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?
Digital Workers: Saving Healthcare's Back Office
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Ever wonder why healthcare costs keep rising while hospitals struggle financially? The answer might lie in what Ananth Manivannan Founder @ Resolvd AI, calls "the swivel chair problem" – the countless hours healthcare professionals spend manually transferring data between systems instead of focusing on patient care.
The journey behind Resolvd AI began in an ICU room, where Ananth watched nurses smuggle basic supplies like pillowcases between departments while his parent battled a brain tumor. This striking illustration of broken healthcare operations sparked a mission to fix the invisible workflows crippling hospitals from within. Today, Resolvd AI works with the very same hospitals that saved his parent's life.
Healthcare's back office faces a perfect storm: growing mountains of unstructured data trapped in PDFs and faxes, critical knowledge that exists only in employees' heads, and staffing shortages that force existing teams to work 80-90 hour weeks. When leaders ask for the 7-10 additional staff members they desperately need, budget constraints make approval impossible. Meanwhile, revenue leaks through cracks in processes like surgical billing, where items used in operating rooms go uncharged due to overwhelmed manual workflows.
Resolvds digital workers don't replace humans – they liberate them. By automating the repetitive tasks nobody wants to do, they allow clinical staff to focus on patients and give operations teams their weekends back. The system analyzes communication patterns, identifies process bottlenecks, and preserves institutional knowledge beyond individual employees. As one hospital executive put it, their biggest fear wasn't AI – it was "what happens when Sydney gets sick" and no one can process critical workflows.
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Hi everyone, evident Irma here, your host of the Vera Health Conversations. Today we're welcoming Anans and we're excited to talk about Resolve, a Resolve AI company that's using AI to help companies resolve issues and make better use of their data to keep systems running smoothly, and make better use of their data to keep systems running smoothly. We'll explore what they do, how they do it and where this technology is headed.
Speaker 2:Welcome, anans. Awesome, thank you both for having me. Super excited to be here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks for being here. Really timely and interesting topic. Before we dive in, maybe give us the big picture for those new to Resolvedai. Great name, great website. What's the big idea?
Speaker 2:What's the problem you're looking to solve? Yeah, so Resolved is essentially solving what we call the swivel chair problem, which is, for the last sort of two decades, I think, everybody's been focused on implementing ERPs and CRMs and EHRs. But what we've found is, when you actually look at the work being done, it's actually all the work that's happening in between these systems, where people are looking up contracts in one system, finding SKU numbers, maybe inputting into a different system, reconciling some data, skew numbers, maybe inputting into a different system, reconciling some data and what we found is this is causing a lot of bog and slowdown for, you know, analysts and different people within the enterprise, and so we want to solve that issue and we think digital workers and modern technology is the best way to sort of do that, so we can enable people to work on their core focus their core focus.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. So you do a lot of work in healthcare and, as I know really well, a lot of what drives entrepreneurs in healthcare in particular stems from, potentially, their personal experience or something they've themselves came across as a problem, and then they went ahead to solve it. So what was your big aha moment, something that inspired you to start this company?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no great question. So I think for us we got into healthcare through more of a personal journey. So when we initially started, my background comes from supply chain, from food and beverage at companies like PepsiCo, and then also software engineering at companies like Capital One, and so when we first engaged with companies, it was like your large tech enterprises so things like Datadog or Mozilla, companies like that. But actually somewhere in the middle I had a parent that was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and so we ended up spending a lot of time in the ICU together, and it's really there that I started to realize, hey, a lot of the sort of back office functions, supply chain, procurement that you don't really think about impacting patient care, we're kind of being brought to the forefront. So, for example, in the ICU we would have nurses hiding pillowcases and pillows underneath their scrubs, bringing them into the room and saying things like hey, don't tell anybody where I got this from or who gave this to you, because they're getting it from different departments or different hallways. And you know this is not even to mention things like IV pumps or catheters or things that are needed. And so you start to learn and ask questions of hey, you know why is this the issue? Why is it hard to get a pillowcase? Why is it hard to get IV pumps? Why is it hard to get the materials you need? And it started to remind me a lot of the work I used to do at Capital One in food and beverage, but this time it's much, much more serious when you think about the ICU. And these are the patients that you know they need this stuff it's not necessarily an. If they need it, these are the people that should be getting it at the forefront. So I think that's sort of how we segued in, and actually the first two hospitals that we started working with as customers are the same two hospitals that treated and cured my parent of their brain tumor.
Speaker 3:So it's actually really special to be able to work with them and kind of help improve their processes. Wonderful, and you're really putting AI to use, putting it in action. So maybe talk about how the platform you built leverages AI, especially when dealing with the challenge of unstructured data. Kind of speed up these incidents that you described.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%, I think. So first I'd like to define unstructured data. I think it's something you hear people talk about all the time and most people probably have no idea what it's referring to and just kind of nod their head like, yeah, yeah, of course, unstructured data, big problem. So we kind of categorize it in two ways, right. So the first way of unstructured data is how I think most people interpret it, which is, hey, there's a lot of data that's kind of stuck in formats that we can't utilize it in. So think about contracts, pdfs, faxes these are things that you can't just plug into an ERP and it's going to do something and organize that data for you. It's naturally always had to be done by humans to actually go in.
Speaker 2:We've even spoken to places where they have what they call PDF analysts and the rule is I don't even know if that's the title, but it's an even less sexy you know reality where they're literally sitting by computers and digitizing PDFs by hand into these different CRMs and ERPs and EHRs and it's really a nightmare. But that is sort of. I think the first core of unstructured data and where we like to focus a lot of our time is hey, how can we operationalize some of this data for you, get it out of these formats and into sort of you know? How is work being done? Today isn't really documented.
Speaker 2:I think you know there's a lot of tacit knowledge, especially in the healthcare field. Just think of things like medical coding, charge codes. You know how is the best way to add certain products or things within systems. These are things that nobody really knows. If you ask a leader today how work gets done, right, the answers are we know it's getting done but we don't know and we sometimes may not want to know exactly the process to how it's being executed. And I think that visibility can be kind of by implementing our stuff inside these workflows, we can kind of pull out some of the insights of how work's being done and, more importantly, where's the opportunity to improve and insert automation.
Speaker 1:Wow. Well, anans, of course, thank you for sharing your personal story and kind of the origin of the company. You mentioned ICU, which is, of course, intensive care unit. You also mentioned another you know alphabet soup parts here, with ERP and EHR and others. So let's go more towards your slogan of healing the revenue cycle for companies, automating their supply chain. You already started talking about it. You mentioned workflow, which is a very important, critical part of any healthcare-related operation. So you automate the most painful workflows hospital operations. Some examples I know about is stalled contracts, broken billing processes, a tangible understanding of how you solve the problems that lead to improve patient care. Even if we might not never see your company, you know working because it's all behind the scenes.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think you know that's part of the key. I just got back from this healthcare supply chain and resource conference called ARM in Denver, and you won't believe when people go around the horn and kind of say why they work in healthcare. These are all back office supply chain people. Nobody will ever see or know their name or the work they're doing. But every single one of them said they're in this not because the money is the best they can all make more money in different industries but because they care about the patient. And so I just want to reiterate that. You know, no matter what, even though the work's not being seen, everybody's sort of in this for patient care at the end of the day. But when we talk about how we can heal revenue cycle, I think there's a few kind of obvious ways people think about revenue cycle management. Hey, can you cut costs and head count here? Can you renegotiate contracts with our vendors and suppliers and save money there? But there's a lot of ways kind of in these. We call them like hidden workflows, where revenues tends to leak, and so I'll give you one example that's not super obvious to a ton of people, which is the OR will use all sorts of items right for their surgeries for any kind of clinical type of things that they need. But a lot of times when they go to try to file that they use these items for billing, they'll find that in Epic the item doesn't exist. So if they use the catheter for Medline, they go into it and they want to charge for it, or they use the knee implant right, which can be really really expensive If it's not in the system. They create something that's called a non-catalog file, which is hey, we couldn't find this item, but here's the best description of what it is Knee implant purple. It was long, go figure it out. And as the surgeries pile up right, you can have hundreds of surgeries a day, depending on size of hospital. It lands on a very small sort of MMIS or value analysis or backend supply chain team to actually process and go find and do that swivel chair workflow that we talked about of.
Speaker 2:Okay, we have a knee implant. Who can we go find? If it's on contract or off contract? If it's on contract, what's the price point for it? What's the unit of measure? What's the quantities? What's all the information we need? Is there any updated within our emails on the data for this knee implant and then what are the proper charge codes.
Speaker 2:But that process tends to take a lot, a lot of time, and as they're bogged down with other responsibilities, sometimes these things never get billed for, and so the hospital is either straining supplier and vendor relationships by not paying for the items or they're leaking revenue by just missing them completely, and so I think that's one of the issues that nobody would even think about is a huge problem, but it definitely is and it kind of falls under this.
Speaker 2:There's a big relation here on the back end of back office and supply chain, procurement and purchasing, contracting and the clinical side, where they're all working together. But what's really interesting is just the work that we also give clinicians to do, like, for example, nurses. When they go through kind of a procedure card of materials that were used, they're supposed to look up and assign billing codes for those materials. A lot of the times they don't have time to go and look at what's the appropriate billing code for each and everything, so they'll just pick one that's in the general category, and even that can cause huge price variations depending on what codes they use. Sometimes they, you know, can just put in kind of very catch-all codes and that's where the hospital is supposed to use that to bill the patient and the insurer. So this is, you know, a lot of the back office stuff that you can kind of uncover and actually save a ton of revenue and operational spend by automating and kind of digitizing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well done. What are? You know? Some of the risks that you foresee in kind of ignoring this unstructured data and capturing it and categorizing it, managing it in an intelligent way, because it's only growing. The amount of data is astounding. What are the risks there?
Speaker 2:I think the risks present themselves in all sorts of ways. You know, for starters, if you just think about unstructured data growing, one reason it grows is because unstructured data is really easy to send someone and it's very, very difficult to work with. So when I'm sending you a PDF and saying, hey, people see this all the time, go edit a couple paragraphs in this PDF. Somebody has to convert that into a Google Doc. All the formatting gets all messed up and they go type it in. Well, think about that happening with medical documents, with medical Things. You know much, much more serious, much, much more complex. And so this data growing is you're not able to actually have visibility into your data and how it's impacting your system as a whole unless you can operationalize it, put it into actually spreadsheets and your algorithms, to actually understand how it's impacting things like your supply chain and your bottom line. That's the one. The second is everybody sort of notices this during COVID, but it's still continuing which is there's a huge shortage in labor around the entire healthcare system. Right, I think nurses are kind of at the forefront of this, but it stems all the way that we have kind of aging professionals in managing even some of these legacy systems or our EHRs or you know some of that word soup. And so what happens in?
Speaker 2:We had one customer talk to us about their biggest fear was hey, when Sydney is sick, sydney caught the flu who's processing all these? You know implants that we talked about. Who's processing all these? You know supply chain workflows and, beyond that, what happens when they retire. And so I think a lot of the tacit knowledge and that unstructured data can be codified and then held within the company, beyond individuals. And so I think that's some of the operational risks that you run if you're not capturing these and you don't know how workflows are being executed. Or Sydney probably has five tricks up her sleeve, that she knows how to get a vendor contract done and signed or how to get this product pushed through and billed correctly for the next billing cycle, but those are things that are never documented because, let's be honest, if your boss or manager tells you to go create really good documentation on something, that's the last thing that's going to be on your recipe. So I think those are areas that we can really help in.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anand, so you mentioned COVID-19. I think that was the first time where a notion of supply chain and healthcare came to be kind of general knowledge for the public. It came in the context of shortages of healthcare workers but also PPE. We all remember personal protective equipment, how hospitals didn't have enough masks and gloves and gowns and had to use trash bags and other things to compensate. And you showed us what supply chain really means in healthcare beyond that, from pillowcases and things like that to make you know patient comfortable in the room to the operating room supplies which are vital for the success of any given operation.
Speaker 1:So let's talk a little bit about this concept of digital workforce that you talk about resolve. Digital workers work with this unstructured information. They do these things that you just told us in terms of improving operations and you talk to them about being like your best teammates. So instead of somebody swilling in in the chair, you now have digital workforce doing some of these tasks. Talk more about where does the human stay still in the loop there, with all that knowledge that the person had accumulated, and how that gets transferred potentially to your digital workforce.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. And so I think what's key to talk about here is you know, there is a labor shortage, and that's where I think these digital workers are sort of addressing. A lot of the times when we speak with our customers, it's not hey, hire a digital worker and fire the rest of your team. I think everybody kind of fears for our jobs. That maybe you know, a decade in and out we may have to mine included but I think today what it's mostly solving and helping for is, hey, this team is strapped for resources. They are working 80, 90 hours on executing a bunch of workflows and they're not getting the resources to help.
Speaker 2:I would say 90% of the time when we talk to a leader on the team that we're speaking with and we ask, hey, what would you need for your team to kind of work at normal capacity, and they always say something like seven to 10 more resources, as in people, and there is no chance they're getting approved because, as you probably know and most people in healthcare know, hospitals run, at best, near break even in terms of their bottom line and their most expensive expenditure is on labor, and so when you go to those VPs and your C-suite and ask for more resources. They just do not have anywhere to go and grab that money from, and so what you have is teams that are understaffed by almost 10 employees trying to do all this work for what Evan talked about a growing amount of data and so I think this is where digital workers, in healthcare particularly, are almost like an ideal fit, which is, hey, we need help. The teams themselves love working with us because they're saying, thank goodness, I don't have to do this stuff until 8, 9, 10 pm, or wake up on my Saturdays and Sundays and try to catch up on work, because you're taking away from their plate the work they don't want to do. Right, when you think of nurses and the clinical side, they should be focusing on their core competency. Why are we throwing all this extra work on their plate when they already are working 80 to 100 hours? Why are they doing admin stuff? Or why are they having to think up billing codes for the materials that are used? Or why are supply chain people sometimes dealing with access management to systems, like people? So it just makes no sense.
Speaker 2:But we've made it, I think, standard practice in healthcare that everybody is just going to take on any work that needs to be done, regardless of what your title is, and that's sort of the ethos of this space is hey, we're all here to help the patient, right. When you have that, it's really difficult to say no to extra work, but these people cannot work a thousand hours a week, and that's where we're headed. And so I think that's where digital workers kind of come in and can make a huge, huge impact by taking off sort of the most manual and rote work possible, because, to be frank, that's what they're good at doing. They're not great at doing what true supply chain professionals know how to do best, and so I think that's sort of the key differentiator of why people love working with these sort of digital workers.
Speaker 3:Wow, great insight. Love working with these sort of digital workers. Wow, great insight. Let's talk about the healthcare IT ecosystem Very complicated, as you know, kind of gets pretty squirrely pretty quickly. You've got 800-pound gorillas like Epic in the mix and legacy systems and homegrown systems. How do you fit into the IT stack and how do you think about integrating or replacing parts of what's being done today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think for us, we wanna be a kind of key integrator and player with the kind of gorillas and tech giants that have kind of established the IT tech industry. These are not easy jobs to do right. Workday implementations are something we're seeing across healthcare networks. That itself is taking multiple years, and you understand why these people have been around a long time, because moving this data is very complex, dealing with it and you know, rip and replacing is a whole different category of problem. I think what we really want to focus on again is what I said the work in between these systems, because, again, they don't all communicate with each other. They don't all work together perfectly, as much as they try to collaborate. You know there's a lot of stuff to be done in between the kind of creases, and I think that's where we specialize in the IT landscape, and so I'll give you an example when we integrate with a customer, we don't want to pull them out of their workflow.
Speaker 2:So a lot of times for requests that come in, hey, can you add this product SKU to the database? Can you look up this contract value? Can you change the price of this? That all comes in via Outlook or some sort of email inbox. So instead of pulling that into a ticketing system and making people fill out forms, we just said we'll just sit on the inbox and the digital worker will be there and when a request comes in, it can get started on that process. And so some of the things that we first identify when we attach ourselves to an inbox like that is okay. What is the time to first response from the team to that request? I think that's a really key metric is telling people hey, I've seen your issue, I'm getting to work on it and I'm not ignoring you. I think that's one of the first metrics that surprises people is oh my God, we're waiting four days to tell 10 emails back and forth to actually get that thing to resolution. But if you go a little deeper, it's okay.
Speaker 2:We have different teams and people making requests. What is the touch point for each of those teams and you'll find is oh, one team is kind of two emails back and forth. They're always sending us the right information. They're always providing us with the proper kind of data inputs that we need to get the job done, versus one is 15. And so by uncovering some of those insights and this is also unstructured data in a way, um, you can go and actually have cultural change by working with those teams and saying, hey, what is it that makes team A so successful at getting us requests, that it's only two back and forths and what is it that's making team D be so kind of delayed and misconstrued? And so I think those are a lot of things that we can help uncover is, hey, maybe we're just not supplying them with the information. They don't have access to the right information they need to help us do our job. And so I think those are a lot of the kind of critical insights that we can pull out and help with.
Speaker 3:Wonderful, well, very inspirational, you know, very exciting. We're all rooting for you, as patients and caregivers, et cetera. What are your plans the rest of the year in terms of scaling up and where can folks see you, meet you and collaborate?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, look, we try to come out in person as often as possible. If I could clone myself, I would, but I think you know we're definitely heavy on the conferences. I think you know finding us on our website, resolveai, or connecting with me directly on LinkedIn. You know always happy to chat and I think you know finding us on our website, resolveai, or connecting with me directly on LinkedIn. You know always happy to chat and, I think, share resources of you know.
Speaker 2:I think there's a big thing in healthcare of hey. We're so unique and you know we can't learn from other industries or we always try to learn from finance, but I think working with you know kind of startups or players that are in multiple health systems, there's a lot of cross sharing knowledge. Like you know, customers of ours are always so interested in hey. How is you know customer A approaching and solving this problem and same with customer A wants to know about customer B and they're willing to share and that helps all of us get much, much better. And so I think you know I'm always happy to speak with individuals about what we're seeing, even if they're not ready to become a customer, or you know structure some of their data I think just being able to share. Hey, you're not alone in the problems you're seeing and you know there is sort of light at the end of the tunnel.
Speaker 2:But I think for us we see kind of scaling out and continuing to build workers for the different kind of teams that operate the back office. So you know we're engaging in purchasing and AP. That's a completely different side of the house, but they also deal with very similar workflows and so we want to continue to help as much of the back office as possible. I think you know it's a third of the spend category that happens within health care. So I think there's a huge impact to be made there and we just want to kind of be known as hey. Resolve is a place to go to when you know you need seven to 10 more hires, but that money and allocation is not coming anytime soon. You can hopefully lend a helping hand and, you know, get the ship up right.
Speaker 3:Wonderful, great story here on Mission.
Speaker 1:Thank you, anans, for joining us, and thank you everyone for watching and listening and engaging these conversations. So connect with Anans online, follow us and we'll see you again, take care.
Speaker 2:You guys are amazing. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you.