The Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.

AI-driven Healthcare Transformation - Patty Hayward Talkdesk

• Nathan C Bowser • Season 1 • Episode 29

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Patty Hayward is the General Manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences at Talkdesk, where she leads innovation at the intersection of AI, technology, and patient experience for healthcare organizations.


Key Takeaways

  • Deep Personal Motivation: Patty’s passion for patient experience stems from her family’s struggle navigating complex healthcare for her mother. This drives her mission to simplify and humanize patient journeys.
  • Transforming Contact Centers: Talkdesk is applying AI to rethink traditional healthcare contact centers. By integrating electronic health records, smart routing, and agent assist tools, they aim to ensure every patient feels known, supported, and guided from their first call.
  • Empowering Agents: The goal is to upskill contact center agents-reducing time-to-proficiency, increasing job satisfaction, and creating healthcare career growth. AI handles routine queries, while agents focus on complex, human-centered needs.
  • AI for Patient Experience: Patty draws compelling analogies to Amazon and Delta, envisioning healthcare systems that anticipate patient needs and minimize frustration. She argues that a truly great patient experience requires patients never have to repeat themselves.
  • Critical AI Adoption Considerations: The democratization of AI (especially LLMs) is making advanced solutions accessible to organizations without deep IT resources. Yet, Patty stresses the importance of rethinking processes-“don’t automate a bad process”-and keeping trust, privacy, and clinical care at the forefront.
  • Balancing Innovation and Trust: Patty acknowledges that while rapid AI adoption is exciting, healthcare’s primary goal is always quality clinical care. Any patient engagement technology must build trust, ensure safety, and ultimately improve-not complicate-outcomes.

About Patty Hayward

Patty Hayward, GM of healthcare and life sciences at Talkdesk, has over a quarter century of industry strategy experience, including at organizations such as McKesson, Medicity, and Humedica. She is an expert in HIE, population health, pharmacy, process redesign for healthcare systems, and increasing access to patient information.


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Nathan C :

Hello and welcome to The Glow Up Fabulous conversations with innovative minds. Today I'm talking with Patty Hayward, who is the general manager of healthcare and life sciences at Talkdesk. Patty, it's so good to see you today. Thanks for joining. Thank you for having me!

Patty Hayward:

It's great to be here.

Nathan C :

As somebody who is just fascinated with the story of innovation and getting things done at enterprise scale, maybe even in healthcare, I am so excited to hear about your journey! Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do at Talkdesk?

Patty Hayward:

Yeah! Absolutely. So I've been at Talkdesk for about four and a half years now, and I started when, that company really wanted to specifically look at some verticals. Healthcare and life science is a really different space and sort of your traditional horizontal take on technology. They really wanted to understand how to be successful there. So I came in and helped guided the strategy, you know, what should we build? How should we build it? What are we going to do as far as go-to-market messaging? What's working today in healthcare? What's broken? How do we go about really getting people to transform how they think about patient experience? As you think about all the technology that's coming out, there's a lot around the clinical side of things. We really focus on the patient experience side.

Nathan C :

I'm eager to know because customer and patient experience is like one of the things that gets me excited most about technology. What got you interested in advocating for and applying technology to the patient experience? As you said, there's so many problems to solve in this space.

Patty Hayward:

I've been in healthcare for 25 years, so I've done a lot of different things, from pharmacy to looking at things like value-based care, a lot of different things of intersection of value and what we can do to help patients better serve themselves, have better outcomes, things like that. And that really all started with an experience I had with my mom who had multiple chronic diseases and navigating healthcare is really, really hard. And My perspective was no one should have to go through what we went through as far as how to get her access to care. How to ensure that their physicians were coordinating well. How do we even ensure that she doesn't wind up in the ICU for five days as what happened at one point. And that disease eventually took her life. So you know, to me it was, there's so much that we can do that's better. There's a lot of things we couldn't change, because you know, these chronic diseases are degenerative in nature, but we certainly don't need to be additive in some of the things that we do, and the complexity is just off the hook. So working between both the provider side working with our payer organizations as well as our big pharma and distribution organizations and really helping to understand and really to bring to light some new opportunities to do better, has really been great because really understanding across the spectrum, again, the complexity is huge and trying to understand what's at the root cause of it, and then what can we change? Because a lot of this isn't just about technology. It's about the people, the process, and the technology triangle that we have.

Nathan C :

I'm always reminded when I ask this question that there's almost always a personal story, and a very personal pain that drives people to work on a problem so expansive and, over such a long period of time. I'm a little stunned to hear a senior leader in healthcare talking about how horrible a struggle it was for them to work through that process and some of the parts of the healthcare system that we hear so much about. Right? You know, chronic care, value-based care. so thank you for that. As you're looking at things like new technologies, I'm sure artificial intelligence, large language models and others have got to be in that toolkit of technologies that you're using. Can you talk a little bit about the core problem that you're working on now at Talkdesk around these patient experiences, and what sorts of technologies are you bringing in to really make a difference there?

Patty Hayward:

So if you think about, and the nice thing about doing what I do is everybody can relate because we've all called a physician's office, we've probably all called our health insurance or tried to do something on their website, right? That experience, especially when I started, it's getting better, but it's pretty universally bad. And we all have high expectations because we're kind of spoiled by Amazon and Uber and some of these other applications, that have really allowed us to have a much easier experience doing things that we tend to do every day. Calling a cab, buying anything really on Amazon. And so those are the experiences that we'd like to see across other sectors. And that was kind of how I came into this was, when someone approached me about contact center, I kind of was cocked my head and went,"I'm not sure why I would be interested in working around contact center." But I will tell you that I started to really think about the patient experience and I started to say,"You know what, there's nowhere to go but up!" So how do we go and impact that in a meaningful way? And you know, I always come with the personal perspective of, I'll call my primary care physician, which I've been with for 20 years now, and every time I call, it's like the first time I've called, right? I'm brand new every time because they don't know who I am. They don't know my journey, and I have to say all the things all over again, every time. So that was the first thing I wanted to solve was: How do we connect the system of record to the agents that are answering the phone so that they're not having to go and look up things and doing all sorts of things and asking you all those questions that are quite frankly annoying. How can you go in and get that information by linking into the electronic health record, bringing that in, making sure we're doing more than just a screen pop. Doing things like when you call Delta Airlines and you are gonna fly them that day and your flight is delayed, they know who you are. They know the fact that it's delayed, and that's probably why you're calling. So how do we take those in those bits of information and turn them into an experience that feels like, okay, we know you. Now let's route you. We know what you're calling about. We know the problem that we're trying to solve. If we can't solve it with, you know, an agentic agent, right? So someone that's artificial intelligently driven, which they're getting better and better and better, who do we get them to that can answer their question the first time so that we're not transferring to 10 different people? We're not further sort of antagonizing you as you're calling in to try to do things. And typically when people are calling in healthcare, they're calling for some reason that usually increases their stress level. So, you know, the stress piece that all kind of comes to light a lot when you're calling and trying to deal with healthcare. So it's really important to make patients feel really known and supported and help guide them. My goal is I want them to be able to be a care guide, right? You're probably having to escalate to a human because you have a complex problem and you need guidance. And so we want to empower those agents with information at the touch, at the ready, as they're listening to the conversations to provide them answers with not having them,"Hold please. Let me go look up the answer.""Hold please. Let me go talk to so-and-so and get back." Hopefully all of this information is presented in real time. It's recorded for quality purposes, and we can help train other people as they come in. You know, I've worked with organizations that tell me it takes them three months before they allow an agent to answer a call from a patient. Yet their average tenure of those agents is 18 months. That is a really tough situation for an organization to deal with. So how do we help them A.) Get agents up to speed B.) Can we empower those agents to do more so that they have more satisfaction in their job and they're not just an ask- answer machine? But they're really trying to solve problems so that we help them, you know, we say work at the top of the license for pharmacists, nurses, doctors. We should do the same thing for agents. Let's train them! Let's have different ladders of what they can accomplish and give them a career path that feels worthy. You know, people go into healthcare because they wanna serve, and so being able to allow them to do that in meaningful ways that get better and better and more complex, as all of this AI gets better and can solve the basic problems, that's what I think the goal is. I don't think we'll ever get to the point where we don't have people answering phone calls in healthcare. It's too personal and there's too many complicated things that we need to deal with. But I think being able to have those folks be much more educated, much more empowered to do things and really help move patients through doing what they need to do, to do the best things for their health, that's a win-win for everybody.

Nathan C :

I love how we started with the patient pain- point and addressed how agents and a human agent response could really start to move those patients into, better response times, better information, less frustration. But then it very quickly also became about upskilling. About addressing, you know, that's a pretty quick turn on a labor force, especially if you're spending a third of the time on training and they're not actually doing any calls. Very interesting to see how, ideally, improvements in that patient care chain also starts to improve the experience for the workforce. This idea that people could be working in their strengths and helping, right? Rather than kind of pushing it down the road, or reading policy descriptions about why things are unknown. It feels way more satisfying, fulfilling of a role there.

Patty Hayward:

And think about

Nathan C :

Amazing!

Patty Hayward:

how we look up information now. Like it used to be Google where you had tons of links and you just had to sort of sort through and read everything and try to, you know, put it together in your own head. But if you look at ChatGPT and how it delivers information for you in a much more conversational, like, here's a summary, you know, and you can ask it questions and it'll continue to give you more and more information. That's similar to what you're seeing now for agents being guided. I will tell you when I started, I sat down with agents'cause you know, you wanna understand what their a day in the life looks like for them. And I remember sticky notes all over the screens, dual screens with like Google sheets behind with all sorts of information because of the complexity of scheduling a physician appointment. It's not like going and getting your hair done. People are like,"Why can't we automate more patient scheduling?" That's a, a very layered discussion. There's lots of reasons, probably some that really aren't valid and need to be changed. And that is our biggest blocker to being able to really adopt more digital technologies, et cetera. You know, if you look at other industries, when was the last time you talked to a human in a bank? And that's a highly regulated industry, right? So we're a highly regulated industry as well. There's a lot we can learn there. It's not the same. There's a lot of things that are different. One of the main differences that I always like to remind my leadership team of is: Why aren't people adopting more rapidly in healthcare? The central tenant for healthcare is good clinical care. It's not customer service. It's clinical care. We want to make sure that that patient is receiving the best clinical care possible, and that is first and foremost our guiding light. If we can also deliver great patient experience, wonderful, we can do that. But first and foremost, it's great clinical care. So it has taken time to get to a point where this technology has advanced enough that they can put the limited resources that they have to do the ancillary goals. And we've sort of democratized AI now with a lot of these large language models because they can build themselves. That is transformational for these organizations who don't have the IT resources to throw at, you know, coding and complex AI. You know, scientific work that needs to be done to train them. So it's a lot easier now to start to consume this. Now, we have a long way to go with trust and you know, how do we start thinking about biases and privacy and all of these different aspects that we have to be good stewards of inside of healthcare. And that's the nice thing about patient experiences because it's not clinical care, right? You're not giving clinical advice. And so that is a little easier place to start than something like diagnoses. And those are moving really rapidly too. So as you think through all of these different areas, you can't walk down a trade show now without seeing AI or agentic AI all over the place. Hims was, every single booth had something about AI and agents and all of those things. So, separating out what's marketing speak and what's real is also a difficult thing for a lot of these organizations and they need a lot of help.

Nathan C :

One of the things that I noticed when I was at HLTH in October, people are very excited to use technology to get the busy work out of the way of care. There's so much in the way of the workforce, let's just make it easy for everybody please. But this idea of how do you trust? How do you build? How do you use AI and agentic tools in the right places that foster trust, that give appropriate information? I always talk about in marketing, automation accelerates everything in your business, especially the dysfunction. AI is really good at acceleration and does things that takes us months in blinks. How do you balance, innovation, the development costs like you were noting. Plus, very important things about trust, safety, patient care and data? There's so many things that you are touching and impacting.

Patty Hayward:

Yeah, for sure! And you know, I think it's important that we understand technology can't solve everything. When you automate a bad process, you just go faster with the bad process. So it's very important when we start a project with our customers to take a step back and say,"Don't just pour old wine into a new bottle." You need to rethink what you're doing and how you're doing it so that you can actually hit the goals that we've set out, because any organization that's buying something wants to look at a return on investment, right? I mean, you don't spend money without understanding how you're gonna get your money back. And so being able to hit those return on investment metrics and goals is really important. And in order to do that, you really need to look at your processes, your culture, how you're going about embracing the technology, because technology can't fix your core dysfunctions. You've gotta identify them and look at ways that you can change your processes and your culture in order to optimize the technology. I used to sell robots back in the day that would do centralized cart fill, and so it was a really dumb machine. It would just pick things up and it scanned the barcode. It knew what it was picking up, and it would pick it and bring it over and drop it into an envelope. If you don't optimize your processes around what it does well, you're not gonna do well with it. Like if you wanna make it do something that it's not programmed to do or in a way that it's not optimized, you're not gonna have the return. And it was pretty black and white. We had organizations that were transformational with it. Got all of their pharmacists out on the floors, you know, and really were able to change their entire culture. Others wanted it to just do exactly what it's always done and they didn't get the returns. So it's really, really just important to do that. Now, AI is much smarter so you can bend it a little bit more to your will, but then you end up with still a lot of issues with things like, okay, I have a lot of physicians that want Gladys to still answer their phone'cause Gladys has always answered their phone and she knows my routine for scheduling and how I like to be scheduled and all of this and that. And when everything is a one-off, nothing can be automated. We need strong physician leadership, right? We need strong support of the automation to say, these are the things guys, if we can all come together and figure out a way where we can sort of optimize how we schedule. We've had patient portal scheduling for decades! And when was the last time you were able to schedule online with a doctor? Hardly ever. There's a few that have adopted it, but very, very rarely. So it's not a technology issue, it's a how do we get folks to really think differently about the way that they're doing things? And there's some great organizations, I've been really leaning in to organizations that are seeing success and understanding, okay, how are you guys doing these things? And really leaning into the physician leadership, because that's really important to understand a, you know, what do they need in order to practice well, we wanna support them. That's, that's a crucial thing. Remember, central tenant clinical care, right? So how do we support them? But how do we also take cost out of the business? We all are feeling the absolute increase in costs around healthcare. It's mind-boggling how much healthcare costs now versus 10, 20 years ago. So we need to do some things to rein it in. And that might mean we need to make some changes to the type of appointments that you have and do that in a way that allows you to still have and honor your specialty practice. But at the same time allows automation to occur so that the organization can reduce their overhead. It's the only way we're gonna stop this train wreck of healthcare cost increases. So how do we continue to do that in a way that's collaborative, transformational, and really embracing the new technology that the organizations have decided to purchase.

Nathan C :

Goodness! This is like such a masterclass in change and transformation. Really doesn't matter how much technology or how powerful of a technology you're layering in, right? If it's not Supporting the core goals of the user, if it doesn't have buy-in at an incredibly high level early on. When you're looking at measuring the impact of the work that you do today is cost really the primary metric or, it sounds like you're working, a lot directly with doctors potentially within systems and larger organizations. How do you help them? I think as somebody who's in transformation, this is important, right? Like how do you help the people who are undergoing transformation measure the impact of it? And then how do you measure your impact within that process and that growth.

Patty Hayward:

So I think it's twofold, right? So we do have, of course, standard like time savings measurements, things like that. We call it full containment inside of a contact center, which means we've been able to fully answer a question from, you know, an automated perspective, we're not, having to transfer to a human. So there's a big cost savings there, obviously. Speed to answer. So you've reduced the queue size because you're taking off the easy questions, and now you're not having to wait a half an hour to talk to a human being, right? So reduction in wait time. Big patient satisfier, obviously that's a huge thing. A lot of times you're in really competitive spaces where you've got five or six health systems that are competing for the business of that patient. And if they can't get through or can't get an actual appointment, they're gonna go someplace else where they can. So, you know, whoever has the first opening gets the business type of thing. So it's important to make sure that we can address those needs, making sure that we can help optimize, how fast we can get to that patient, work with them on scheduling, making it easy for them to schedule and reschedule. That's really important. And then in the member side, if you think about the payer side, especially for Medicare Advantage, which you do a lot of work with those organizations, they get ranked on star ratings and member satisfaction is a huge piece of that. So being able to ensure that they're being answered right away, they're being thoroughly answered in the language that they can speak. All of those different things are really, really important to these payer organizations. And then when you think about life sciences and you think about especially a lot of the scrutiny that they get under for pricing and different things like that, how do we help their patient access centers empower those patients that need to take the drugs that they've brought to market but can't afford. And that's their role is to take those referrals from the physicians who want to help them and get them on therapy. How do we keep them on therapy? Because we know it can be life changing, but we also know some of these specialty drugs are$10,000 a dose. How can we help them afford that and truly understand what they're supposed to do'cause some of these drugs, if you don't take them exactly as prescribed when they are prescribed, they're ineffective and they're also$10,000 a dose. So how do you go about making sure that these folks are really, really in tune with what they're supposed to do when they're supposed to do it, and that they're helped with the cost? So across those different worlds are sort of what we do and can intersect and help, to really allow these organizations to do that and look across at patient satisfaction, healthcare provider satisfaction as these healthcare providers are calling in member satisfaction. Those are high ranking needs for these guys as well as of course, all the efficiency metrics. How can we make sure wait times are lower? How can we make sure that you're answering on the first call as opposed to having them call back multiple times'cause they get frustrated without getting the answer that they think they need. You know, we call that"first call resolution." So there's a lot of standard metrics, KPIs that we have in contact center. But I've always challenged my organizations to think a little differently too, around how do we think about number of appointments scheduled? Are we able to look at, hey, you know, as you're starting to create time and space for these agents, are we answering more than just the question they called in for? An example would be,"I've run out of refills on my prescription." and The agent can say,"Okay, I can help you with that.""You haven't been in for your annual physical. You need to get your mammogram, you need to get your A1C checked." This list of things that are also happens to be the value-based care metrics that the health system is measured upon, and that's how they get their bonus payments. Or conversely, they get knocked for not meeting those metrics that they need. And they end up getting penalized. So how do we take them from penalty to bonus? So that helps their bottom line and it becomes a value driver for everyone because if they do the things that we've identified in those HEDIS measures, we know that they're gonna stay healthier. They're gonna stay outta the hospital. They're not gonna have the acuity that you would have if you just ignore. We get a lot of people unfortunately, who don't do the things that they're supposed to do, and they don't come in on a regular basis either from fear, from just cost all these things. How can we understand what's going on here and how can we help them better afford a drug that maybe they're only, they're supposed to be taking once a day? Now they're only taking it every other day. Is that cost? Is that side effects? How do we know that? That's a big thing. Patient days on therapy is a measure for these organizations. So how do we make sure that they're doing that and that we understand the reasons why they're not, if they're not. Are they having problems getting to the pharmacy? Should we just mail it to them? What are the ways that we can help these patients do the things that they need to do to stay healthier, which reduces cost, which helps with bonus payments, which helps with a patient experience. Talk about the ultimate patient experience if you stay healthy. Lack of health is the worst driver of mental health problems, quality of life, et cetera. I think being able to help guide these organizations to guide their patients through complicated therapies and protocols and appointment scheduling and all those things, that to me is my ultimate vision of where we go when we get sort of time back for these agents.

Nathan C :

I'm bought on a hundred percent. You know this, this picture that you painted of from the first time I call into a call center to schedule an appointment or to get a clarification on something I'm now kind of in the care of this agentic support, which has a little bit of visibility into the history, can start to be that through line that used to be the very friendly woman who answers the phone, for all the doctors and really like starts to hold onto things, be a consistent data set through that whole experience. And I love this idea that, not just providing value at that first engagement, but delivering engaging, teaching back into. Anything that gives doctors more time to doctor, I think the whole system would be thrilled with! Absolutely! So I love this idea of learning and growing, you kinda have to paint the picture for a team and encourage them to go find the path, even when it's not all there today. So, the show is called The Glow Up. A"glow up" is a notable transformation, or a rebirth. We use it to talk about big audacious goals that you might have in the next six months, When you're thinking about transformation in healthcare, I feel like any six month goal is audacious on its own! What sort of audacious goals do you have for your work at Talkdesk in health and life sciences?

Patty Hayward:

So I'll take it into two sectors because I think there's the technology goals, which are fun and really inspiring right now about what we can do. And then there's the transformation, sort of like, okay, what do we need to do for them to be able to take advantage in a meaningful way of this technology? As we've talked about, you've gotta have both. I think from a technology perspective, I think this agentic AI and the things that we are building and doing. It's just like nothing I've ever seen as far as how fast these things are evolving and the abilities that they have with sort of multiple, each agent kind of has its own specialty, just like you do with humans. And then you've got this supervisor agent that can then say,"Okay, I see you're calling for this. I'm gonna send you to this specialty agent who's now gonna ask you the questions." You're not gonna see that it's not gonna transfer, it's just gonna automatically do that so that it knows which group, which things to ask. And that way you're not confusing things, you're not getting that hallucination. All those different things that we've been able to solve, and allow those to be deployed both in a digital way, right? So typing in any channel you want, right? So not everybody wants to call. I know my daughter would love to never speak to another human again. She'd love to text everybody. So then there's the, you know, my dad who wants to call everybody and I'm probably somewhere in the middle. And I think that, being able to meet people in their channel of choice, have those conversations in a meaningful way in the language that they speak natively without having to have them translate. That might cause its own set of problems. So being able to translate into the language that they are native to and being able to, really help folks. That for me, from a technological standpoint, the next six months we're gonna see some just amazing output there. So I'm really excited for that. And then on the transformation side, I think I talked a lot about sort of what I'm really focused on today, which is really working with organizations to look at what are the blockers, how do we need to transform the culture and the processes that they've built over all of these years that may not serve well with automation, right? As people are starting to buy more and more into like, look, we've gotta transform. These are our important financial goals that we have to achieve and it's important for us to ladder up and down from C-Suite all the way through to the end users and the physicians, et cetera. Everybody's gotta kind of be rowing in the same boat and that's not easy! Buy in and of itself, but then to kind of see how do we make these changes? What are some of the things that we can experiment with and try maybe in small pods that are more open to change. What are the ones that we can use? Let's try. Fail fast because these kinds of models allow us to fail fast. That didn't work? Okay, let's try this tweak. Ooh, that worked! And you can do a lot more changes more easily with this work than in the past where it required so much coding and resources, you don't need that as much anymore. So it's much easier for us to do iterations and to iterate fast to get to that ultimate, okay, this is working. This is working really well. So that's kind of the transformational work I'm really excited about in the next six months, that I'm working on now.

Nathan C :

Do you use agents in that like alignment and discovery and process work that you do on the transformation side as well?

Patty Hayward:

When you say agents, are you talking about human agents or are you talking about the agentic AI?

Nathan C :

Does a agentic AI support those initiatives?

Patty Hayward:

So yes, the agentic AI, so there's the agents that answer the phone, and then there's the ones behind the scenes that sort of analyze patterns and different things that they're seeing and hearing. I have an example of one of our financial services group. They did some amazing work and used our platform that listens and finds patterns in discussions and things like that to detect fraud in real time. They noticed a certain pattern when someone was calling and trying to take over someone's account, and they were able to put together a real time alert to their supervisors when they detected a pattern like this, that they would come in and cut it off in real time, and they were able to completely reduce the amount of money that was being stolen out of different bank accounts, by the way that these guys were trying to reset passwords, right? So I'm trying to reset a password. They call in with things like crying baby in the background, right? Like,"I've gotta get this done right away. I'm late for work, my baby's crying." You make this really stressful situation for the agents, and the agents kind of comply and do it. They started to see that pattern and they were able to cut this off in real time. So it's pretty exciting to see some of the evolutions of how this can do it. We know in healthcare we're under attack on a regular basis from people trying to do ransomware for that data. So password reset's a big deal right now. How do we detect and look at fraudulent ways of this stuff happening that we can cut off in real time. How can we do things like make sure that when we do have an agent that's having some trouble communicating in real time or alert a supervisor to be able to kind of come in and join and support that. Lots of great things that we can do in real time now, that I think are gonna get better and better and better. You talked about AI editing. It can detect and really look at things in really good ways. You can tell it,"Eliminate all the ahs and ums and awkward silences and things like that." That's the way things are working in detecting. Because we record all of these calls for quality purposes, right? How do we go about learning and training our agents to do better? Learning and training our agentic agents to be better? What are areas folks are getting stuck and they have to escalate? Maybe we don't need that to happen. So how do we iterate? Iteration and quick iteration is really important in this innovation.

Nathan C :

Oh my goodness! So many seeds there! What if I'm having a frustrated conversation, right, sort of unpacking your fraud example, and the agentic AI could help the agent understand this particular patient is getting very frustrated. Could you send them some flowers or whatever that digital equivalent is, or maybe just take a break and take a breath. The ability for AI to sort of help those of us who are managing so much detail to understand what's important in the moment, and to see the other inputs that might be driving the problem is such a powerful thing, to think about. I

Patty Hayward:

love it because it automatically takes notes and summarizes things for me. I'm a talk thinker. use my hands a lot. Trying to write things down my notes are terrible. They're universally terrible. I have like one word that I was like, for some reason I thought that was important at one point, but I don't actually know what it means anymore. My notes tend to be a lot like that because I get really involved in a conversation and I'm really trying to actively listen as opposed to just writing all the stuff down. This allows us to not have to do that, right? It can guide more and it can give you less programmatic responses to things which I think

Nathan C :

Cool. is really going

Patty Hayward:

to help all of that.

Nathan C :

So on each episode of The Glow Up, we do make an opportunity for a community shout out or spotlight to a group that's doing work for good or impact. Is there a spotlight that you'd like to share your episode today?

Patty Hayward:

Thanks for that opportunity. April's Parkinson's Awareness Month and my sister-in-law suffers from this awful disease. She's quite young. She's in her early fifties, so it's pretty devastating. The support and the research that's going on right now, talk about transformation, there's a lot of great things that are going on in scientific research, so I always like to highlight the Parkinson's Research Foundation. I think they are incredible. They're doing great things. They're funding a lot of amazing research that I would love to see continue.

Nathan C :

Heck yeah! Thank you so much and so timely. Sort of switching gears a little bit, in your work at Talkdesk and the things that you're looking to accomplish over the next year or so, is there anything that you're looking for, whether it's partners, research, team members, et cetera?

Patty Hayward:

I think I'm gonna go back to that partnering with the physician organizations. I would love to get a focus group around just that. And bring some really key physician leaders together to really think through how do we think about automation in a different way? And how can we make recommendations and have multiple types of recommendations depending on the organization that would allow both their practice to thrive as well as automation to continue to evolve so that there's more and more things that we can do, overheads reduce all of those different great things. I'm very clear on clinical care is the central tenet. That's really important. We don't wanna change that. We're not looking to take that away. And then how do we go forward looking from that? So that's been my primary focus for the last several months as I've started to have a lot of folks go live with the new technology and sort of start to run into some blockers of adoption. Primary care is pretty simple to do'cause it's a pretty standard type of care. But once you get into the ologies and all of the different types of specialties out there, and then you have subspecialties and subspecialties, so much complexity! Don't even get me started on radiology. You know, how do we go about scheduling all of these things in a way that allows us to honor the needs of making sure folks have prior authorizations and all of those different things, but at the same time, allows for more automation so that we can do more and more things like we talked about with care guiding.

Nathan C :

I love that the call to action is around building partnerships and doing consumer research. Could not be more on brand for The Glow Up! I love it! Patty, it has been such a delight to chat with you. Thank you for spending so much of your time today, with us on The Glow Up. If people wanted to learn more or join in a research partnership, what's the best way to follow up with you or connect online?

Patty Hayward:

Probably LinkedIn. That is probably the best place to go. I publish all of my thought leadership and podcasts and different things that we're doing at Talkdesk there, so it's a great place to see what's going on and to connect with me.

Nathan C :

Patty Hayward, it has been such a fantastic treat for me to talk about AI driven healthcare transformation with you. I really appreciate so much your focus on That central goal of working in the healthcare space, which is provide top quality care and to power, people providing it to do the best, they can with so many constraints and so many challenges. I'm really heartened to hear the AI story in healthcare moving beyond just like,"Hey, we'll fix your data." but We'll actually like activate your data, empower you, and really start to build this model for a unified continuum of care, not just like 40 different disparate conversations where you say 60% of the same thing over and over. I've never been so excited about healthcare scheduling and supporting doctors with automation. Thank you so much for the fantastic work that you're doing and sharing it with us on The Glow Up.

Patty Hayward:

Absolutely! Thanks for having me!