What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Reshaping Healthcare: How Ring Central's Cloud Communication Fuels Innovation and Patient Care
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Prepare to be taken on a journey through the dynamic intersection of healthcare and technology as we sit down with John from Ring Central. With a background that spans military service to CIO and now as an industry principal, John's story is as compelling as it is informative. We dissect how Ring Central's innovative cloud-based communication tools are not just improving healthcare operations but are reshaping them, ushering in an era of unparalleled productivity and patient care, even after the trials of a global pandemic.
In our exchange, John and I explore the ripples of digital transformation within the healthcare sector, revealing how telehealth and remote patient monitoring are just the tips of the technological iceberg. Staff satisfaction soars and patient care becomes more personalized with these advancements, all underpinned by the ironclad security and compliance standards that reign supreme in the cloud services domain. This episode promises enlightening perspectives on how embracing such innovations can lead to a health system that is not only more efficient but also more human-centric, capturing the essence of what it means to deliver healthcare in the modern age.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone, I am super excited for this chat today with Ring Central, with a true innovator and thought leader in the healthcare space. Healthcare IT is a particular obsession of mine and Ring Central has been making so much news, particularly this week, so it's a really timely time to have us here. John, how are you?
Speaker 2:Good to meet you. Great Doing great. Thank you very much. Great to be on and love your show.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being here. We're going to dive into the mission at Ring Central in healthcare, but you have a fascinating background. Maybe introduce yourself and your background. You've been CIO and general manager and CEO of organizations. We're really delighted to have you as a guest here. Sure, tell us about your background.
Speaker 2:We'll spend the hour if you like, but briefly. Join Ring Central. I'm the industry principal for healthcare at Ring Central. Those are industry verticals, but our industry vertical team is primarily a sales enablement role. So I have a responsibility globally across all our segments to align and make sure that we're articulating our sales strategy discreetly across all those environments. At the same time, I'm very engaged with clients. By design. I'm involved in deals and working with sales, so I get to hear directly from our clients what the challenges are, what hospitals are dealing with, what clinics are dealing with, and then I take that information I act as kind of the voice of the customer back to our marketing and product development teams as we build our strategy in healthcare. So I love the role. It's a pivot role, leveraging my experience both operationally in being a customer as well as my work directly with sales. Join the company in June of 2020, right in the middle of the lockdown at COVID. So I met the whole team through our remote tools, which was kind of neat. They just shipped me a lot of stuff and I plugged in.
Speaker 2:Before that, I spent seven years at Gartner Research. I was what's called an executive partner, that is, an ex-CIO they hire to be consultants to their current client CIOs. You have the full range of the Gartner, research, canon, and then you bring your personal expertise as well to that. So every month I'd meet with 20 to 25 CIOs and talk about digital transformation, talk about CRM tools, talk about transformation of the workforce and staff, and so my portfolio is probably 50% healthcare payer, provider, etc. But I really got to see the challenges from a kind of omniscient point of view of the theory of change and then how the challenges of healthcare being historically laggard in IT. They love tech but IT is something they adopt very slowly. So being watching that world evolve made my move to ring exciting because I saw an agent of transformation right Ring central's core fabric becomes a very powerful agent that I think can have an enormous impact on healthcare, which I'm sure we'll get into.
Speaker 2:Prior to that I was in New York just ran a small startup for just about a year and a half as president of a company, but then prior to that it's been five years on the West Coast in Seattle as CIO at Delta Dental of Washington. So I was a buyer side, ran a team, ran a data center. Ironically, I was there during the cloud evolution to storage. So I was there when AWS and Azure first came out, reluctant adopter at that point in time. Very similar activity happening right now in the communications world. Right, the cloud is here, it's coming, it's just a matter of time. So we're excited about what we can bring to this market. And then you mentioned GM. That was my Microsoft time back in the day and started in telecommunications Right after my military service as an officer in the Air Force. I was in telecommunications for about a decade in the 90s, without dating myself, doing all kinds of internet and technology in that space, which was a crazy market, but great to be here today.
Speaker 1:Wonderful to have you and thank you for your service in the Air Force. You know all about mission clearly. What is the mission to bring central in healthcare? What is the value proposition at a high level?
Speaker 2:Well, if you look at our intelligent connected experiences is really, or intelligent connected experiences is really.
Speaker 2:What we want to do is create an environment where, again, your communications are becoming a utility right.
Speaker 2:You plug into a partner in the cloud and now you can actually exercise the work you need to do, having all the communications that you're disposal through a service model and through the services offered by that partner. So, whether it's voice, video messaging or faxing, whether it's contact center collect the least simplization of care, or whether it's working directly on reshaping how you do care or how you manage administration, all those elements we think can be done in a consolidated, centralized way and then offer a kind of optimization in the process. So we, as Ring Central, are innovators in the obviously leaders in the pure UCAS cloud space and CCAS space. We see ourselves as innovators as well. You just talked about a number of our product releases. We bought an AI company a while ago, so we're AI centric in all our next generation of tools and, I believe, all those providing credible options for the healthcare marketplace. The challenge is getting to them, adopting them, using them and then transforming the requisite workflow that makes a really powerful change in the healthcare space.
Speaker 1:Change is good. Change is much needed in healthcare, as you know better than I and one of the drivers for adopting Ring Central is staff productivity. Staff is so overloaded these days and you're able to talk about things like 50% increase in staff productivity. How are you able to demonstrate that that's a pretty spectacular outcome from deploying leading edge tech? What's driving the change there?
Speaker 2:Well, in some of the more simple cases for example, a contact center agent, for example, who's answering calls for a long, being able to tell me route calls and being able to more quickly answer and get information to a patient or even to take that call from a human call to an automated call drives a ton of productivity and cost takeout within that very simple structure. And when you're getting a million calls a month at a big, large enterprise, they can add up very quickly into the cost models. We've done case studies around things like if you can right now, today I'll give an example 85% of providers still use FACTSs today, which is interesting, shocking. These are LNGMA statistics. 55% of referrals are using FACTS machines today in providers. That's a primary care provider saying you need to see a specialist, and this is a revenue generation. So when you offer that next meeting, that's gonna be a specialized doctor or nurse or a practitioner, so that's gonna be a high revenue item for a provider environment. Of those, 45% fail because it's not a closed loop scenario, it's just the fact that goes into the ethernet or into the world into the ether and then it never goes anywhere. Just adding, say, 10% reduction in those failures, putting a closed loop system around your digital FACTS environment. Moving that quickly or even moving that all to maybe a messaging system, gives you an incredible opportunity to drive revenue, because your referral turn goes down, your referrals that get accomplished successfully go up. You get more scheduled appointments for specialists. At the same time, you operate in a much more clean environment on the cost side. So we've done a number of these small case studies, but because in healthcare they're done over and over again millions of times, they create incredible return on investment.
Speaker 2:So to your point on productivity just getting cleaner environments around executables today provide value right off the board. So we look at it like a and there's also a consolidation option there. That productivity from just optimization is one element of it. But more creatively and this is where it gets interesting when you talk about digital transformation the productivity of changing the way the workforce, the care professionals and patients collaborate, taking a true collaboration environment off the administrative side but also using it linked to the care side, is a very powerful option.
Speaker 2:And to start to recreate workflows on care delivery, including remote care delivery like telehealth and remote patient monitoring, for example, gives incredible options to think about how to be more productive, whether you're in behavior health, whether you're in hospital systems, whether you're in clinics and understanding how those workflows are today, what those limitations are and what those limitations get released from when you move to a cloud or an agile fabric, gives you a really powerful option for productivity. So that's what we're starting to see from our clients. So you see increased call answering rates, for example. You see decreased costs. You see a much more satisfied workforce. All those things come to play because you've got flexibility and they all drive productivity in their own way.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, it's a virtuous circle, as they say. And let's drill down on staff satisfaction. You know, it's no secret that healthcare workers of all stripes are under tremendous pressure. They're kind of overwhelmed. There's a lot of burnout, a lot of exhaustion from the pandemic. You know how can you, you know, increase staff satisfaction through technology? I mean, is it the ease of use, the user experience, these sorts of things, what else?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the first critical thing for us is security HIPAA compliance, right. To be able to redesign care, you need to have security goals to do so. And so the one thing about all our services, every element I mentioned to date, all the functionality we have to date, they're all HIPAA compliant, high trust certified environments. You know, R, we have a whole compliance engine, a site where you can go to on our website that talks to all our compliance. You see copies of everything. So that inclusion, signing VAAs as part of our agreements with clients, is all critical, so that now you can start to find where you actually deploy care, where care providers are.
Speaker 2:If you look at what has happened with a lot of these clinics, they've expanded very quickly. If you look at, say, clinics alone as one subset, that aggregation of doctors and specialists into a centralized group, but now with, say, instead of 20 clinics, 50 clinics, the geography gets very complex. So the ability to bring specialists and patient and location together in an old model where you had phones, you had to go to the office, is much more immensely complex than when you have a virtual environment and you can support those visits or those specialists or those advisors through virtual environments and the cloud uses that incredible flexibility. So if I need to get a consult and I can see that that doctor is available because I have contextual environments with my collaboration tool, I cannot get that doctor real time to do a consult and maybe accelerate discharge, change surgery, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:We have clients doing things like virtual rounds, where an internist on the floor of the hospital will get a specialist on a video call and they'll jointly do rounds with patients in orthopedics or something else. So those kind of Opportunities to grow are incredibly powerful and we're not dictating this to our clients. We're saying to our clients we're gonna give you the option to attack where you have the most acute need. We just want to give you flexibility To do it at the pace you want and you stop with just your phones. But because there's so much stacked into that application, you start to build more and more usage and more and more consolidation on a single partner.
Speaker 1:A brilliant approach and, last but certainly not least, patient satisfaction. There's nothing more stressful than dealing with antiquated communications Outside the healthcare system or inside, you know, with you know, voicemail, jail and I VR hell that you often see with legacy systems. How can we improve patient satisfaction, patient experience and for patients and their families, loved ones, etc.
Speaker 2:Well, this is probably one of the most acute areas we're targeting, because what we find is that people might love their doctor, but their hospital, their healthcare system or their office they're not too much fans of, because they sit on hold for 30 minutes on Monday morning. They get a simple question answered. We've taken the approach that we want, with our communications tools, to do two things. One is to integrate with the key systems that allow you to answer questions for patients and get them to the right location and for their needs as soon as possible, to take out the delays that are involved systemically in whole transfer, whole transfer type environments. Secondarily, we want to be able to engage them in a digital model, the way they're engaged with other consumer based products, whether it's Amazon, social media environments. They want context, they want to know that we know them, they want to know the history that they've had with us, that we collected and we learned from Right. So those are all parts of the patient engagement model that we're very focused on right now.
Speaker 2:So, as we roll out our baseline tools, we've always been key about looking at how we offer A digital front door that's omnichannel, that can talk to different generations on the media they most like, but it's text messaging, voice calls, people like to chat bots, whatever it may be. We add to that the context of integrating with the E M R, so we understand that when we see you calling in, I grab your record and understand your history. So, okay, evan, we see that you have X or why? So we can now talk to you in a contextualized basis based on your history. We're not treating you as one of a million same objects. And then, thirdly, as I get smarter, we start to listen to the call and understand what's happening real time and where to direct that conversation and where it goes to make that engagement the most possible. And that's where we're bringing all three layers together with our investment in a I are aggregation tools around being the digital front door, and our integrations with E M R is to bring that context the conversation.
Speaker 1:Brilliant approach. So you work with so many healthcare systems and providers can't talk about them all, but there's one in particular. You've done some press releases with Sun River Health Maybe you are Sun River Health and kind of what have they deployed with Ring Central?
Speaker 2:Well. They've deployed our contact center and unified communications, what we found at Sun River. They're a great organization. They're a federally qualified health center, so they really service poor communities. So it's critical that they get costs managed well for that environment. They're dealing with a lot of patients in Medicaid, for example, so we were able to provide them a system that allowed them, first of all, to answer all the calls they had. Their call answer rate went up 97% from, say, mid 70s and that was critical because these patients probably may have struggled getting access to the carrier or to the care provider.
Speaker 2:So it was key that we focused on quality of the network we provided to them to answer the phones for the patients out there.
Speaker 2:Secondarily, they found costs came down because, being able to kind of manage their distribution calls and their workforce, they were able to make the calls cheaper, reduce the time on the phone and answer more calls. So the aggregate cost model to answer, say, a thousand calls went down on a per group basis. So that allowed them to overall have cost savings in their network alone. And so the combination of those two things, powered now by a workforce that's now distributed with their own application that follows them wherever they go to be able to log in to calls, get on videos from their home cell phone privately, securely, without having their home numbers being violated, was a very powerful tool for them to give that flexibility to their staff to be creative about creating solutions as well. That helped their patient base as well. So a very great example of kind of having an impact on the community but having an impact on the care providers, and I think that's something we really relish if we can do that in our business model.
Speaker 1:So well done. So in terms of other providers, you've done a lot of work in the dental space, heartland dental. You're dealing with very large, distributed offices, networks of offices. What was a deployment like that, where you have, you know, dozens, hundreds of different offices?
Speaker 2:Well, there are 1,400 offices for Heartland.
Speaker 2:They're enormous, the largest DSO in the country, that's Dental Service Organization. They aggregated and I think you're growing about 150 clinics or dental offices a year, incredible growth rate. So obviously, the ability for us, just first and very simply, the cloud's ability, to adopt a new office without having to put infrastructure in place. Put things, you might want to put a physical phone in place, but beyond that everything else deployed seamlessly through the cloud. You can basically load up, add a new office, add the numbers, real time, and it's all in the cloud. So as long as you have an internet connection to that office, guess what? You now have a phone system and that's incredibly powerful when you're growing 150 offices that historically might have been on five different carrier environments and handsets and all that stuff. We can aggregate that very quickly. So that first is the power of the cloud, for growth is the first thing.
Speaker 2:Now that we've seen kind of these industrialized sites like leaders, like Heartland, what we're seeing now is kind of a management of call volume in the aggregate. So because we have a contact center solution and a UC solution. So think of contact center as centralized, scaled agents on the phone all day long answering calls and then at the same time, your local dentist wants to seem to you like they're answering your call right there at their office. They want to be very community based. They want to make sure that they're answering the call to the patients they've had for decades and they don't want to become a machine that's impersonal. So the ability to really again understand where those calls are and what they're going Again, many patients want to just schedule an appointment and they don't necessarily need to talk to a doctor or a nurse to do that or dentist or a nurse to do that. So there's a way you can set that up. So we're now able to take the collective whole of aggregated calling and distributed calling map those where best serviced and automated, driving the cost down for Heartland, driving the experience up for the patients, but at the same time making sure that we're listening to what's happening. So, for example, one of the things they use AI for at Heartland that's very cool is if it's a new patient calling and they don't initially get through and they go to a voicemail or IVR, that notification from that dialogue that it's a new patient clearly gets routed to an outbound call and within 20 minutes they call that patient to make sure they get on board and it's a revenue driver for that.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of people who are dialing for doctors when they're in looking at dentists. So you get an incredible set of tools that you can customize to your business model. We have other great large DSOs. Some, for example, take every call at the center first and then distribute calls to the clinics based on need, based on what the function is. Others go right to clinics and overflow to a call center so that they don't drop any calls. Both of those models work. That flexibility works. It just depends on your business model. We service both and we service both intelligently and by doing so we give incredible optionality to these clients to really build the best engagement model with their patients as possible.
Speaker 1:Oh, well, said, that's excellent. We touched on security a couple of times to talk about the impetus for fundamentally for security, patient privacy, data protection and the various certifications that you have to go through to comply with those requirements. It's no small feat these days. What's happening?
Speaker 2:there. Well, this is one of the nice things I inherited when joining RingCentral right. The team of engineers, I think, in this organization are in parallel, just the rock solid network we put in place. If you look at our history of five nines for the last 20 quarters, I mean that's incredible reliability built in by design. As part of that forward thinking, the construct of when you think about HIPAA compliance and what's protected right, how do you protect data Encryption at rest, encryption in transport, those types of sub-engineering functions this group does extremely well and has been doing for a long time. They've set the standard in the cloud for UCAS. By doing so, we can clearly meet the obligations of securing data and protecting data as needed that are requisite in the HIPAA rules and what's met tested every year by us in our high trust compliance. That's been very helpful to be able to start to execute models in the healthcare space.
Speaker 2:I think it's one of those things that people think of the cloud as insecure. They're not sure about the reliability of it because I have my PBX in the basement and I have my data center. That's a thing of the past, just like Amazon. This goes to the trend I talked about earlier in 07 and 08, when Amazon was coming, everyone thought, oh, aws, it's not secure. I stored in my own data center on my own servers. Guess what? They got a lot more security expertise than you do.
Speaker 2:I think it's the same model here, where the investment we're making, we lead the R&D side, for example, in the UK we're going to continue to give our clients. From day one, you step to the forefront of technology. By just signing up for our phone service, you now have the most advanced network in the world at your disposal. Oh, by the way, all our new innovations you now get to get as part of your service model by design, because it's embedded in the network itself. That's been our philosophy. Applying that to healthcare has been a powerful tool we can use. Obviously, as I said earlier, signing the BAAs and establishing the credibility to support the requirements of HIPAA has been part of our business model. But again, it's built on the rock solid environment we have in terms of engineering and the solutions we've built in terms of the common space that allow us to basically easily pass those bars of security and privacy.
Speaker 1:Well said, we're off to the races here in 2024. Already a super busy year in the healthcare space. What are you excited about Any trips travel coming up? Obviously we've got HIMS and all the various shows, but I imagine you'll be on the road quite a bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've got some people at HIMS this year. We like Obvious Vive, which is in LA in February. Hims is a great show. We'll have some people at HIMS. We've got some appointments set up there as well. We've got Enterprise Connect at the end of March, which is a big show for the cloud space. I'll be there as well. We'll be talking with a number of our partners across the board about some of the APIs integrations that are creating next generation solutions. It's exciting there.
Speaker 2:We like to host local environments in cities where we can bring together One of the things I like. When I was a CIO, I loved going with some peers in my local city, for example, to a dinner, like 10, 15 of us and just sharing ideas. I think that's where, if you want to get the CIO's attention, the best way to do it is to have them just share ideas with their peers and maybe introduce some technology thoughts to give them feedback. We're trying to do that In a lot of cases. We'll be having dinners Millennium Alliance dinners, for example, as our partner on the coordination of that in Dallas, in San Francisco, in Philadelphia. If you're in those regions, look for those environments. We'd love to have you Hear about your challenges, talk about some solutions and where the future's heading. That's our model as we go out there.
Speaker 2:It's the balance of the big shows to make sure that we're up to speed and we're creating brand recognition, because I think in a lot of cases everything is going to be blunt. Ring Central is just not seen as a healthcare brand because we just haven't been at the forefront. We believe we bring so much to the healthcare vertical that we want to open as many eyes as possible. That's why we're really thankful to be on your show as well because of your impact. I think the more you look into Ring as a core provider supporting healthcare, the more happy you'll be into the results. We've got some great stuff coming Again. We're building the most flexible network for growth as possible. Really, the art of the possible gets pretty powerful.
Speaker 1:Well, that's exciting. The only thing missing from that was Boston. We need to add that to your itinerary for road shows.
Speaker 2:We were there last year.
Speaker 1:So yes, we'll get back to the bottom In the North End, which you probably know pretty well. So this must be extremely gratifying for you personally as well as professionally. When you go into a specialist or a doctor, do you poke around see what kind of communications infrastructure, IT, they have, or do you kind of leave that?
Speaker 2:Well, I've finally mentioned that I am a bit of a geek. Yes, every time I do, I ask it's funny. One of the things that's interesting my old I just moved from New York to North Carolina, but in New York my primary care physician for the last 10 years would basically sit down, talk to me for five minutes and then pull a keyboard in front of him and just start entering his Epic data in real time because they were in Epic, that system. So I'm always asking what's going on? What kind of system do you use? And while I understand what he was doing and he hit on our good friends as well as he was a very competent doctor the fact that Epic kind of got in front of us and became the center of the discussion, answering all the questions that the protocol prescribed as part of the visit, was kind of interesting.
Speaker 2:I think what we're really seeing with healthcare is, as communications and IT is really catching up to care, we're going to allow doctors to do what they do best, which is talk to patients and spend time with patients. You think about voice recording, you think about telehealth recording, you think about translation we want to give the doctors and again, the one thing we haven't covered Evan is, with this new technology, now you can, if you'd like, capture all of it right. Every call, every communication department you have, every message could be correlated and integrated into a history for that patient. So now, not only do you have the doctor's perspective based on what are he or the nurses remember entered into Epic in the notes, you now could have the entire history of interaction with that patient, what they said, what you said, highlights as well, captured as a composite of that health record. So now it's the patient's point of view brought to life real time.
Speaker 2:And I think what you're seeing in communications is that future is that, as we start to understand record and capture, we want to know the history.
Speaker 2:If you were on a chatbot for five minutes and transferred, or when I VR to chatbot and then chatbot to agent, we're collecting all that data. We want to know that you spend 10 minutes with our chatbot before you're on the agent, because it's important for your experience. If you don't, then you're blind to that and that's where we see we're at a ton of value. And I think when you get to actual care and care management, telehealth and in-house sessions over time will all be captured real time. And you know that technology is out there, it's everywhere, right, nuance and others are thinking through that with Epic right. How do we start to capture the voice of the patient real time and then understand care delivery and care continuity using that data, and then analytics on top of that, and of course, ai is the advance of that too. So the whole concept of taking the content of communications into the equation of analytics and data pools, for example, is a whole next generation of care that we haven't even scratched the surface of yet.
Speaker 1:Wow. Well, speaking of scratching the surface, that was quite a mic drop moment. We saved that for the end. I suspect I could wind you up and you could go on for like a couple of hours here. Your enthusiasm is really infectious. But thanks for joining and just sharing a little peek behind the curtain and I'm sure we'll meet up at one of the many events this year. Thanks, John.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the platform. Evan, great to talk to you. Take care everyone Stay safe. Thank you.