Hello, everyone. This is Brian Zimmerman with the
Becker's Healthcare podcast series. Thank you so much
for tuning in. Today, I'm thrilled to be
joined by Amanda Burry, chief commercial officer with
InformEDICA.
Amanda, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much
for coming on. Thanks so much for having
me. I'm really enjoying being here today.
Great. So just to get things going,
wonder if you could briefly give us an
overview of your your professional background in health
care so listeners out there can appreciate your
perspective as we move through this conversation.
Sure. So I always say that I started
my health care journey in 1988
when my mom started a medical billing service
from our home.
She did medical billing for just about 70
anesthesiologists
in the Chicago area. And so I grew
up around the business of health care. Back
in those days, it was dot matrix printers
and paper bills.
And in 2,001, she sold her company
as the transition to electronic medical records happened.
But I got to see firsthand growing up
really the business side of health care, which
turned into my love of digital health care
and all things,
member and patient engagement.
Yeah. I love love that too because we're,
of course, we're gonna talk about AI and
things have come a long way from those
those those days of paper. Right, Amanda?
Yes. And those days of the sticky notes,
you know,
nurses and practitioners putting sticky notes all over
the office. And,
you know, throughout my journey in health care,
and I've spent about the last 10 years
really focusing on member and patient activation,
engagement.
We have come a really long way, and
I know health care is hard and we
all feel like every day we're slogging up
the hill. But when I look back on
my journey when I started in 2001 to
where we're at today,
you really can see that we have made
strides. Now AI is definitely gonna help us
hopefully get there even quicker.
But I think over the course of presenting
the EHR as more of an engagement platform
in a place where patients go
to get all of their health care information
to the way that members engage with their
health insurer to understand their bills and and
coverage.
We have come a long way from the
paper, the post it notes, the phone calls,
but it is gonna take that next wave
probably to push us into
more of a seamless and interoperable transition that
we need to get into.
Yeah. And and we'll touch on that that
that Xwave, I'm sure, but also wanna get
to the current state. But I think you're
right. It's It's it's kinda human nature sometimes
to sort of forget or omit the the
progress that has been made over time.
Getting to that,
the advancements in AI, the rapid,
it's becoming increasingly clear that new technologies are
are transforming
health care.
And it seems like new solutions are coming
out daily. It's good. It's a crowded crowded
space right now.
Where have you seen AI influence the member
experience specifically,
and and how is that affecting health systems?
How is that affecting patients? But more broadly,
more specifically, how is it affecting health systems?
Yeah. I think all of these new technologies
and
the the talk tracks that are happening at
conferences and social
are giving whether you're a health system or
payer a little bit of FOMO. Right? What's
everybody doing? How are they implementing it? And
the word AI for the last couple years
has definitely been the buzzword, Gen AI, large
language models.
But really now I think we're at the
top of the roller coaster where we need
to see the AI tools that have come
out,
how they are transforming parts of health care.
And I see think you're seeing some of
the most successful ones in the ambient space.
So things that companies are doing like a
Nuance,
with Microsoft
or or Suki, what they're doing in terms
of ambient listening, I think is one of
the quickest wins that we see have seen
as well as a lot of the administrative
burden burden that's happening with pre charting or
pre authorization.
So some of those lower level ones, we're
getting more comfortable with. And I think as
that
comfort continues to increase,
not only on the patient side, but the
provider side, so patients understand and members understand
how AI is being used with them because
most of them, and we did a survey,
most of them think, ma'am, this is gonna
give me less time with my provider. My
provider is gonna treat is gonna be a
robot and and treat me like everybody else.
But what they need to understand and what
we have to educate them with is it's
gonna give you more personalized time with your
provider to actually talk about how you're feeling
than,
just having them push you into a queue.
And so I I'm hoping that at some
of the upcoming events that we're gonna be
having in the fall and and at Becker's,
I'm looking for some real world implementations
of AI, and we're doing that as a
company today with some astounding outcomes. Again, very
much at that early stage,
but I'm excited to see how some of
these things snowball into larger, more meaningful workflows
that can really move populations at scale to
make that difference that we need them to
do.
Yeah. And, Amanda, to the I'll echo that.
The the anecdotal stories I'm hearing coming through
about the power of MB and AI are
really powerful. Just that our most recent Beck
Becker's conference heard a story or an anecdote
about a a mom sitting down to dinner
with her kids. She's a physician,
and she's at dinner eating with them. And
her her son looks up at her and
asks, why aren't you working, mommy? It's it's
it's some some powerful stuff is coming out
with this technology. Right, Amanda?
Mhmm. And we're seeing it too. Like, I'll
take a a not even a health care
example, but something maybe all of the listeners
would use who are in in on the
business side is we use a tool called
Fireflies.
Fireflies is a tool that you add to
your meeting invite,
and it is your AI notetaker. So gone
are the days of people on business meetings.
You know, you're trying to scribble down notes.
You're typing feverishly to get everything that somebody
says.
This AI scribe is listening to the meeting,
understanding the meeting, picking out the highlights,
and then giving you a a summary or
giving you a readout
after the call. Right? It's making light our
lives easier post call. Like, those are the
little wins, I think,
in that health care is adopting
that we probably need to share more of
because it's exciting for those clinicians
or,
different practitioners or administrators
who are really bogged down with a lot
of the paperwork, the charting,
and just the things that are taking time
away from clinic time or care time,
and making them more of,
paperwork time, which, you know, is not as
productive as it needs to be.
Certainly. And and wanna move here not to
regulatory
components here. Of course,
regulation, there's there's a lot of question marks
around what's gonna develop here. But, of course,
California's governor Gavin Newsom signed 17 bills around
the deployment
and regulation of generative AI in 2024.
Other states are likely to follow, of course.
So my question for you is, how can
leaders
a responsible
approach to to leveraging AI? And are are
there any other instances you call can call
out about how patients are benefiting so specifically?
Yeah. I I mean,
what we're doing in terms of regulatory, and
I think Europe does this very well. So
as a global company,
we have to perform regulatory
with the government bodies that are outside the
US as well. And,
they have a different legislation and a different
regulatory
lens than the US does. I think the
White House putting together this AI,
committee and these, different key
leaders from different parts of health care has
been really critical.
I think putting laws and legislation into place
that is guidance for people to understand
where AI starts and where it ends, how
it's impacting data and data privacy
is very important.
Responsible,
trustworthy,
and and and really
safe AI is very important. So we see
many of our partners and customers globally
starting to develop AI boards.
So because there are not as many guardrails
out there from a
regulatory perspective,
it can create bad actors or it can
create,
information,
that is not accurate or create biases.
And so we see a lot of our
customers actually putting together
AI boards where they meet with us regularly,
and we go through how the models work
and how they're built and and and and
and the tools and triages that they're using
to get those members and patients to the
right level of care.
And so what California is doing, I think,
is a great first step in not only
informing the public
about how we need to have certain bylaws
around AI technologies being implemented,
But also even taking a step further, some
of the things the White House and the
White House Council has done to put specific
leaders in place from very large health care
organizations that
see large populations of data and making sure
that we're taking a trustworthy, responsible,
and clinical safety approach,
to how these tools are being used in
the market.
Yeah. Yeah. A good first step in some
of this legislation,
you would say, but also I I gather
from your response that a lot of the
governance, a lot of the ethical use of
this, folks are gonna have to try to
to to figure it out themselves because the
technology is moving faster than maybe regulation can.
Am I reading that correct, Amanda?
A 100%. And I think you see that
both internally with themselves.
So I think internally, they have to ensure
their providers,
administrators, their employees that they're they themselves are
leveraging AI appropriately.
And then their duty as, let's say, the
health plan or the hospital that is treating
them with their providers,
educating them about where AI is being used
in the process. So whether there's an ambient
scribe in the room or whether you're using
some sort of chat assistant when you're going
on to pay your bill or whether you're
using, you know, some sort of triage tool
to be able to be connected to the
right level of care.
We know health literacy in the US is
a is a challenge. So now we're adding
a step of complexity onto it saying, not
only do you have to understand all of
these hard health care technical terms about something
that might be wrong with you, but here's
also, you know, information about how AI plays
into that. So,
there's there's internal education and external education,
to make sure that both, patients and providers
know that the tools they're using, are trustworthy,
and are ethical.
Certainly. And and, Amanda, as we move to
the close of this conversation, I think it's,
of course,
important to sort of point to, you know,
organizations' health systems have to figure out also
how to how to measure the impact of
these tools, which are which can be challenging
and new. So
thinking about and, of course, the the a
big impact, a big thing they have to
measure is is ROI. There's a cost involved
here. So where can AI do you think
makes the biggest difference in reducing costs while
while boosting engagement, patient member engagement,
and and how how can folks measure that?
Yes.
ROI in digital health, I think, has been
notoriously
hard. Right? Just like all things in health
care are hard. I think ROI and cost
savings in health care is hard.
Where I think AI can make the biggest
difference in reducing, you know, that cost while
also increasing engagement is
really through the data and the information
that is being,
pulled and is being
understood during these different workflows.
So for instance, we talked a little bit
about the ambient space.
What is the cost
to the health system of that provider
leveraging those additional 15 minutes that they might
spend doing the charting and doing the,
post information
from that conversation.
I think it's making it easier for us
to connect the dots,
and it's also making it easier to connect
the top the dots between different parts of
the organization.
So from a health plan side, from the
time you engage those members, you could also
do more outreach. Right? It allows you to
stratify your members
into population
and start to add risks,
buckets to those members.
So the data is actually helping you to
also understand the the risk of your, population's,
message to them more clearly,
provide them more guidance,
maybe keep them out of the ED if
they are a frequent flyer or or visit
the ED or keep them engaged in a
diabetes program.
So I think from a provider side, you
can look at it as how much time
savings is happening happening to provide more care.
And on the pay on the patient or
member side, it's how do you engage them
in programs to try to make them healthier,
to try to make them more engaged,
within their health?
How do you steer them away from the
ED for a sore throat or a low
acuity case where they can potentially do a
telemedicine appointment or even maybe self-service at home
where the cost is low, not only for
the plan, but most importantly for the patient?
The patient has less out of pocket cost.
They spend less time trying to get to
their appointment,
and they get better care outcomes.
So I think that AI is going to
help connect more of those dots
and create more
prescriptive
messaging
to those populations
versus react reactatory,
messaging to those populations.
It's it's easy to to to imagine how
powerful that sort of prescriptive proactive messaging can
be. Amanda,
selfishly, I could- I could probably talk to
you much longer about this, but we- we
are up against time. So I was happy
to share anything else you'd like to share
that we didn't get to touch on in
our time today.
No. I think we covered it all. I'm
really excited to see the continued advancements that
AI is going to bring to the marketplace,
whether that's, the health system side or the
health plan side.
And I really hope that all of the
people listening to this podcast try to embrace
one new AI tool, whether it's chat g
p t to help them rewrite an email
or maybe they try a tool like Fireflies
to help them capture meeting notes. Because as
we become more comfortable with it, the more
adoption and the more engagement that both consumers
and patients
will have in our lives hoping to make
health care better.
Thank you. A great note to close on,
Amanda. Appreciate your time today.
Thank you so much, Brian. Speak to you
soon. Yeah. I also wanna thank our podcast
sponsor,
InformEDICA.
You can tune to more podcasts from Beckers
HealthCare by visiting our podcast page at beckershospitalreview.com.