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Interview In Action: AI Voice Automation and the Future of Healthcare Call Centers with Scott D'Entremont

[00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by Parlance. Elevate patient and staff experiences with AI voice driven solutions from Parlance. Automate call handling, streamline switchboards and contact centers, and enable quick, accurate call routing in hospitals and clinics.

Improve patient experience and reduce the workload on your staff. With smart communication solutions from Parlance. Visit ThisWeekHealth. com slash ParlanceCorp today to transform your healthcare interactions.

Welcome to This Week Health. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare, one connection at a time.

Now, onto our interview

(Interview 1) All right. Here we are from VIVE 2025. And we're here on the final day on Wednesday, the snow day, Scott D'Entremont with Parlance it's been a fun conference.

Yeah, it has. It really has. These are the final moments and a little less activity, but still plenty of people [00:01:00] walking around and

giving out your last cookies and whatnot.

We are.

I'm

getting our last friends.

I'm gonna cheat here. And I want to walk people through your booth. Alright, so I walk up here and it says fix your phones. Talk about what Parlance does to, what, is this getting more value out of your phones?

If you think about all the investments in healthcare technology over the years, what you'll find is very little of it has gone in changing the patient's experience in the voice channel.

And that's where we come in. We leverage conversational AI to make that whole process better.

So conversational AI. I call in as a patient. I'm going to get a parlance backend. Yeah. I'm going to be talking to AI?

Yeah, you are. We're going to answer the phone and say, how can I help you? Sounds easy.

No, it doesn't sound easy.

There's a lot of questions you can get. There's a lot of questions you can get when I call into a health system.

Yeah. I think the best technology makes hard problems seem easy on the front. So one of our customers, Keck Medicine of USC. has [00:02:00] an 800 number that we answer. It's called 1 800 U S E CARE.

And you can call and ask for anything from, what time is my appointment to what are the visiting hours in the Glendale location. And it's really helpful to create that consumer experience in healthcare. In terms of systems that are in place, almost none of them are able to advertise a one phone number access like that.

More than a billion calls handled?

Imagine.

That's a, that's Yeah. So you guys have been around for a while. We have. Because it's not a billion this year.

It isn't. It isn't. But it's hundreds of millions. It's it's a company that's been around for more than 20 years. I joined about six years ago, so I'm still a new guy.

We have a lot of really tenured people that have dedicated their careers to helping people with their caller journey. That focus on navigation and focus on healthcare has been around for a really long time. The tech stack has evolved. So we used to be doing a much simpler version of technology where we would be able to say, How do I direct your call?[00:03:00]

So we really cut our teeth on being good at navigation. And today we've been able to take advantage of new advancements in technology to broaden that, to be able to do transactional things. Anything from helping at the help desk in the healthcare system to getting patients to the right place.

I was going to come to that because that's the next thing I took was a picture and I noticed automate resets, frequently asked questions, ticket management from a CIO IT perspective. Yeah. You talked about the patient experience, but that would be of significant value for me.

it's really interesting. Last year, a customer of ours said, you're doing a great job of the front door of our health care system. I've got this huge problem with my help desk. People are really mad at me with the guy said, the whole times are really long and it's just not going well.

I'd like you guys to do something about that. We did an integration with service now. It's gone really great. We're really excited to talk to people about it. It's funny. A lot of the CIOs are talking to us in person. Yeah. In support of their colleagues in the contact center, when you [00:04:00] start to talk about what you could do in that with the help desk, they light up and go.

Yeah, talk to me more about this. They seem pretty interested.

Yeah, it's interesting. I'm looking at this deflect most routine calls from operators. One of the things I'm talking to CIOs about They're very serious about consolidating the number of touch points coming into the health system.

So all of those clinics, all of those outbound places They used to have somebody sitting at the desk, you'd go into for your appointment and sometimes they'd be on the phone and be like, wait a minute. They're consolidating that. They're saying, look there's a better experience to be had if we bring all that in.

And I would imagine that's a pretty complex undertaking from what I understand.

It is. And we support that around the country. A number of different customers, a line of health is that exact instance. We started off just answering for all the hospitals. The physicians loved that experience and thought it was much improved.

We'd like it out at our offices. So now we answered the phone at about 100 different ambulatory locations for those guys as well.

So do you have to map that whole thing? Like before we used to map it out and create these [00:05:00] complex routing tables for

yeah, again, we tried it. We do a lot of work to make it seem easy, but there's a lot of work that goes behind the scenes, designing call flows, things like that, in particular, the directories.

Some of our bigger customers, academic medical. Systems, they might have 40, 000 different places that you can direct somebody

to, yeah.

Yeah, so when you say, okay, I'm going to have a 1 800 number out in front of this, it has to know every single spot, and you can get into the tens of thousands of directory entries.

So why don't we have to worry about like hallucinations and those kinds of things with your technology you're using?

We use some techniques to make sure we get that right. When there's a tiebreaker, we send it to the operator. We're not overly aggressive. We don't try to trap anybody in the system.

I think we've all called those systems. When you try to opt out and it goes, are you really sure you want to opt out? That's not us. We're here to help if the call isn't going to get to the right place or we're not 100 percent certain. We'll just send it to the operator.

do you like to start the [00:06:00] conversation with in a health system that's thinking about this?

Is it the CIO? Or is it somebody else who owns the call center and the experience?

Yeah, the CIO is always a great place because they can direct you and they also understand what projects are underway. As I'm sure a lot of times it's about timing. We have people that we meet and they sign up in six months.

And we have people that sign up in five years and it has a lot to do with, where they are in their technology journey. So by partnering with the CIO, it makes a lot of sense to get that timing right. But we certainly speak with a lot of contact center executives, a lot of people that are responsible for entering the front door of acute care facilities as well.

I would think in this space, there's a lot of low hanging fruit for health systems. for efficiency, saving money, but also to really elevate the experience.

Yeah, I think so. And we try to make it happen in that way by doing a phased approach where we get in there and have an impactful first phase in eight or so weeks.

And [00:07:00] then just continue to do more. It's usually our final phases are around working with health care systems to standardized templates really. What it comes down to the workflows are really tough. One of my contact center managers, we, Hey, Scott, we want you guys to do a lot more.

However, we have 79 different scheduling templates, so we've got to clean that up first.

Man, you just gave me like PTSD thinking about I had at least two of those types of projects where I went in and I thought let's just standardize this form. How hard can this be? it was the intake forum at our clinics.

I thought how hard can this be? And after collecting like 450 of them with very distinct things and things, people were passionate about this is

really invested. Yeah.

And yeah that's very difficult work.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think we do a great job of that. We've hired people that, had been former solution architects at Epic and.

Worked in those kind of projects, people that have run contact centers were really deep.[00:08:00]

Thanks

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