooked out there?
Yeah, I think as we discuss ai, it's important to put, uh,
some framework around it in terms of its own evolution in healthcare.
So of course, AI is supporting our D S L clients today,
and the scope of its use continues to grow.
If we focus on the real first wave of ai, um,
within a communications framework,
it was focused on supporting more patient directed service requests,
like scheduling, billing inquiries, med refills,
and these types of activities.
And these tasks largely now can be fulfilled via AI chatbots
or voice authentication and response inputs. This has, uh,
become a really,
really popular approach to meeting a higher patient demand for self-directed
engagement,
but it's also very valuable to help augment or even possibly replace
traditional and static, uh,
what we refer to as interactive revoice or I v r front end menus
or common auto attendant tools that sometimes are pretty fixed and have limited
options. And then finally, I would just add, uh,
AI is also commonly utilized to,
to route these new digital patient messages that are generated
during an initial chat bot interaction between the patient and their
practitioner. So what happens is, is the ai, uh, digitally, uh,
routing,
it leverages message learning in conjunction with ai and it understands the
general intent of the patient inquiry,
and then it intuitively routes these digital messages to the right
staff who are best suited or skilled to address the patient inquiry and need.
And then to address your question about, you know, things to consider, and I'll,
I'll share more about this in a moment,
but as D ss o leaders look to leverage AI in the
cloud, I think a real critical requirement is, is as you evaluate vendors,
ensure that there's a deep level of integration not only between,
uh, your core business systems that are voice centric,
but make sure that platform integrates to your real critical clinical systems
like your, uh, electronic health record or your practice management system.
'cause this is where we created a really exciting, uh,
merger between the two that absolutely levels up patient experience.
So we'll, we'll talk more about that in just a moment, but yeah,
that's what I would share where, uh,
where DSOs are leveraging artificial intelligence today.
Yeah, a a a great high level overview of how AI is being applied,
uh, at at DSOs dental practices today. Um, I,
let's let's get to sort of the, you alluded to this in, in your previous answer,
but I want want to get to it directly and drill down and,
and hear how RingCentral really, you know,
enables its d s O partners to leverage these AI tools. And I would love it if,
if you could ground this response in, in, in some specific examples or outcomes.
So in addition, uh, to the AI use cases that I just described,
DSOs also had the opportunity to leverage the latest in conversation
intelligence and conversation intelligence delivers a couple critical
capabilities. So first it, it automatically generates notes,
summaries and full transcripts from patients or staff interactions.
Then secondly,
these captured transcripts are fluid and can be searched via key terms
or other insight benchmarks. So what this does, Brian,
is it lets DSOs let AI track and assess patient
sentiment and identify best practices to repeat or obviously service
improvement opportunities by really just, uh,
listening in a very intelligent way that we never could before
about patient, uh, input. So it's,
it's pretty exciting to see them leverage that new era of conversation
intelligence that's, uh, part of an AI engine as well.
I imagine we're sort of just scratching the surface here in terms of what,
what kind of transformations this could yield and how it could benefit patients,
right?
Oh, absolutely.
And then, and then looking ahead here, Lance, uh,
what are some other areas where,
where digital transformation or AI and dentistry could really make a big
impact for DSOs out there?
So building upon what we've shared,
let's transition over to a comment i I made a moment ago,
and that is where can providers get even more optimization
out of existing, uh, technology investments?
And so another new era of digital
transformation that leverages AI is integrating cloud communications within
a provider's e H R or p m s system.
And so this creates some really exciting synergy between the system.
So a good example of that is if a patient specifies within their patient record,
you know, via their patient portal,
a specific preference for how they want to be notified, say for a,
an appointment reminder notification and they indicate messaging by integrating
the cloud communications platform to this E H R or practice management
system, we're able to see those preferences on the cloud communication side.
And so that system recognizes this,
it follows the notification preferences and sends messages versus maybe
a traditional voice call. And the great thing is,
is all this is done without any staff intervention. So you're level,
you're leveling up patient experience and satisfaction levels by just simply
letting the technology do what it's been designed to do intelligently
and without direct, uh, human intervention.
And then I'd also share another big capability specific to
the cloud contact center, which is part of a a,
a full communications platform in the cloud,
is the ability to pull,
define patient data from the E H R.
And when a patient calls their provider,
this information is presented to the, uh,
patient care navigator practice representative on their
contact center agent screen. Once that call comes in.
So what this does, Brian, is it provides a,
a richer patient care context with some key information.
It delivers a higher level of insights, and then collectively,
this is where you get that new era of personalized patient experience.
And then as far as just operational benefits that dramatically reduces call
handling times, it avoids those very frustrating, you know,
multiple call transfers that we've all encountered and then optimally together
it increases single call resolution rate.
So there's just some tremendous benefit about integrating the cloud
communications platform, which is the cloud phone system,
but also the cloud contact center system with these critical practice,
uh, clinical application systems as well. And then you,
that enables the,
the DSOs to get greater optimization and value out of, uh,
these other systems as well as leverage their new investments in cloud
communications.
Yeah, and I imagine anything that's sort of a, a, you know,
alleviates staff burden, so to speak, improves staff satisfaction is, uh,
critically important right now when you, when you consider the,
the staffing environment in, in dentistry. Am I thinking about that correctly?
Yeah, absolutely.
And then just to close out here, Lance, I think you,
you walked us through sort of some high level stuff that's happening with AI and
digital transformation and then got, got granular for us, got super specific.
So I, I greatly appreciate your time as always, but before we sign off,
is there,
is there anything else you wanna reemphasize for our listeners or you think
listeners should know?
I would just share that when we're discussing digital innovation in
dentistry and specifically the, the role of ai,
I think it's just really fascinating how patient engagement,
their experience and satisfaction measurement can today
really be measured as much by what patients don't say directly,
but by other inputs and self-directed activities that have historically
been overlooked or simply not trackable that we can do today.
So I think that's the real takeaway with this type of digital innovation is,
is it just expands the,
the patient voice in a way that's never been done before.
And then it just sim simply, um, means the DSOs need to listen and,
and plan very productive next steps to increase patient
satisfaction levels from the great AI knowledge that they're gaining from their
cloud communication system.
Yeah. Making sure they're leveraging that technology to get the most out of it.
Right. Uh, Lance, exactly. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.
Hey, I appreciate the opportunity to visit with your audience, Brian.
Thank you very much.
Of course. Um, again, thank you Lance.
And I'd also like to thank RingCentral for sponsoring this episode.
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