Latest / WOI Unfiltered / Healthcare PR and the impact of AI - Epi 17
Transcript
- speaker-0: Alright, I just hit record. speaker-1: Wait a second, wait a second, let me grab coffee. speaker-0: buddy, welcome back. Happy Friday. Good. Today is a super exciting podcast. I am very happy to welcome one of my former colleagues as well as clients on, Kelly Katapotis. Kelly, thank you so much for joining us today. speaker-1: too Jenna. How's it going? speaker-2: Thank you so much for having me. speaker-0: So, Kelly and I worked together, gosh, 12 years ago or so now, probably, or maybe even more. speaker-2: in turn when we started working together, probably. Maybe maybe like 10 minutes an hour, yeah. speaker-0: We started together at Weber Shamrock in Boston. We worked together there for a few years, crossed over on several projects. And then Kelly moved on to RF Bender, another agency. She was there for a little bit. And then she went in-house. She worked at St. Elizabeth's, which I would say, and Kelly, please correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think was her first four-way in the healthcare space. She had previously been a consumer gal. So jumped into the healthcare space, which is obviously huge in Boston, worked at Saini for a while, then went to Sophia Genetics, an AI driven company where Kelly and I were lucky enough to work together again for a little bit. And now she is at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. So continuing on her journey in the healthcare space, we're very excited to have you here and have you shed light on kind of another area that we haven't discussed yet. speaker-2: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you again for having me. I'm so excited to be here. speaker-1: Yes. Yeah, I was just going to say that, Jenna, we really haven't talked healthcare on this pod and then into the insurance space as well. So I think it's a really exciting topic. And I love that Kelly also graduated from agency and kind of did all the things as agency people hope to do someday by going around. speaker-0: He's jumped ship with me the right time. speaker-1: Yeah, it's like she got into college. Like that's how I see people. I never, I never did that. So welcome Kelly. It's awesome to have you. speaker-2: Same. speaker-0: Kelly, I want to hear a little bit about your role now, but remind me, weren't you at St. Elizabeth's during COVID? Is that correct? speaker-2: Yes, yes, I was. Believe it or not, COVID is actually one of the reasons why I wanted to jump ship out of agency life and leave the CPG world and get into healthcare in the first place. So maybe to take you back to my young formative years, I remember I have always been very interested in healthcare. thinking on this, I pinpointed the exact moment where I think it really clicked for me. And that was, I kid you not, I was probably 10 years old. One of my aunts had left, I think it was a self magazine lying around the house and I picked it up and I read it and I was so fascinated just on, you know, reporting on the nutrition side of things, the fitness and the lifestyle. And that was really, I think, where I was like, Ooh, I really love this type of stuff. And so I went to college, I studied PR and so I went all the way through studying the communication side of things and got the first job that would take me, which was Weber Shamwick, which was amazing. As I mentioned, I started. I started as an intern in the Boston office on the consumer side. I graduated. I had no idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted to focus things. But I loved the consumer space so much. It was so fun. think one of my first assignments, we were taking old school photos. Instagram was brand new. We were taking old school photos for a client and making margaritas and taking pretty pictures of them and then drinking them. was probably like, as an intern fresh out of college, I was like, this is the best job in the world. What more could we want? speaker-0: You have some fun pictures of us with the beer cart. speaker-2: Yes. ⁓ yeah, I did it all. We ran the beer cart. was, I loved it more than anything with that though. I always, you know, I was always looking to, to continue to grow. And especially when you started so early in your career on the agency side, you know, there's, there's a ton of opportunities and a ton of different directions. And I think one of the things that I love about agencies is that you can see a huge range of communications, ⁓ roles and the different types of things you could do. So at one point I was like, Ooh, I'm really interested in doing events or I'm really interested in doing like. project management and I had the opportunity to touch on all those things. And I kind of raised my hand and said to one of my bosses that, I'm really interested in healthcare stuff too. Can I give it a try? And I was able to work on some projects. So that was really fun. ⁓ And you know, after a while I needed a little change of pace. So I went over to a different PR agency where I continued to work in the CPG space. And just after a while, and I'm sure everybody goes through this, I was starting to get a little run down. It felt a little uninspired. Like I felt like I was. losing my creativity and then just so happens COVID hit and I thought, you know, now's the time. And so I had the opportunity to move over to St. Elizabeth's and that was really my first jump into the healthcare space and it was diving headfirst. so it was October of 2020. like by then everybody at the hospital, everybody who I worked with, was like COVID was like, it was not that it wasn't no big deal, but they were like, this is, you know, it's, it's whatever. It's just part of our day to day now. And for me, I was like, It was a huge shock, but also I think my comm skillset could really help. I mean, things were changing rapidly. There was, you know, mass regulations going on and off and on and off again. And then the vaccine started to come out. So it was just a really interesting and exciting time to be there. speaker-0: Yeah, I can imagine that's like a jump into healthcare. I mean, not just the healthcare space, but a hospital setting during COVID. You know, I can imagine that was just a very big kind of whiplash moment almost. Absolutely. speaker-2: Absolutely. speaker-1: Kelly for following your purpose too, just to be like, this is speaking to me more at a very crazy time in the world. So yeah, tell us, tell us what it was like just diving right in to that in-house role. speaker-2: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, huge change of pace to go from agency to in-house first and foremost. And then second of all, I would say that working at a hospital, doing any sort of communications, marketing, any sort of project like that, it's insanely different than any type of other communications job, I would say. I mean, for a few reasons, I was a lean team of one. I was essentially doing two in one, right? With everything going on, a lot of what I focused on was internal communications. And that's kind of also where I started to move from the strictly PR external comms to really round out my corporate communications skillset. ⁓ And when you work at a hospital, there can be upwards of 12,000 employees. It's a huge employee base. Not everybody, I would say over half the employees don't even have computers. They don't check their email. So you can't send out an all staff email and just expect it to be known. So you really have to get creative and almost go. old school and how you talk to your own people and make sure that everybody is up to speed and built on that. speaker-0: You know, it's funny, Kelly, as I'm working on a client right now in the CPG space, but part of what we're working to do is reach a large chunk of their employees who work in more of a factory setting. And it's a very similar thing where you find that you have to go offline to reach these people almost, right? You have to use more traditional tactics with signage or if there's TV screens, you know, what are those saying? really kind of have more of a high touch to engage with them and to reach them. So it is interesting because there's parallels there no matter which company, what type of company you're working for is just meeting people where they are and understanding your audience's behavior, whether it's an internal or external audience. Can you talk to us a little bit about your role now? I'm really curious to know just a little bit more about what you're doing day to day. speaker-2: Absolutely. So I am fairly new at the company. I'm about five weeks in, so I'm considering myself and a lot of employees. Thank you Emily. Just give me a little clap. A lot of employees are really long tenured. So I'm like a newborn baby compared to a lot of people there. And I think that there's going to be a long way to go before I learn all of the ins and outs. I would say there's a few things in my role now. I oversee communications just for one specific division. And so I work on the technology division in particular. For me, I'm really excited by that. In my past few roles, I led corporate communications and so I was responsible for the entire gamut of a company. And so now I'm really excited to be able to drill down and to really make a big impact within one specific area. And I would say, mean, especially now that I'm super close to the technology of the company and I'm just scratching the surface of my time here, but there's a ton of innovation and a lot of... AI forward thinking that's happening. And, you know, the average person may not realize that or may not think that about a health insurance company, but I think there's a ton of exciting things going on behind the scenes. And of course, technology at any company is responsible for keeping the lights on, making sure you can, you know, send emails and Teams messages. But there is so much more. And I think it's a really cool time to be joining an organization like this where they're undergoing essentially a massive digital transformation. speaker-1: I was curious about the unpacking of that. Again, Kelly, five weeks in, you know, I think of my relationship with AI and health as very much a place where I go to check symptoms or look at something on me, take a picture, upload it to chat or clod or whatever property and spit out, okay, that's fine. I don't need to get a doctor to weigh in on this or whatever. For an insurance company, what would you say encapsulates that digital transformation piece when it comes to AI? speaker-2: Yeah, I would say first of all, think one of the biggest and probably for me as an employee there, one of the most exciting things that has rolled out recently is the fact that there's an internal Gen. AI tool that's proprietary to the company. So, especially as a comms professional, that's really exciting for me because I can, you know, use it to kick off ideas. I can use it to proofread, you know, documents and emails that I send. I can use it to help summarize ideas and I use it all day because I think it's such an a helpful tool in the arsenal and it really has helped me speed up my workflow. feel like that's kind of a very overused phrase when it comes to using some sort of AI agent, but I think it's so true and it's essentially, I'm thinking about it as like, here's my free intern who I'm using, who's like helping me make my day go by faster, helping do some of heavy lifting for me. And just like an intern, you want to double check all the work that it does. speaker-0: So wait, Kelly, can we back up for just a quick second? So the comms industry is so nuanced and there are so many different places we can play. talk to me as though I'm a baby starting off at your company. When you say that you're focusing on technology and the digital transformation, who is your audience? Is it internal or is it external? speaker-2: Yeah, that's a very great point. I would say I'm mostly focused internally because there's a lot of work to be done. mean, it's a large, large department and a large company still there, thousands of employees. And so a lot of what I'm doing is helping to connect the dots between what's being said at a leadership level and at an employee level. And then also I'm making sure that all of the work that's getting done. Inside our department, there's, there's so much that happens. We keep the lights on essentially, and then we're also contributing to this innovation and helping progress the company into this digital era, if you will. And I mean, there's been great work that's been done, but there's so much happening so fast because of AI. But a big part of my role is and will continue to be to help celebrate our successes and make sure that people internally know, know what's going on and also make sure that they understand what's going on and what sorts of resource we have available to them. speaker-0: Yep, no, that completely makes sense. So when you talk about AI and having access to it and being able to use it internally, how are you using it day to day? it like message development or is it like kernel emails or what are some tangible examples of what you're doing with it day to day? And how do you know that you're not going to accidentally leak any kind of proprietary data because I feel like you guys are probably responsible for so much of that, that that is going to be a huge concern for you guys. speaker-2: Yeah, of course. Well, I'll start with the security part, I guess, the second part of your question. And I would say too, because we have our own internal tool, the nice part is, is that there are tons of safeguards in place. And so our internal platform is built off of Google Gemini, but essentially it's strictly for within our organization's walls, which is amazing. And I also think, I mean, there's plenty of guardrails in place where I won't have access to any patient data. I am nowhere near any of that. nor should I be. I think that's, that's, you know, it's, it's not in my hands. And so, ⁓ I think that's another way to just to make sure that, you know, that the data governance is, is really set in place. And then how I use it in my day to day. Yeah. So here's an example. We recently did an employee poll survey. And so I was able to take the results of that. And rather than, you know, I mean, I did read some of the comments, but rather than reading through and trying to pull together and extrapolate answers or broad assumption and themes on my own, I literally just took the Excel. and uploaded it into our GPT and it summed everything up for me nicely. So that saved, you know, that could easily save like 30, 45 minutes to do that. So I find that I use it to summarize major documents and it kind of just saves you that power of sifting through. And then I'll go through and major points it pulls out. I like to fact check a little bit here and there, but it's just so helpful and starting to kick off some of the work that you need to do. speaker-1: have a question just in terms, of is there any talk about AI from a user perspective? So for your customer base, your Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, turning that technology into something that's useful for your subscribers. speaker-2: So yes, there are some resources in place and, and, know, there's a great innovation pipeline that I won't speak to now, but some of the resources that are already available for our members include AI to help provide tailored recommendations. if patients log on to our website and they can, you know, say, I'm looking for a new primary care doctor, or I'm looking for mental health support, we have AI on the backend that's helping to serve up some of those providers for our members. And in addition, I think a huge thing, and this has been covered a lot in the media recently. is that we're using AI to help combat healthcare fraud. speaker-0: Wait, talk about that. I have not seen that in the media. That sounds so interesting. speaker-2: Yeah, so it is. so I mean, there's AI everywhere, AI tools everywhere, right? I come from a company where we offered an AI tool for doctors, right? And so you may have heard or seen a lot about what's what doctors use, which is called AI scribes. And so those are amazing tools that are meant to help doctors transcribe their visits. There's also other tools, and I don't want to mix up the two. I'm sure that there's a ton available. but there's some that also help them with billing. So it makes sure that doctors and providers and hospitals are billing for all the services rendered. And so basically that's helping them ensure that they're submitting the right things to insurance. On the flip side though, sometimes that's inaccurate. And what we're doing on the insurance and on the payer side is essentially we have AI tools that are going through and just seeing where the spikes, the... ⁓ anomalies that may have not have been in the past and just double checking that to make sure that there's nothing and it may not be, it's not intentional by any means, but where's the discrepancy here? And so I think the example that was quoted in the Globe a few weeks ago was that there has been an uptick in sepsis claims submitted. so, you know, have they always been there and they just haven't been built or has that been accidentally upcoded? And that's something that we're just trying to work on so that it's mutually beneficial. speaker-0: That is so interesting. And I'm gonna take a hard left, a not serious response to that real quick because I've been watching The Pit recently. Have either one of you speaker-2: I love the pit. I watch any medical TV show. I love it. speaker-1: three bits away from doing it. You're like the 18th and 19th people who have recommended it. speaker-0: You have to try it. But also, in this season, they're using more AI and they're talking about how doctors are using AI. And there was a couple of different scenes where the doctors were using AI for billing and they had put in incorrect, it had basically transcribed incorrect codes or incorrect orders. And the doctors are supposed to obviously go in and proofread and make sure that everything is correct and is accurate. So it should save time for them. And again, I'm speaking about a TV show. I'm not speaking about real life doctors. So this may not be a hundred percent accurate in the real world, but it was just interesting in the show because they were showing kind of the double-edged sword of it drastically cutting down on time and helping with efficiency and potentially allowing doctors to see more patients and all of those great things. And then also they were showing, Hey, if you're not really fact checking this, then it could be inaccurate. Like you gotta go double check. speaker-2: I mean, I think that's the theme of AI everywhere is basically like, yes, it will make our lives easier. There's going to be a huge learning curve, including for the AI itself. Right. And I think, yeah, that's pretty spot on. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: So I guess on that note, as we're talking about this, know, trust and transparency is huge. We deal with it on the CPG side and in lifestyle. And some of our clients, you know, as they're getting their own proprietary chat engines or, you know, doing licensing for certain AI tools, there's a lot that goes into that to make sure that there is trust and transparency. What have you seen on your side, specifically, you know, in your healthcare industry? speaker-2: Yeah, absolutely. So I think especially in healthcare, mean, super important. Every organization on the healthcare side that I've worked at has a huge lens of compliance and just a lot of parameters in place as they should to make sure that anything related to patient data or patient health information is handled the proper way and only the proper people can see it. So somebody like me doing right now technology communications would not see any sort of patient data. And I think on a similar note, that's how AI is being handled at these organizations. So for example, currently at Blue Cross, we have an AI governance function. And so they're really taking a look at any sort of AI agents, tools, whatever it may be, and making sure if we bring it on that we review it from a very risk mitigation lens, that we make sure that anything we bring on will help, will be ethical, will be safeguarded, will be transparent, and can also support the business front. And so. I would say that's not just unique to us by any means. I would say that any organization who's bringing internal tools in for their employees is probably looking at that with the same lens. speaker-0: I love that. speaker-1: Okay. So, um, Kelly, so we've talked a lot about AI and its influence in the healthcare space, in the insurance space, super intertwined and related. What else are you seeing out there in the healthcare space that is trending, anything popping at the moment that is worth our discussion here? speaker-2: Yeah, absolutely. And this, this kind of goes back on our discussion a little bit about talking to diverse, diverse employee groups, right? When you mentioned you're, you're working with communicating with factory workers. And when I communicated with hospital workers, there's, you know, a slow uptick in, in organizations that typically dealt with maybe the generation before us who were not so digital forward. now. they're actually starting to digitize a lot of their communications. you know, I can go on, pay my copay, confirm my appointment, do all that on a quick app. Whereas before, know, 10 years ago, maybe that was not a thing. So I think that sounds very dated and very behind, but if you look at the user behavior of maybe who uses the healthcare system the most, it's a generation who may prefer receiving a bill in the mail and then writing a check and then mailing it back to them. interesting to take a look and see how far we've come as humans and then how far a lot of organizations have come and then just think like some places are just starting to get back to like making a mobile app and making things more easily available for their users digitally. So that's one trend that it sounds really silly, but it's very logically as millennials age and we use the doctors more, we're going to have, think, a completely different experience than our parents had. speaker-1: One, I also think there's a movement to sandwich generations where they are taking over their parents' health care. You know, these folks and even Gen X that has ridden the wave of technology and sort of were right on that crest. ⁓ And obviously that's the way they prefer to communicate. I don't want to have to wait 20 minutes to get someone on the phone. So it actually feels like now's the time for multiple different reasons. Yeah, I love it. speaker-0: I find it so interesting. takes me back. So one of my first accounts when I started, I worked in the tech space, but I also worked on some health tech. And one of the very first accounts I had was Honeywell Scanning and Mobility. Their big thing was electronic health records. But it was when it was just coming out and you didn't have all of the records digitized. And so just getting all of that data. you know, to be digitized was a huge thing. So I feel like, and that wasn't that long ago, was, you know, 15 years ago. But so, so there's that, there's, I think it's looking at the fact that in some instances, the health industry is rapidly moving forward. think about the work being done at Sophia genetics, you know, your old company and some of the stuff that we worked on. And that was cutting edge and so advanced. then I do, think about my mom who, she's not going to check in on a mobile app for her doctor's appointment. She just wants to go 20 minutes early and walk in. think bringing those consumers along and adjusting consumer behavior takes years and years and years. So I think it's so valid what you said, Kelly, about the timing of that and getting people to really start to accept, ⁓ I pay my copay here versus at the counter when I'm checking in because that's just more efficient, why wouldn't I do that? Or I can see my test results on my chart because again, that's so much easier. I feel like now I'm at the point where if I get a piece of mail, like a bill in the mail, I'm like offended. I'm like, why would you send me a bill? speaker-1: It's three weeks till you open it, right? speaker-2: And maybe that's also brings up a point too of blending my consumer background to kind of the healthcare background, right? I think you can talk about healthcare as one whole industry, but there's really so many different subsets within it. I think distinctly different areas are the health tech space, I would say, is very similar. Like if you look at biotech, health tech companies, and there's a million and one of them popping up, and there's a lot of similarities that you can draw to the consumer space. Like I remember... I'll just use writing style as an example. Obviously with anything in the healthcare space, it's a lot more regulated. You have to be very careful in certain claims you make and certain things that you imply just based on the regulatory bodies that you deal with. A little less so on the consumer side, but there's still ways that you can kind of write a little jazzy or make things sound a little more exciting. And you kind of want to use that big grandiose language to kind of get people excited about whatever you're talking about. And so that was kind of, I was like, I've done this before. had to, you know, get people excited about XYZ recipe of the month. I can do that. Like that was again, one of my early Weber days is like writing press releases about recipes. was like, what am I doing with this? But yeah. And then maybe on, and then maybe going to like the hospital side, the insurance side, I'm not so much on external comms, but like looking at the hospital side, you want to be a little more factual, a little more clear and just help meet people where they're at, where if you think about, okay. For example, one of the things I did was make sure that the hospital website was updated. I want to make this as clear as possible so people, even if English isn't their first language, can understand what the heck they're looking at. And if they want to understand, you know, a certain symptom or a you know, a certain department that they got referred to that they can within just a few minutes of looking at that page. speaker-0: Yeah. No, also true. I do. feel like the healthcare space, there are so many different segments and elements. There's so many different lanes you can go down. We could spend hours talking about all the different spaces. There's a lot of crossover in the industries and especially our skills as you've shown, Kelly, are transferable. You can start in consumer and you can end up in health. There are transferable skills for sure, but all that to say is it's fascinating. I love talking about it. So as we wrap, I'm going to ask you the question we asked everybody. And I'm thinking right now of just, I'm inspired by your journey into healthcare because one of the big things our agency was founded on was purpose and doing something similar to you, walking away from just the block and tackle consumer and seeing where can we contribute more to the purpose and the things we're passionate about. And so because of that, we... end the pod by asking each other, what's our impact? So today I'm going to ask you in the last week or two weeks or so, or even since you started at your new company. Weeks. Yeah, five weeks. speaker-2: Five weeks, okay, perfect. speaker-0: What has your impact been? speaker-2: Yeah. So, you know, I would say I did not know this going into Blue Cross, but it's an extremely mission-driven organization and they do so much to give back to the community. And they host all the time, different employee led events where you can volunteer your hours and give back to people. And so it was such a nice surprise when I, when I joined there and I saw all these emails and I was reading more information about it. so pretty early on, I had the opportunity to volunteer for Cradles for Crayons. ⁓ They brought, you know, cartons of clothes and our job that day at least was to create essentially like outfit capsules for, you know, we had different age groups and different genders. And so I was, you know, I had like 10 year old girls that I was making it for. I'd, you know, pick out, they had a formula of like, you know, X amount of shirts, X amount of like pants and skirts. And I was trying to like create capsule wardrobes where they could mix and match things. I would say, yeah. So, and I would say too, it's a really great organization. I was always familiar. but they take such great care in ensuring that the people who are on the receiving end of their clothes receive really nice quality things. they, you know, they said, okay, they filtered out anything that looks like it was like a little shabbier. Like I had a pair of sweatpants that was kind of pilly and they were like, no, just put it. And then they, can responsibly, you know, dispose of them after. So it's not just going in the trash. They're still going to good. So I just, I loved learning about the organization and I love to be able to make a difference. And hopefully some, some gals got some cute outfits out of it. yeah. speaker-0: I like that. speaker-1: it's finding those opportunities, right? And just putting all the pieces together when it's handed to you like that through your workplace, you're so much more apt to just raise your hand. speaker-2: Exactly. Yeah, it was so nice to just be able to spend two hours and go down and do that. yeah, so I'm very lucky and that, you know, opportunities like that are made available to our employees. I love that. speaker-0: I think that's so special and it's so important that companies have those outlets for their employees because it just it builds the culture of the company. Well, thank you so much, Kelly. This was great catching up. speaker-1: It's been a great way to meet people five weeks in. ⁓ speaker-2: Yeah, thank you. And likewise, thank you so much for having me on.