OR_Sempre Health_ Amy Brown: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Kyle Wildnauer-Haigney:
Well, welcome, Amy, to the show.
Amy Brown:
Thanks, great to be here.
Kyle Wildnauer-Haigney:
So maybe to kick it off, I’d love to hear what inspires you to work in healthcare and what’s your background?
Amy Brown:
Yeah, so I began my career actually as a social worker who was working at the macro-systemic level. So my first career move out of graduate school was in state government, and I began working with the Medicaid population as well as some other vulnerable populations and started to kind of really become passionate about data at the macro level and how understanding that data, you know, deeply could actually influence change in big ways. I left state government and began a career in the private sector, working in provider-owned managed care companies as well as traditional health insurance, as well as pharma, and in all of those roles, my work was mostly operational. I led teams who were conversing with patients, providers, every day, sometimes by the tens of thousands every day. And I became really interested in how those micro conversations, when pieced together and aggregated, might contain really important insights that could fuel change within the healthcare system that would make real impact. So that’s really what inspired the move to founding Authenticx.
Kyle Wildnauer-Haigney:
That’s great, and I think we’ve all kind of heard that all the audience listening and has heard that a lot of the value within the healthcare ecosystem is really captured between those one-on-one conversations, whether it’s between you and the doctor, whether it’s between a customer service representative or telehealth professional.
Amy Brown:
Yeah, and it’s such an undervalued data source. I think that a lot of people because it’s, those conversations are usually facilitated by operations and operations has the, kind of the bad label as being the cost center of the organization, I think they’re often thought of as transactional. And what we’ve really discovered is these conversations are just chock full of emotion, of insights, of things that can help strategy or help the C-suite or help compliance or sales and marketing. It’s just amazing the richness and the value that are in there.
Kyle Wildnauer-Haigney:
I love that, and so maybe for the audience, you could tell me what Authenticx does and really what the mission of the business is.
Amy Brown:
Yes, so Authenticx’s mission is to help humans understand humans, and we have specifically taken that mission into the healthcare space, pharma, payers, and providers. And what we do is take in bidirectional customer conversations. These might be voice, recorded voice conversations, they might be chats, emails, any kind of two-way communication that’s voice or text-based. We have machine learning models and AI that listens at scale to the big themes that are happening within that set of interactions. And then we allow human users that go into our platform to really dive deep in particular areas of content that they care most about. So to put that into a real-life example, if I’m a patient services team member or brand leader and I really want to understand what might be causing friction in the customer journey for patients to actually get on therapy, they’ve been diagnosed, they have a prescription, but they haven’t yet filled that prescription; we can go into our set of conversational data and really understand what’s driving friction at that point in the customer’s journey, understand it deeply, and then be able to use that data to make some decisions on how to pivot our program.
Kyle Wildnauer-Haigney:
Sure, that makes a ton of sense. And I guess one question is, how is that different than what is available today, or maybe what was available before you founded Authenticx?
Amy Brown:
Sure, there’s really two key areas or tools, I should say, that pharma leaders and healthcare organizations leverage today that we have found to be not as helpful. The first is industry-agnostic speech analytics platforms. There are other speech analytics platforms out there, but typically they have kind of the infrastructure, the tools, but the pharma organization has to figure out what research topics to look for, listen for, how to build algorithms to go find that. And what Authenticx does is we come with prebuilt algorithms that are based on our own experience, listening to millions of interactions, and the people on our side who listen to these customer interactions are not just kind of data enablers. There are people who worked in healthcare and understand the context and the nuance of what’s actually happening in the conversation so they can best interpret that conversation and create our ML models. The second kind of thing that most pharma organizations and other healthcare companies do today is they solicit feedback from their customers in the form of surveys. It might be a post-call survey or an annual customer survey, and what we’re hearing from industry leaders is that the data gleaned is just not deep enough to really inform strategy at the level you need to. You might get numeric scores and you might get some free text comments, but understanding really deeply what’s on the mind of that customer is really challenging. And so because customer conversations happen every day, it’s a renewable resource, insights, and it has really opened up a whole new channel for brand teams to leverage.
Kyle Wildnauer-Haigney:
I love that and really structuring that unstructured data, right, and making it useful. What have been some of the outcomes or maybe the improvement in the business that brand teams or other pharma manufacturer teams have kind of achieved with your product?
Amy Brown:
Yeah, so on the brand and customer experience side and patient journey side, we’ve seen brand teams make quick pivots to brand launches based on what they’re hearing. So they may change marketing materials, website instructions. They might simplify their patient enrollment journey to help reduce friction for that customer and improve understanding. Compliance teams use our platform to understand what might be driving missed adverse events in conversations, not only identifying that there’s a missed adverse event reported, but what was going on in that conversation that led to that, the reporting of it, and also the agent perhaps missing that that adverse event has been reported. And then operations leaders use our product to understand that agent side of the conversation. So whether it’s a patient support specialist or a nurse navigator, they want to know how effectively are my humans, my people, at delivering our brand promises? And so they use our data to improve ongoing training quality of their team.
Kyle Wildnauer-Haigney:
Wow, I mean, that’s just a diverse kind of set of use cases across the organization. Really seems like you guys have found a nice product-market fit to really drive a ton of value for pharma. I’d love to hear when you have been kind of running this company, what were some of the biggest setbacks that you experienced, and what was the key learning there? If you don’t mind sharing.
Amy Brown:
No, I’d love to share. Well, when I started the business, you know, I had kind of a vision and obviously a point of inspiration, but I didn’t know exactly how I was going to get there, right? And so the early days were very meager and frugal. I spent time really kind of exploring my idea in a really scrappy way, right? I used my savings from my corporate career to build out an MVP product. You know, I hired a developer, an independent contractor to build out an MVP product. And I went about the work of selling the idea and just testing in really manual ways, testing the idea and seeing what value was there, and I learned some things. I learned that the idea did have value, but there were happy surprises. One of them is leaders are designed to find problems and fix them, which is important. But one of the really happy things I learned is that there is so much heartfelt goodness in these conversations. There are reflections of gratitude, of life-saving therapies, and so it was really, really amazing to see how leaders responded to kind of the strengths that were expressed through these conversations, and I had no idea that my product would end up being something that is actually reminding the whole pharma enterprise of their noble purpose and their noble cause. They use the literal voice of the customer to inspire entire teams of individuals, and that’s been really cool. And then the other thing I’ve learned is just the power of listening. You know, it is important to take massive amounts of unstructured data and structure it so that we can make informed decisions, right? But there’s something very special about the human voice and it’s very moving for our clients who are corporate leaders, right, to marry that structured data with the literal voice of the customer, and that’s really what incites action.
Kyle Wildnauer-Haigney:
Well, that, absolutely love that, and sounds like it’s been an exciting journey and you’ve built something very unique and impactful in Authenticx. I guess one thing I’d love to hear from you is you’re looking ahead, right? In the next 2 to 5 years, what are you most excited about today, kind of in the context of your business and just patient impact overall?
Amy Brown:
I am so excited about solving true healthcare problems and I’ll give you an example. Like today, we’re obviously focused on a lot of operational challenges with the healthcare system, right? How do we reduce complexity for patients? How do we remove barriers to getting them on therapy? But what we’re also discovering from this data source is that there are insights around social determinants of health, there are insights around impacts of health inequities. Because these are human conversations where patients are talking about the social factors in their life. And I see a world where this conversational data is actually making it over to the clinical side of the house, the caregiver side of the house, to allow more responsive action to be taken, more interventions so that we can actually start to drive at health outcomes like we all really want to do.
Kyle Wildnauer-Haigney:
Yeah, yeah. Very exciting opportunity ahead of us. And maybe before we conclude, do you share just a closing thought and where listeners can get in touch with you?
Amy Brown:
Sure, closing thought would be don’t underestimate the power of your conversational data. If you’ve never listened to a customer conversation that’s happening somewhere in your organization, I encourage you to go do so and see what you find. When you do that, you can get in touch with Authenticx by going to our website, www.Authenticx.com, and we’d love to talk.
Kyle Wildnauer-Haigney:
Awesome. Well, Amy, it was a pleasure speaking with you today. Have a wonderful day and thank you so much.
Amy Brown:
Thanks for having me, Kyle.
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