SeamlessMD Podcast - Episode 40 - Greg Johnsen: A.I. Chatbots for Healthcare

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Video:

In this episode of the SeamlessMD Podcast, Dr. Joshua Liu, Co-founder & CEO at SeamlessMD, and marketing colleague, Alan Sardana, chat with Greg Johnsen, CEO of LifeLink about A.I. Chatbots for Healthcare. See the full show notes below for details.

Guest(s): Mr. Greg Johnsen (@Gregjohnsen), CEO at LifeLink

Dr. Joshua Liu (@joshuapliu), Co-founder & CEO at SeamlessMD

Episode 40 – Show notes:

[0:04] Introducing Mr. Greg Johnsen, CEO of LifeLink;

[1:02] Why Mr. Johnsen built a health tech company after exiting his previous company GT Nexus due to his passion for solving big problems;

[3:46] Why Mr. Johnsen believes now is the right time for digital patient engagement and chatbots for health systems due to the culmination of digital technologies across all industries;

[7:49] How Lifelink determined its core use cases by identifying workflows that require rote instruction that is labor-intensive and expensive at scale, considering three key criteria:

1. Is it high-value?
2. Does the workflow have a significant administrative burden?
3. Would the consumer prefer asynchronous communication?

[12:22] How Lifelink engages patients using two main modalities:

Passive: A chatbot that is inactive until engaged with (e.g. chat button on the website);
Proactive: A chatbot that reaches out to the consumer usually through SMS text message containing a “magic link”, which is a personalized URL key that leads to a browser-based, HIPAA-compliant, automated chat conversation;

[15:19] How asynchronous communication (i.e. communication that is not limited by time and space) improves the patient experience by allowing consumers to engage at their own pace, eliminating social friction;

[25:05] How COVID-19 put immense pressure on health systems to innovate and why the pandemic made it easier for LifeLink to fundraise their Series A as COVID became part of its story;

[27:17] How LifeLink acquired its first customers by thinking big and aligning with strategic, forward-thinking health systems willing to take a chance on a big shift as opposed to incremental progress;

[32:51] How LifeLink’s “virtual waiting room” workflow extends the waiting room to the consumer’s home or the parking lot, enabling patients to fill out required forms ahead of time while setting accurate expectations on current wait time;

[35:18] How LifeLink measures success focusing on patient experience metrics such as NPS scores, happy or not scores, as well as technology-interface scores such as Activation rate (% of patients that click through, authenticate, and engage with chatbot) and Engagement rate (how often patients stay in the conversation / go through the workflow);

[42:28] Fast Five / Lightning Round Questions:

Q1: What is your favorite book or book you’ve gifted the most?

A1: “Conversational Design” by Erika Hall

Q2: How has an apparent failure set you up for greater success?

A2: “In my last company (GT Nexus), we merged with this cloud-based platform (in the early 2000s) before cloud was mainstream. I spent my days selling into cheap procurement deals to heads of supply chains and I would be quite frequently met with reluctance from customers hesitant about putting their purchase orders into the cloud, even though it is the common standard now. It felt like rolling a boulder up a hill… In retrospect, it taught me that things do take time and if you have a great idea, grit is important.”

Q3: Would you rather have Super strength, super speed, or the ability to read people’s minds?

A3: “Probably super speed; I think speed is really, really powerful.”

Q4: What is something in healthcare you believe that others might find insane?

A4: “The sheer amount of money and complexity involved in setting up back-end EMR systems within healthcare systems. Although highly necessary, an extraordinary amount of time and money has been spent on developing these systems; the grip these systems have is also quite insane; the restrictions of the use of data within these systems is quite insane.”

Q5: What is 1 hobby or activity you’ve gotten into since the pandemic?

A5: “We have a lot of birds in the area near my office, so I’ve become a bit of a bird expert!”