Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Authenticx: Making Healthcare More Human with AI | The Tech Matchmaker Podcast
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Good morning, everyone. Today we are chatting with Eric Prue, who is the Chief Product Officer from Authentics. And we're talking about healthcare enterprise software. Eric, welcome to the podcast. We're really happy to have you here with us today. Let's start with the basics. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker, the show where contact center challenges meet their perfect tech match. I'm your host, Gina Gibson, and in just 15 minutes, we serve up the smartest, coolest innovation shaking up the contact center industry. Whether you're searching for your next solution or just love staying ahead of the curve, we've got the insights to keep you in the know. Let's dive in and discover what's next. I promise you it's going to be fun. Thanks for hanging out with us on the Tech Matchmaker. I hope today's spotlight sparked some fresh ideas and real solutions for your contact center. Want to dive deeper into the tech we featured? Hit up the show notes for all the links and extras and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if there's a challenge you want us to tackle, don't be shy, reach out. I'll catch you soon with more innovation, more use cases and more ways to keep your business moving forward. Eric Prugh: Thanks so much, Gene. I'm really glad to be here. So I am the Chief Product Officer at Authentics, as you said. I have a long history in technology. I've been in the software world for almost 20 years and have seen a lot of change, a lot of evolution. I've been on the sales side, the product side, client success. Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Eric Prugh: And ⁓ really I'm just obsessed with technology and the potential it has for helping people, helping organizations. And yeah, I just love it. Gina Gibson: What was...tell us one thing about yourself Eric that we might not find on LinkedIn. Eric Prugh: ⁓ Well, while I seem very buttoned up on LinkedIn, but I have three very small kids, a pet at home. So generally my life outside of work is ⁓ very chaotic, ⁓ which I love. I embrace the chaos. I think it helps me in my work during the day. ⁓ But another thing I love to do, I'm a big movie buff ⁓ and I love, I'm an absolute ⁓ huge fan of sci-fi and fantasy. So Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, you name it. ⁓ I love it. ⁓ Gina Gibson: Excellent. Okay, now it's your time. Give us the Authentics elevator pitch. Eric Prugh: Absolutely. So, Authentics. is ⁓ really an incredible company with a mission for helping healthcare organizations create more of a human connection with their customers. And we do that through the use of AI to enable intelligence for better individual performance within the organization. So think about how agents are performing while they're interacting with customers, providers, or patients on the phone. ⁓ We also have some really interesting proprietary technology that allows organizations to identify processes within their organization or within the healthcare system that are broken. ⁓ We help automate key compliance actions and workflows. And one thing that I think is really a big differentiator for us is we help create actionable signals that will help customer experience teams and executive teams understand where their customer experience challenges are. So where are people getting stuck, ⁓ where people falling off from an abandonment perspective, and a lot more. And we offer this all through a comprehensive software solution wrapped with services as our clients need it. Gina Gibson: And what makes healthcare such a unique space for this kind of conversation and intelligence, you know, compared to other industries? Eric Prugh: Yeah, healthcare, healthcare is notoriously difficult for a lot of reasons. ⁓ When it comes to innovation, you don't you don't think of healthcare as the most innovative area of industry. ⁓ And especially when it comes to customer experience, ⁓ there's so much more nuance to customer experience in healthcare. You have patients that are struggling, they're in pain, they're taking medication, there's you got payers and providers and pharmacists that are sort of this terrible triangle that patients get caught up in the middle of. And really it's a lot to unpack. So we have really focused our efforts in healthcare to capture a lot of the nuance that's happening in these various customer experiences and help organizations navigate the challenges. And I think when it comes to AI, we've obviously have had to build a lot of infrastructure to support a company's journey through adoptive AI as well. You you've got AI governance committees, you've got all sorts of compliance challenges, privacy, data security, that sort of stuff. And that is one of our primary and first considerations when deploying new technology and innovation. So where you would typically see projects stall out, enrolling out AI and trying to get a healthcare provider, a payer or a pharma manufacturer up and running. We've built turnkey solutions that make it really easy to get live and get value and learn from what your customers are telling you or what your agents are saying in the contact center. So ⁓ that has really been our biggest triumph, I would say, offering that sort of speed to value for organizations that have historically struggled to achieve it. Gina Gibson: Well, and it's interesting you bring up the compliance and regulatory requirements because that's such a focus and pretty much every conversation I'm having these days, it's how does this software, know, like how does this vendor meet those requirements and how do they ⁓ help them protect them, you know, help the customer protect themselves from leakage. So can you share a success story with us ⁓ where Authentics helped a healthcare organization make measurable improvements? Eric Prugh: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. There are a number of different stories. You know, we have a really great set of customers in pharmaceutical manufacturing, which has its own unique challenges. Some of the things that our patients, that our customers have seen successes in, ⁓ reducing time for their customers, their patients to fill their first prescription. had one of our customers was able to react quickly to a new launch of a medication and was able to listen to what customers are calling in about, what patients are struggling with, ⁓ where they're having issues getting prescriptions filled, and make changes to their process in near real time within days of a launch to reduce time to fill first prescription from 14 days ⁓ to three days. So you think about having to get insurance involved, having to have the provider calling the prescription, ⁓ lots of things that can go wrong that prevent people from getting access to the medicines that they need that we're able to help with. On the flip side of that, one of the areas that we've helped a lot with is ⁓ helping people with the struggles of maintaining ⁓ their ⁓ medication staying on therapy. ⁓ And we've been able to identify key disruptions that a patient might be experiencing, whether it's a side effect or a supply chain issue, a shipping delivery problem, surface those to the top and eliminate, for one of our clients, we eliminated ⁓ adherence or ⁓ medication adherence or persistency challenges by 25 or 30 percent. ⁓ On the flip side of that from an operational perspective, we also focus a lot on what's creating repeat calls or unnecessary interactions with a healthcare organization. And in some cases, by focusing our efforts on prioritizing fixing those process challenges or issues that may be creating ⁓ repeat calls or frustrating disruptive experiences to customers, In some cases, we reduce ⁓ average handle time on calls significantly by 50 % or more, and we eliminate calls altogether. One of our clients in insurance was able to reduce calls and talk time in the sort of altitude of about $800,000 a month or so of wasted time and wasted operational effort that it took to sort of service members with those particular challenges. Gina Gibson: and just giving them that option to self-service. Like, literally something that easy. You mentioned having the prepackaged options. How quickly, like, what's the typical deployment? And I know, you know, no one's gonna hold you this, but like, how quickly can people kind of get up and running and start seeing and experiencing the benefits? Eric Prugh: Absolutely right. Yeah Yeah, that's a great question, Gina. So generally speaking, we will have... All clients live and in 45 days or less. Now, obviously there's always exceptions to the rule. ⁓ But many of the, many, many of the customers that we're talking to are dealing with six or nine or 12 month deployment cycles with some of these other providers where they're having to really build a lot from scratch. So by ⁓ simply having all these pre-package options and just the knowledge we wrap around the insights we provide to our customers, we can really streamline that process and we can even move faster than that. We have productized integrations with all of the telephony platforms like Genesis and 5.9, Twilio, Nice, CX1, etc. ⁓ And we can really short-circuit that process even more. It's just dependent on essentially getting the conversations and interactions flowing through our platform and then the insights are just there once that happens. Gina Gibson: Now looking to the future and I mean the speed of change right now is overwhelming, but what's next for Authentics? Eric Prugh: Well, we have a grand vision, of course. We are really working hard to The way I see it is really acting as a brain for a healthcare organization to help create all sorts of new intelligence that enable people to be more effective in their respective jobs, ⁓ enable intelligent process, so really breaking down where things are, where are things broken? How can we improve the process our customers go through? ⁓ Do we need to deploy new AI capabilities? Do we need to eliminate steps? thing that I'm really excited about is helping executive teams create new ways of thinking about historical metrics that they rely on to report on how their business is doing. So NPS is a classic example that executives rely on to understand how their customer experience is going. CSAT surveys. But those are reliant on people filling out those surveys, right? You get low hit rates, low response rates that ⁓ make it sort of a lagging indicator. of where challenges may exist. We tap into customer interactions that are happening every day in real time to determine in a predictive way what that experience really looks like. And we have the capability to score and are really doubling down in how we look at what we could bring to executive teams that would augment how they think about customer satisfaction and experience and give them more of a proactive metric to take preventative measures for things kind of going off the rails from an experience perspective. Another thing that I think is really exciting is as organizations are really looking at when it makes sense to deploy AI agents, human agents, what... ⁓ what really makes the most sense for the customer experience. We want to help provide insights and visibility and even workflow triggers and sort of ⁓ action to be taken internally. We want to help organizations better understand what is best suited for which types of interactions. So different analytics, different AI models that will help sort of uncover where things may be going wrong in each of these respective areas as organizations sort of grapple with where it makes sense to resources for each of those categories, know, of customer experience interaction. So those are just kind of two examples of where we think it's important to invest and where we're going. Gina Gibson: Excellent, excellent. And I always like to wrap up, ⁓ Eric, the episode. I've always been a fan of James Lipton. So we wrap up with a few little rapid fire questions. What is your favorite word? Eric Prugh: Great. ⁓ what is my favorite word? ⁓ my gosh. ⁓ I'd say opportunity. Opportunity is my favorite word. I try to keep it positive, you know. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. What's your least favorite word? Eric Prugh: ⁓ my least favorite word. I should have known that was coming. ⁓ Gina Gibson: you. Eric Prugh: I don't know. don't know that I have a lease. I told you I'm like an optimist. I don't even know what's my lease. I can't even think of one. Gina Gibson: Yes. It's all good. What excites you the most in life? Eric Prugh: ⁓ What excites me the most? think, ⁓ you know, outside of work right now, ⁓ my kids are at really fun age and they are, ⁓ honestly, what excites me most right now is getting my youngest kid out of diapers, if I'm being totally honest. Gina Gibson: That is fantastic. I love it. If somebody wants to get a little bit more information on Authentics, Eric, who should they reach out to? Eric Prugh: Well, they should absolutely reach out to me, Eric Pru ⁓ at Authentics, or to you, Gina. I think you'd be a great resource. You've been a great partner to us. Gina Gibson: Perfect. Thank you so much Eric for spending time with us today. It's been a pleasure learning more about Authentics and I look forward to seeing the new developments that you guys come Eric Prugh: Thanks so much for having me, Gina.