Name: How AI and Analytics Transform Patient Engagement
Uploaded: 2026-02-06T21:00:03.695Z
Duration: 1 h 30 min
Description: How AI and Analytics Transform Patient Engagement

Transcript for "How AI and Analytics Transform Patient Engagement": Alright. Hello, everyone. We're gonna give it just about thirty seconds here for some more people to join. Hang tight, and we'll kick things off shortly. All right, well why don't we just go ahead and get started here in the interest of time. Welcome everyone to today's webinar. My name is Kenyon Hesker, and I am the senior manager of domain generation here at IntelliPeer. Joining me on today's session are Jeff Wayne, CEO of Jefferson Dental and Orthodontics Alistair Butler, mid market enterprise and channels west leader at Microsoft, and also Josh Fox, IntelliPeer's vice president of. Thank you all so much for taking the time to be here with me today. I know I speak for everyone at IntelliPeer when I say we are thrilled to have each of you here and looking forward to a really great conversation ahead. Before we dive in, please just keep in mind that today's session is being recorded, and we will share access to the on demand on demand version shortly after today's discussion. As we move through the session, please feel free to add your questions to the q and a panel at any time. We will be keeping an eye out for them, and we've also set aside some designated q and a time towards the end of the session to make sure that we can get through as many of them as possible. Just one final reminder that today's session is being recorded and will be available on demand later this afternoon. And that's it for me. So I will go ahead now and pass it over to Alistair. Thank you so much. So hello, everybody. My name is Alastair Butler here from Microsoft. Happy Friday sitting here in Seattle. And, look, I'm very excited to kick off today's conversation about one of the biggest shifts that we're seeing in healthcare and that's this move towards trusting AI as a real time analytics tool that truly can elevate patient engagement. Now patients, of course, are accepting expecting, forgive me, seamless 24 by seven experiences and healthcare teams are being asked to deliver that with, fewer resources. Now across the industry, we're seeing organizations move past AI hype and focus on solutions that are responsible, measurable, and make a real difference right now. And I think that's why today's conversation is so meaningful. So with Microsoft, Jefferson Dental and Orthodontics and Intellipere, we're coming together to share what's actually working in the field. You'll actually hear us focus on reducing missed calls, improving access, and also actually supporting underserved communities. Jefferson Dental is a standout example of how AgenTic AI with patient experience at the center can be reasonably delivered and create impact. So as we get going here, please, Jeff, if you could introduce yourself, that would be great. Sure. Thanks, Alistair. Jeff Wayne. I'm the CEO of Jefferson Dental and Orthodontics. We are a Dallas, Texas based dental support organization. We, we support about 60 locations across the state of Texas. We have a a real access mission. We primarily serve underserved communities in Texas, particularly from a from a dental perspective. Actually, been around as an organization, since 1967, back when our first office was opened before I was alive. Let me just say that. And it really had a great mission here, a long history of serving underserved communities, heavy Hispanic orientation. So that creates some interesting challenges from a from a language perspective and an operational perspective. But, really excited to be here and look forward to, telling everybody a bit more about our experience. Josh, I think, your turn. Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. And thanks everyone for joining today. Yeah. So I'm Josh Fox, vice president of product marketing at IntelliPure. And I'm just gonna spend the next few minutes to walk through who IntelliPeer is, what we do, and how our conversational agentic AI platform helps health care organizations solve some of their biggest challenges with automated patient engagement, analytics, and workflow streamlining. Along the way, I'll briefly introduce a couple of our core products. SmartAgent, our agentic AI automation solution, and SmartAnalytics, which is our end to end conversational analytics layer. And then we'll spend the majority of our time discussing how all this actually works in the real world. So IntelliPeer is the trusted partner for Agenic AI in health care and other regulated industries. We automate high stakes workflows, everything from scheduling to collections to reminders and more. But what truly differentiates us is the analytics layer built into every interaction. We don't just automate. We give customers full visibility, compliance, and measurable outcomes. Essentially, we provide health care practices with digital staff that they can trust. Smart agents handle the work, and smart analytics proves the impact. It goes without saying that AI is moving incredibly fast, but enterprises will only scale what they can trust, and they only trust what they can measure. There are three reasons customers choose IntelliPear. Number one is trust. So our roots in carrier grade voice and communications orchestration, it's a big reason why our agents excel in real time and at scale. Paired with enterprise grade security and a compliance first architecture, we've we are really built for regulated environments from day one. And number two is our innovation. Right? So our AgenTik AI works inside of existing systems. There's no replatforming, no rip and replace. We meet our customers where they are today with deep integrations and real time write back capabilities into their existing PMS and EHR systems of record. And then finally, measurable outcomes. This is a a theme you'll hear over and over again. Smart analytics makes AI fully auditable. It ties every conversation to KPIs and business outcomes. This means we're able to give our customers a solution they can trust, implement quickly, and justify easily with data. So IntelliPeer is not a brand new AI startup. We've been building reliable voice communications and automation technology for over twenty years, serving over 2,500 customers along the way. We now support more than a 180 enterprise customers with our AI solutions across health care, financial services, utilities, insurance, and more. And across the base, we consistently deliver significant measurable ROI with reduced labor costs, increasing revenue, and improving the customer experience. And for health care practices and multi location groups, especially, we consistently deliver quantified results. For some customers, that's translated into upwards of 90% AI engagement rates on patient calls. For some, that means 75% reduction in operational costs. To date, we've successfully automated over a billion customer interactions, and we consistently deliver outsized ROI quickly. In fact, some of our customers that's meant greater than 3x return in just six months. And finally, we enable 20 fourseven patient access, which is so critical to improving the patient experience. What makes our approach powerful is that our agents don't just talk. They execute and complete real work, which creates immediate impact for the business. So our product strategy in health care, it's really simple, and it's just it's entirely centered on our customer's customer, the patient, and automating every step of their journey. All of our solutions are developed to solve significant challenges health care practices face today. We consistently hear four major pain points. First and foremost, high unanswered call rates. 70% of patient interactions still happen by phone today, and 60% of callers, they'll hang up if they've been put on hold for more than a minute. For health care, the average unanswered call rate is twenty nine percent overall, with some specialties exceeding thirty five percent. That directly translates into missed care and lost revenue. Second, double digit no show rates. One out of five patients don't show up for their appointment. That costs The US health care industry over a $150,000,000,000 a year. And then there's aging accounts receivable. Americans collectively owe more than $220,000,000,000 in medical debt with collection rates averaging less than 50%. Accounts that are delinquent by more than ninety days, they're oftentimes just written off entirely. But AI assisted outbound outreach, it can actually drive 30% improvements in those collection rates while also reducing the administrative burden by over 40%. And finally, there's this data fragmentation and lack of operational insight issue that so many face. It's frequently a top challenge for many of our customers initially. Many practices, they just simply have no visibility into why performance is slipping or which issues drive patient frustration, especially across different locations. Our automation and analytics platform solves these head on. So to address all of these challenges, we've built SmartAgent for Healthcare. It's a patient experience automation solution that gives practices digital staff capable of handling patient interactions twenty four seven. Our goal is simple, automate the front desk and back office workflows that drain time and resources so that your teams can focus on higher value work directly tied to patient care. The result is higher revenue, lower operating costs, and restored capacity for your staff. Our smart agents, they can act as an AI receptionist, ensuring no call goes unanswered. They manage the full appointment life cycle with real time scheduling integrations and can seamlessly escalate to human staff whenever needed. On the back end, our automated collections agents help recover aging rebalances, while smart analytics gives you full visibility in a performance across every interaction. So from pre visit to post visit, we see a future where AI agents take on more of the routine but essential patient engagement tasks, scheduling reminders, answering frequently asked asked questions, all the follow ups and outreach, all while giving overburdened front office and back office teams meaningful time back and improving patient access and utilization. And most importantly, this only works when AI can be trusted to operate inside real workflows with guardrails, compliance, and true write back capability with EHR and PMS systems to complete tasks end to end with minimal or no human intervention. The impact is straightforward no missed calls, fewer no shows, more staff capacity, and a better overall patient experience. So now that you have a clearer sense of who IntelliPeer is and what we're capable of delivering, we're gonna go ahead and transition into just a free flowing conversation, between me and my fellow speakers about how Jefferson Dental and orthodontics is putting all of this into practice. So before I dive in with you, Jeff, primarily, I do wanna ask Alistair kind of like a a macro setting question. It's very timely, I think. With all the news going on right now in the markets about, you know, the supposed SaaS pocalypse and and the impact that AI is is having on the world of software today, your CEO, Satya Nadella, he's talked consistently about how AI agents are becoming the new runtime layer, and that's really collapsing traditional SaaS application boundaries. So as we make this shift in health care, how do you see the Azure marketplace and your broader partner ecosystem evolving from just selling these standalone apps to providing the composable tools and the data and even entire forms of digital workers based on AgenTic AI so that, you know, customers who adopt them can drive measurable clinical and operational outcomes. Yeah. Thanks, Josh. It feels like every week's a big week, doesn't it, at the moment, which is the changes in the industry. But I think if you look as far back to November 2022 where this whole AI space and world changed with Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI. At that time, application within the enterprise at some level is going to be changed, rewritten, replaced. And of course, three years on from that, you know, we we absolutely still believe that to be true. And look. Whilst Microsoft, of course, we're very focused on our own first party innovation, we've also been a company that has built a significant marketplace and then cloud technology platform that customers can leverage their own innovation on in that in that environment in a single ecosystem that is also open. And I think what's something additionally is very important from Microsoft, it's been thought through at a very detailed level that that is all delivered securely. And at the scale we're talking about here, the uniqueness of that is incredible, and and it also doesn't doesn't come easy. Now AI agents, of course, are becoming much more prevalent in, health care, and it was just excellent to hear, you know, just what that story has been for Intellipedia at at this point, and we would compliment you for that. It's great to be in your environment and partnering with you. And some customers are already replacing application silos. And, look, in most, they're either using agents to sit alongside or working with SaaS solutions. And I think, you know, that's going to that's going to exist for a very, very long time. Our marketplace, well, look, we really want people to think about that as a one stop shop where you can also go and grab proven agents to automate critical tasks like documentation and triage. And then further, and I go back to that architecture point I was making earlier, you have Azure AI foundry, whereas a customer, Mhmm. you could then access the language model that's of your choice. We're supporting over a thousand different language models on those. And yes, some of those might be considered competitors to us, but we're trying to make the environment the best. And then, you know, finally, you've got amazing offerings from companies like Intellipere sitting sitting in that in that marketplace. You bring that all together for partners and customers and you've got an ability as a customer to turn their expertise into agent building blocks for the outcomes that, you know, you're moving towards. Jeff's gonna share his own examples of that in the moment, but you bring that all together, a lot of complexity there, and you're getting better better care at lower cost. No. That that is very true and resonates with exactly the the the vision and the strategy that we have, you know, in in the health care segment, especially. So now I wanna turn it over to you, Jeff. And then maybe before we get into some of the questions that I have in mind, you could tell us a little bit more about Jefferson Dental. I know you've done a little bit of that already, but I'm really interested in hearing more about the challenges that led you to working with IntelliPure and what the most acute operational challenges in particular were that that you needed to solve. Sure. Well, first of all, I've been working in the the health care world, the provider based side of health care, on the business side for going on twenty years now. And during that entire time, the the realities of our health care world are such that reimbursement is generally flat to declining. There's just not enough money in the system to, to improve rates in many cases. And at the same time, we have a cost structure, right, that's inflating. Rent goes up. Everybody wants raises. You know, health care insurance goes up, all those things. So, you know, broadly, there's real margin compression. So the need to be more efficient, with the resources you have is sort of an overarching theme. In dentistry, specifically in in Jefferson Dental, as well, really are challenged with a a a very high missed call rate, a lot of no shows, you know, in some cases, 30 to 40% no shows. We had, I'd say, a very expensive call center that we had built up over the years that, of course, brings its own challenges if you're familiar with large calls call centers and sort of the the personnel elements of that. And then, of course, we had a patient base that is, I'd say, you know, tends to skew blue collar, and the impact on that on on Jefferson is their their time to talk to us and to schedule appointments and to do follow ups is not your typical nine to five. It could be after hours. It could be on the weekends. We also do a fair amount of urgent dental care. So, you know, you break a tooth, you're in pain. Oh my goodness. I need to get in to see a dentist, and that doesn't necessarily happen during nine to five hours. So we were really struggling with patients that were trying to reach us for any number of reasons, and we were missing them. And so so for us, it was, you know, just sort of taking a step back from my seat. We I looked at the numbers and was like, you know, there's gotta be a better way. Right? And so that's that's ultimately what led us to to to find you guys and work with you. And and what solutions, did you adopt from IntelliPure in particular to overcome these challenges? Yes. So, so we we start let me just preface this by saying, you know, AI everything AI. Right? It it's a little bit overwhelming. I am not. a technological guru, by any means. And, you know, every time I turn around, there's some new AI tool. So I I I came at this with a little healthy skepticism, if you will. But, you know, I do firmly believe that, as a leader, we we have to embrace AI. And and, you know, when the leaders embrace AI, the teams will embrace AI as well. And so, you know, we started off with, you know, I would what I would say were kind of the tools that would help us with our largest pain points. So we we have an AI receptionist that we have named called Sofia. We just we made that up because it it sort of speaks to to our customer base, and that's primarily focused on inbound calls. So when you call any of our offices now, all calls are routed to Sofia, and she answers, depending on your language choice. You know, how may I help you? It's very it's very conversational. It's it's not like, you know, it's not off putting at all. So the AI receptionist, is is really what we've started with. And then along with that is there's an appointment management element of the of the tools that allow, for a a patient or somebody who wants to be our patient, to engage fully with the AI agent and never talk to a human, and get everything set up for their next appointment. And it's it's it's quite seamless. I will say I was a little skeptical at first, because I've I've been one of those frustrated people on the line with, an airline. I won't say the name, but I live in Dallas, so figure it out. You know, like, you know, agent agent agent. Right? Like, it it wasn't helping me. And and Sofia is not like that at all. It it really is not. It's been really impressive just how seamless it is. So so that's what we've gone with, and, know, we're in we're in early stages of of rolling out some outbound call efforts with the AI agent for patients that are difficult to to get them to show up for their appointments. And then we're also in the early stages of of using some of the tools that IntelliPeer has for collection efforts as well that you mentioned before. And in the early stages of that. so I'm really I'm really intrigued now. So how especially with the the demographics of the customer base that you serve, as you mentioned, you know, blue collar. How did Jefferson Dental build trust with patients when introducing Sofia, you know, this whole concept of an AI receptionist? Because, I mean, universally, everyone's been there screaming into a phone agent or operator, right, while they've talked to the robotic IVRs of the past, maybe still the present in many cases. But especially, like, in underserved communities, how how did you build trust with, you know, Sofia in in order to overcome maybe some some hesitancy upon the the part of your your customers? Yeah. So took a couple of different approaches there. You know, one, of course, is making sure that, Sofia, our our AI agent, was just, like I mentioned before, very approachable, and and just, you know, actually articulates, I'm an AI agent, but you can talk to me just like a person. Right? And so you just say whatever you're thinking. And, so really just sort of giving them permission to to say, okay. Yeah. We're not a live person, but a live person is available if you want, but give us a try. Second of all, we have actually taken it upon ourselves to to use this as an opportunity to to engage with our patient base and sort of educate them on Sofia. And so we've actually sent out messaging that we're using Sofia. Give us a give it a try. It's really impressive. You can access. her twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Right? So anytime you you know, if you get off work at 09:00 at night, you can call us. You'll get your appointment scheduled. So really just sort of trying to meet our patients where they were. And then, you know, always offering, we kinda look at this as it's a journey. Right? Like, it wasn't something that while we've had really great results early on, this is not the end. It's it's gonna be a process over time. So we always want our patients, that engage with us to know that just say you wanna talk to a live person and we'll connect you with one. Right? Mhmm. We are not cutting you off. That security blanket is still there. And we've seen adoption continue to improve over the months as more and more people, not just in their interactions with Jefferson, but probably in the broader world. Right? We're all just getting. more comfortable. So, you know, definitely in the early innings at this stage, but but that's how we're going about it. Yeah. Hey. That makes perfect sense. Yes. Please. go ahead, Elsa. Josh, I think I would just, you know, try and emphasize just great examples that's coming from from from Jeff there for the for the for the broader community and common signatories I see with the, you know, thousands of customers that, you know, my team and I are responsible for is, you know, that that notion that Jeff's sharing about owning it as a a CEO and an executive executive team that, you know, we're we're not really so much in the debate at this point, understanding that there is something real in this technology transition that can be leveraged. And even from a humility perspective of recognizing that you don't have to be, as a CEO or a leadership team, AI experts to begin the journey on that, but you do have to be committed that there's something something here. And I think one of the things that Jeff is showing to us all here is the key is to start small in a very focused way and still take real intention with the stakeholder group that you're using that with. So if that's with your customers in this instance, really build into that and be patient. And, you know, over time, you'll you'll start to see the benefits of that compound and accelerate and then naturally open out into other areas like any general purpose technology through history is done. And it's. so so many of our customers are nervous to begin. And, you know, that's gonna hurt their competitiveness, but but also in time, your customer base and your internal stakeholders want to want to see you take the take the leap. Yeah. I totally agree. I think taking that first step is almost the hardest part for a lot of the customers and the prospects that we talk to. But I think the recognition about what's at stake in terms of, you know, are you gonna be a leader or are you gonna be a laggard, right, when a technology is as transformative of the as this and it becomes so table stakes eventually, like, across just about everything that waiting is probably one of the biggest risks you can take. Right? And so I I what you're saying definitely resonates with a lot of what we hear as well. It's, you know, kinda start small, but aim big. Right? And, like, look for that trusted partner like an IntelliPeer to help you along that journey. Right? So, you. know, first find the the initial use cases that can deliver immediate ROI so you you sorta get your sea legs under you and then build out from that success. And so to that end, you know, I'm curious, Jeff, like, what were some of the earliest leading indicators that that AI was working? Right? That it was, you know, improving patient engagement or or scheduling or, you know, whatever the KPIs that matter to you most. You know, what were the results that you were able to quantify? And and then along all of that, you know, I'm really curious, like, how fast was the payback in terms of ROI? Because especially as we talk to a lot of our customers, you know, many of whom are are PE backed, multi location practices, The ROI component of it's so essential, and so that's a big part of what we do with smart analytics, being able to show that kind of proof of value along the way and and, you know, going forward. Sure. Yeah. No. ROI, incredibly important. Right? And so, you know, roughly six months, we we've seen a we've seen a real ROI on this, and and how we're how we're measuring that is is from a multitude of angles. You know? So number one, as it relates to just the the patient experience, we've had, you know, much we don't have missed calls, Right? Because the agent answers every single call. Right? And so, whereas before, we would have, you know, depending on the day, and that's one of the challenges with, a call center in an environment like ours is some days, you see surges in calls, certain times surges in calls. Well, I can't flex my call center staff, you know, in the middle of the day, you know, that way, not realistically. So, you know, number one, we're we're not missing any calls. We're able to at least, you know, let the patients know that we are we are there, and that we can help them. We have had, you know, obviously, reduced hold times. So before, we'd have certainly, in the in the busy times, we have patients that were on on hold for several minutes and, you know, guess what happens? They hang up and you lose them and they, you know, they move on down the road. Right? So we've been able to eliminate that. It has freed up our what our call center team to focus on, activities that are higher value add, whether it's patients who call the call center and really need to talk to a live agent beyond just scheduling or confirming an appointment or changing an appointment, which the agent is able to handle easily all of that. But, you know, sometimes it's more it's more serious, and so we're able to to make sure that the agents focus on that. And, you know, a reality of this too, and I mentioned sort of squeezed margins earlier on, right, is we've reduced our live agents in our call center. And so we have and that's a very that's a hard cost, right, that goes away in addition to just some of the revenue improvement that we've seen because we're not missing these calls. And you you you know, we talked a little bit about no shows before. You know, oftentimes, the reason we were we would have no shows is people would call us to reschedule, but we didn't answer the phone before we had the. agent. Right? They would they would go to voice mail or they'd go on hold, then and they just get frustrated and say, well, I'm just not gonna show up. Right? And, you know, so then but now they call they reschedule with the agent. Okay? So we're we're keeping them. We're actually rescheduling the appointment at the time that they reach out to us, but we also have cleaner schedules and don't have people sitting on there that really had no intention of showing up because they tried to contact us, but they couldn't. That makes sense. Yeah. That that definitely makes a lot of sense. And then in terms of implementing all of this, right, you know, you've got an existing tech stack workflows. You know? Give give me some insights on how how difficult this was, right, to integrate with your existing scheduling and PMS systems as an example. Yeah. So so we we I won't I won't say the name of the PMS system, but it's it's antiquated. Okay? And and we've we've we've, over the years here, tried and failed with, other sort of, technological add ons to the PMS system that that the PMS system just couldn't handle, didn't play well, with. So I was a little concerned about that here, but IntelliPEAR, I mean, made it almost seamless and was able to work within our practice management system. And I I would go on the I would go out and say that if you can work with this practice management system, you can work with all of them, because I know it's a real difficult one, to work with just because it's old. So, you know, I'm not a technology guru, but, I do know that, it was it was quite seamless. And it really, to me, speaks to just the IntelliPeer team in general and their capabilities. I mean, not only did they make this a, you know, a a really straightforward process from an integration perspective, But, you know, when we started with them, I I said, you know, we need we need a guide to take us through this journey. None of us are experts on this. And so, you know, they they held our hands along the way. We did proactively the impellate IntelliPeer team would come to us with ideas based on, okay, we're seeing, you know, this type of voice. So we we changed our voice several times to find the right sweet spot. We changed the greeting several times based on some a and b testing and the response. And this was all driven by IntelliPeer. Right? It was it was and and, candidly, I've got a very high bar for for working with with third parties. And, you know, it's frustrating for me when as a as a a CEO when a vendor's like, well, you know, we don't know what else to do here, so sorry. It's just not gonna work. That's never happened with IntelliPeer. They've been incredibly patient in helping us to just sort of optimize. So it's it's been a continual improvement, I guess. You know? So there's the original. implementation, Josh, and then there's there's just a continual improvement that we're we're always working on together. That's great to hear. I mean, there's it's, you know, it it it's definitely a journey. Right? It's, when you're implementing AI technologies, you know, you start with a certain set of use cases, but you do need a a strong change management process and partner who's able to work with you as you grow, you know, and build out your capabilities, you know, going forward into the future. So that makes a lot of sense to me. And so I'm curious. I know a lot of people listening in, they're probably either early in that journey or they haven't yet started, and they're probably, you know, asking themselves the same question, which is, you know, what workflows do you start with? Right? So what would you recommend as the starting point for, you know, the first automation to replicate, you know, sort of that that early success that you had? You know, maybe maybe some thoughts on that for the audience would be would be appreciated. Yeah. Sure. You know, I I think, you know, we started, and I think this was, you know, the right approach. It was kinda mentioned before. Right? You know, you you start easy. Like, what are what are what are the what's the biggest areas of pain that is relatively straightforward to solve? And and for us, it was, you know, the scheduling element of it. And that's that was, you know, we knew we had a problem there. Building schedules, no show rates, missed calls, all ties together, and it was it was material to our organization. Right? There's a lot of other sort of nice to have areas that that I'd love to deploy, some some tools like this, but it's just not gonna move the needle. So that sort of on that combination of what's the most impactful, but but it's gotta be relatively straightforward, because I think it it's important for to make it, relatively easy for the organization to absorb, that way and also for the patients. Right? Again, this was a this was a pain point pain point for the patients. You know, you could we would, unfortunately, read about it in our reviews. You know? You know, called and didn't get to talk to anybody. Right? And, honestly, we we watch our reviews very closely. The negative reviews, as it relates to engagement have diminished, And we really haven't had any negative reviews about, oh, they're just using AI agents now. I can't talk to a live person. Right? That does not exist at this point. And if it doesn't exist at this point, I don't anticipate it will. So, you know, I I think I think you gotta you gotta start easy. And, again, I mentioned this before, the leaders in the organization have to take this on as a it's a journey. Right? And we're gonna we're gonna go through this slowly. The change management is really, really important. And I think it even goes so far I mentioned we sort of did a marketing campaign to our patients to introduce them to Sofia. We did the same thing with our teams because the last thing that we wanted was, you know, the somebody at the front office at one of our offices saying, oh, yeah. Don't call the don't call that number anymore. You're getting that, you know, that stupid Sofia AI agent, right, that, you know, is not a real person. Right? We don't want them talking negatively about that. So we absolutely we absolutely took it upon ourselves to make sure that the entire team, right, was understanding of what's going on and could embrace it. Yeah. And I think if I may build on that a little bit, Josh and Jeff, and and for the audience here, you know, drilling into Jeff's starting point was really looking at major major pain points and then acknowledging that, you know, some work effort and some patience with AI to help in that works. And something that we've been talking about at Microsoft for about three quarters now is once you've done that, really think about a success framework as a as a company to try and help organize that a little bit. And we put it in the four pillars of employee experience, customer experience, an ability to think about the revenue side, so bending the curve on on innovation. And then to where you started, just specifically on business processes, not necessarily visible to customers, but but doing it that way. And with that success framework, we've seen customers with partners like Intellipear do very well and actually start moving moving towards something. I've seen very few customers be successful where they've created completely new teams, and they're trying to transform the whole company all at once and create new metrics and every I've seen companies do so much better to get organized, keep it simple. If you can't measure it from a perspective of a metric that's important in your business today, why would you try and create a new metric. to make the project work? It's not that different to other technology transitions that we've seen. And the greater pragmatism to organize and finally just, you know, if you're a CEO or a line of business owner, the the the ownership at the line of business level is just critical. And it doesn't mean to say that all lines of business have to be doing stuff concurrently. Decide as a leadership team where you're going to focus first and then you'll actually get benefit through a a period of time. It's a funny thing with everything going so fast to actually say patience is key, but it really is. Patience and intentionality are not overcomplicating, and we're seeing customers break away. We call them frontier firms, break away where they're doing that within an organizing structure. And like I I mentioned on those four pillars versus, you know, the sensationalization of the transition, get away from that, make it practical. Yeah. I'm a big believer in that as well. Sometimes you have to slow down to go fast. Right? And so I think adopting. the framework that you just laid out is is exactly, the the key to setting yourself on a path to success. So, I those insights. And now I'm curious, you know, what role does conversational analytics play in all of this? So, you know, like, IntelliPeer's smart analytics product, Which insights, Jeff, were most operationally valuable or or even surprising? Yeah. There's there's a number of of insights that we we that were new to us and were surprising. I actually think probably the one that was the most surprising was just the sheer number of phone calls that we were getting that I would say were sort of low value ad, interactions. So people calling for, directions to check hours at a particular location. Right? All this stuff that you can very easily, you know, look up on on the web. Right? But a lot of our calls were like that. So it was clogging up all of our our live agents, right, just answering very basic things. And, of course, we didn't have the technology to help us understand that. So that's that intent of the call, and seeing that really, was eye opening and certainly helped us think about how we, how we resource things. The, the other piece of it or other insights, I would say, is, with with 60 offices, you know, you wanna believe you're doing everything the same and you're standardized. The reality of it is you're not. We got lots of humans involved. Right? So you could see, you know, if we we can look into data in the analytics and see why is it taking so long to get patients, the wait time to get in for an appointment is so much longer at some offices versus others. Yet we're looking at the patient volumes on the other side saying, they're all about as busy as the rest. Well, guess what? We'd have offices blocking schedules at times and things like that. Right? So the analytics that we got from, people's attempts to schedule and sort of the timing of that was very insightful, and it helped us to it helped us to to make some operational changes, right, and and that we that we definitely needed. And then also additional insights that that we really didn't have a great way to to understand, but we have much clearer info on it now, with with this, AI tool. It's just why do people cancel a no show? Right? Like and and you can actually pick that up. These are all recorded. You get all the the, the insights from there, which helps us to, you know, sort of try to better meet the patients where they are from an overall patient experience perspective. So, again, insights that, you know, really, we struggled, didn't have any way to access before, but but now we do. Yeah. That's great. And so was there anything that's, you know, about this journey that surprised you, you know, either from the patients or even the insights, you know, several of which you've already covered, but just kinda curious what else beyond, what you've already discussed maybe was just something new or or or unknown and uncovered? Yeah. I mean, I mean, first of all, honestly, one of the bigger surprises for me was was how quickly our patients accepted the the the AI automation. I think, you know, almost two thirds of of ours of our scheduling calls are now being handled by the the AI agent, by Sofia. And so that's sort of beginning to end. Again, that's freed up time for live agents to handle the, the many other calls we get that are that are also important, but that, people need to talk to a human about. So I think, you know, number one, it's just patients accepted it much much more quickly than we thought, which has been great. And then, you know, sort of coming full circle, we have seen a decrease, in our in our no show rate because, again, we're able to more proactively meet the patients where they are when they are because most of the time, people do try to reschedule if they're not gonna show up. But, again, before, we we just weren't able to to talk to all of them and make sure. So we've seen a reduction in that, you know, by it's about five total percentage points at this point, and that's that's not nothing. That's very meaningful to us across 60 locations. And and I'd also add that, like I mentioned before too, our our teams. Like, our teams feel like they are freed up to to focus on, you know, higher value add type of engagements with patients, which is more fulfilling for the team. Right? And that's that's soft. Right? But it it's you know, people wanna find meaning in their work. And, you know, if they're not if they're not having to talk all the time about, you know, the hours of the clinic and things like that, right, and they're actually able to really talk to a patient when they need to that is that need to talk to another human, I think it's better for them. And no exaggeration here. We have not had, any voluntary turnover in our call center, not one, Oh. since since this went live. Now as I mentioned, we have, you know, we have either repurposed or eliminated a few positions or some positions, but we've had no voluntary turnover. And that was a concern of mine. Would be would, you know, the call center folks look around and say, these AI agents are gonna do everything I'm doing. I don't you know, there's no future for me here. And maybe in the future, that is the case. Right? But for right now, I think people really appreciate they're actually doing something at a higher value add and feeling like they're they're making a bigger mark on the organization. Yeah. That really jumps out at me just knowing the industry average attrition rates within call centers alone. Yeah. So, that's that's absolutely, stunning. You know, final question before, maybe we take a few audience questions. You know, I know you covered this a little bit at the beginning, but maybe we can touch upon it again. What's what's next for Jefferson Dental? You know, what are your plans in terms of expansion of use cases in your AI road map? Sure. So I I did mention it before. Right? We are we are leaning in on some outbound call efforts with with these with Sofia. We have not unique to our business, but definitely not relevant to all businesses. But in in Texas, you are assigned patients on the Medicaid roster based on your geography and a number of things. And, it's your responsibility as the provider to engage with those patients and bring them in for care. And it it can be challenging to do so. It's very high volume. So we're starting, outbound efforts, where we will call and schedule appointments once we get ahold of them with the AI agents for them to come in. That's something that, you know, up until this day has been done entirely manually. And I'll just say from my seat, I have real questions about where whether we're making all those phone calls on a routine basis every month. Right? So I I'm very excited about that. We will definitely see some sort of uplift from that, and that's a revenue uplift, right, that we would not have otherwise. And then, on on the collections front, we have dental having worked on the medical side, for most of my career, not sure who else in the audience, but, the dental side of collections and revenue cycle is more complicated than the medical side just due to some nuances in in dental insurance. So we end up with a lot of patients that, you know, do have outstanding balances, and they're not usually large balances. So they're not always worth us, you know, sending a bunch of statements and all that stuff, Certainly not use use using live agents. So we're, working down that that road map, to start using IntelliPeer's agents on the collections front as well. That's great. Alright. So thank you guys so much. This was absolutely wonderful. As Josh mentioned, we're gonna go ahead and open it up now to take some questions from the audience. So if you have any, please go ahead and insert them into the Q and A or chat panel. If any of your questions don't get answered just due to the limited time on this session, still throw them in there. We'll have a member of our team reach out to follow-up with you personally. In the next day or two, we'll make sure that you get those covered. So the first question that came in from the audience is, it seems like there are many different places you can start with automation. Where do you feel that AI has made the biggest impact for you as an organization? I said or let's go ahead and start this with Alistair, and then I would think we would love to hear from Jeff as well. Yeah. Thanks, Ken, and and for the question. Look. I think I'd probably lead off with three three main areas, you know, employee productivity without without question. There are so many workflows, functions that can be now confidently solved at the right quality with and from Microsoft, that's with Copilot. Of course, we also have a free flavor of that Copilot chat that is enterprise secure. And there are just thousands of use cases now or examples where confidently and identified by different job roles, productivity benefits of 20% and and and higher. I think secondarily as well in the developer community, just how much traditional and rather lower capability type work can actually be coded in the development in the development sense, achievements of 40% in excess of developer time is being saved with that. If you think about Microsoft as a business and its size of revenue stream, and for the most part, we sell software. This is already public. 40% of our code base now is being automated. And that's that's colossal when you think of the size and scale. And and then I think the third, and we've talked a lot about this today, is just in that customer experience and customer engagement. All of those three are just great places to start in your company and with Intellipear and other resources or partners or or or even online. You're you're going to find those very simply. But a great question. Thank you. And for you, Jess. Sure. Mean, I I probably I think I may have sort of touched on this already. Right? But just to kinda rehash it, you know, we were very much focused on, you know, where are our pain points, where are the dollars. Right? Whether it's costs, that, you know, just really aren't gonna be sustainable in the long run or revenue opportunities that are material. And and so, you know, sort of, bringing those all together, I think every organization is gonna be a little bit different. But, also, you know, wanted to make sure that this was not just going to entirely disrupt our organization. And and, I will say this. I certainly won't name names, but I have, endeavored with a few other partners, from with some AI tools not overlapping with IntelliPeer. And, frankly, they they haven't always panned out the way we expected. And a lot of them are new, organizations. Right? They don't have a long track record. So for me, what gave me a lot of comfort, was working with an organization like IntelliPeer that had been around for decades, right, and, was proven. And so I think that's that's really an important a critical thing to to think about as well. Right? As as your your partner's experience, they know what's going on, and they they've got the, the financial wherewithal to be around, right, for the next couple years and decades. And so for me, it was it was kind of all those things. Wonderful. Alright. Moving right along into our next When bringing AI into your patient communication, what type of guardrails were essential before going live, and how did you build that necessary trust? Maybe we'll start this time with Jeff. Sure. You know, I I can't speak to the the the technology behind it, but, obviously, you know, we've we have to make sure that, we can identify the individual we're talking to and make sure that, you know, when somebody calls and says, you know, my name is so and so, we need to verify that that's actually who it is. Right? There's technology built in that's linked to the phone numbers of the individuals and and, date of births that we use to confirm. You know, there's incredibly strong security to make sure that if there is ever a question about who the agent is speaking to, it just automatically goes over to a live agent. Right? And so that's the extent that I know we have. You know, Josh may be able to speak more specifically to what they have done from a technology perspective, but, you know, I would just say we're very, very concerned about that and make sure that, you know, no issues at this point. That's a great segue. Josh, I'll hand that one over to you to talk a little bit more about the guardrails behind the technology. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly, when it comes to compliance and governance, of which things like guardrails, are are certainly a component. As I mentioned upfront, you know, we've been doing this for a long time as a as a regulated telco effectively, in the early days, and we've carried that into you know, as part of our DNA forward. Right? So when it comes to guardrails, we really do this, in multiple layers. When it comes to overall compliance and security, you know, HIPAA is at the center of everything we do within health care, of course. And then coupled with that, you know, it's an endless list of certifications for things like high trust, you know, SOC two compliance, endless number of ISO standards that we comply with as well. Within the voice layer itself, being able to deidentify PII information is very, you know, sensitive, personal information is is paramount. And so we certainly do that to support, you know, the things that Jeff was mentioning. Right? So that, you're guarding your patients, and your employees' data really, really carefully. Right? You know, not just to the minimum of what's required, but well beyond that, right, to ensure that, you know, that trust that I was touching upon so much early on, you know, is never breached. Wonderful. Alright. And we'll close out with one more question here. I think, Josh, if you don't mind kicking this one off, what does it look like for an organization's that call volumes or scheduling patterns are very different from what we've seen today with Jefferson Dental's? Yeah. So I I think one thing that's interesting is, there's no one size fits all approach to any of this. Right? And that's why smart analytics is such a key component of everything we do. Like, in aggregate, I can tell you that we have observed that upwards of 60% of inbound calls are often scheduling related or simply, you know, frequently asked questions, But that differs. Right? I mean, it's a distribution. And so from one provider to the next, their exact pain point that they need to focus on and start with could be very different. And so that's why it's so fundamental to have this analytics and data capability, not just as an add on, but essentially integrated. Right? We are able to, capture these interactions whether it's an AI agent or a live call. We do this across the entire lifetime of the customer interaction across handoffs back and forth between AI agents and live agents, so from one segment to the next. And that that data, you know, and and the traces across that journey of an interaction are are really, really critical between for being able to discern, you know, what you might do differently from, one customer, to the next, where you start with which use case, how you might tune it, and, you know, how you ensure that the agents that you're deploying are really delivering the most bang for the buck. Wonderful. Can give another end of the scale if it's helpful, Kenyon. It was actually at Microsoft. One of the first places that we went internally was our customer support services. And as you can imagine, the scale of that globally across across our entire business, it was 7,000,000 calls a day coming in that ultimately was a nine month project in assessment, but four month in actual rollout and pilot to actually living it now in that world over the last year where employee satisfaction, just like Jeff's organization, increased, customer experience improved. And annually now, a saving of half $1,000,000,000 Wow. That's incredible. is across, you know, very different disparate platforms, different amount of communication channels, all of that unified in what's essentially an a AI led experience for customers, and just like Jeff, an ability to get to an actual person when that makes sense. So, you know, it's it's a brave new world. The opportunity is there. Awesome. Well, really quickly here before we wrap up, I just wanted to invite everyone on this call today to go ahead and join us for a live experience to see IntelliPeer's conversational AI in action. So every Wednesday, we host a weekly live demo where you can see firsthand how our technology is transforming patient engagement across various industries. So during these sessions, our expert solutions engineers engage our AI agents and real world use cases like you've experienced here today, everything from appointment scheduling, rescheduling, complex FAQs, collections, and beyond. So this is a really great opportunity to see how the solutions we talked through today can help your organization, and it's also a great opportunity to have any and all of your burning questions answered by an expert in a very educational and intimate environment. So we would love to see you there. You can go ahead and scan the QR code here to save your spot for the upcoming sessions. Any final notes, thoughts to close out today? Just really wanna thank our speakers, Jeff, Alister. Really appreciate your time and the insights. It was wonderful discussion. And likewise to everyone who attended this webinar, we appreciate your time as well. As we mentioned, any questions that we didn't get to, we are more than happy to follow-up with directly, as well as any that you may think of after this webinar. Feel free to reach out to us, and we would love to, you know, start that dialogue with you. So thank you everyone for your attendance, and enjoy the rest of your day and weekend. Bye. bye, everybody. Thank you. Thank. you.