629 - RingCentral: Cloud Migration, AI and the Future of Voice Communications in Australia

Speaker A: Quick one before we dive in, if you want the best of what's happening in Australian digital health delivered to your inbox each week, then jump onto the Talking Health Tech newsletter. It's free, easy to read and it's where I share my hot takes from the week that you don't hear on this podcast. Head to talkinghealthtech.com newsletter to sign up.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Talking Health Tech Podcast. My name is Peter Birch. Today on the show I'm joined by Steve Saunders, Ringcentral. G', day, Steve. How you going man?

Speaker C: Um, good, thanks Peter. Good to see you again. Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Yes, always good to have a chat, um, often see you out and about at the, uh, industry events and various things. I don't think we've done like a full length feature podcast episode as yet. I think we've probably done some rando sessions here and there. But it's wonderful to have you on the podcast today. For those unfamiliar with, I guess, you and Ringcentral more broadly, um, in the healthcare space, tell us, um, tell us a bit about it and um, we'll go from there.

Speaker C: So, a little bit about myself, Steve Saunders. Uh, as you now already know, I've been with RingCentral for seven years and I focus very much on the healthcare sector, uh, in and around Australia, um, and very much focusing on two specific outcomes for healthcare, which is very much about helping healthcare organisations become more efficient through their operation, but also helping them also improve their patient experiences. So it's something I'm really passionate about, um, and I think something that Ringcentral is um, well primed to do.

Speaker B: Yeah, got you. Um, what you just described could be interpreted in terms of the things you make, uh, but differently by um, different people based on their experiences. Tell us a bit more about how um, you do that.

Speaker C: How we do.

Speaker B: Oh, like the enterprise solutions and the blah, blah phones like Internet. What's the.

Speaker C: Yeah, let's break it down.

Speaker B: I'm a simple guy. Yeah.

Speaker C: Let me give you, Peter, um, some anecdotes that I hear from CIOs across health care, both public and private. Quite frequently, voice is the number one application. And when I say voice, I'm talking about the telephone. I'm talking about a conversation between a consumer or a patient and their healthcare service provider. And healthcare customers continually tell us it is the number one application across their enterprise, full stop, critically important that they can service telephone conversations both from external but also when you're in a large hospital that a specialist can talk to A nurse, a nurse can, can initiate a code blue. It's the communications in and around clinical healthcare.

Speaker B: M Because I mean, yeah, and it is interesting in this world of there's a million different ways to communicate with people in various apps and formats and uh, physically and virtually and 100% always unless it's like I'll either go see them in person, but that's like really hard to do. Uh, but then often the fallback is I'm just going to give them a

Speaker C: call and let me sort of expand on that because you're exactly right. There are plenty of applications, a way that we could communicate with our service providers. But we as the consumer, as the patient have a preference to talk to someone about what it is. Whether that's because it's confidential, whether it's because it's personal, because it's real time. Um, but it's very close to us that we need to talk to these people rather than do anything else. And the statistics that we have bear out very much that healthcare as a user of telephone services is 5 or 10x from a number of other vertical markets that we service.

Speaker B: And like there are a number of different ways you can get a phone. Uh, and sorry, I didn't mean to be like, you know, uh, cute about it but like obviously healthcare has some different needs when it comes to voice. Tell us about like the, and given that your world is, is healthcare in Ringcentral, what are those kind of key things that make healthcare different when it comes to these kinds? It's not just phone site but just the services you provide generally.

Speaker C: So I'm gonna elaborate on Voice being the number one application across and the telephone being critically important. And the challenge that healthcare organizations have today is that they've had and they still have legacy on premise telephone technology. It's called a pabx. They've had these on site for number lots of years, decades. And these PABXs are coming to end of life and healthcare providers don't know what to do next. Everything else is going to the cloud. But because Voice is so critical, the CIO says well I'm not taking voice to the cloud at this point. And so what makes Ringcentral difference is that we service that marketplace very well and globally. We have 22,000 customers to demonstrate that we are relevant in this sector. And so if I continue to sort of on that narrative, um, these legacy PABXs will continue to work until they don't and when it doesn't, it's going to impact their care Coordination. And again, continuing to evolve that thought process is these on premise PABXs, the legacy end of life. They're often supported by, not by the manufacturer now themselves, they're supported by local third party providers. They require ongoing expensive upgrades and they require specialized engineers to service and maintain these things. And so again coming back to there at the juncture of what do we do next? What comes next for healthcare?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I mean because I think about health care, it's a pretty broad spectrum of services that are provided big and small. Yes. Like every health care provider is going to need a phone in some capacity, I guess. But where I'm thinking that the bits you're talking about is probably um, most relevant in that kind of large public hospital kind of space where there's a number of different phone lines and everything's connected. Uh, everything's a different age in terms of technology. Um, yeah, I'm not even sure where you'd start with that.

Speaker C: Yeah. And they look at these, you're exactly right. In these large campus facilities where they've got clinical services, but a whole bunch of peripherals as well. Um, you know, the IT team will say, well we've got dial tone. The phone works until it doesn't. Um, but the other part to this is it doesn't support a modern clinical functioning environment. And really these, these phone services are not contributing now to healthcare organizations evolution, which is how do we make you more efficient, do more with less. And whether you're public or private, that's a key aspect of doing more for less. But it's not doing anything to improve the patient experience. And if we take that patient experience a little bit further, uh, the telephone conversation requires a synchronous conversation between two human beings. And if the service provider is not available to take your call, then the patient experience is terrible because of long wait times. Not available. I can't contact you when it's convenient to me.

Speaker A: Hm.

Speaker B: I was going to say, like, are we like. Yes, I 100% agree that you like for optimal patient experience and uh, I guess clinician satisfaction too that like in terms of allowing them to do their work, you got to have working phone lines. But are we trying to like really do stuff around the edges? Like how optimized can you make a good connection? But I guess as you just started pointing out then it's not like you can just pick up a phone and then you speak. Exactly. To the person that you need to, especially in these, these large things. Tell me a bit more about the. Because you talked about you know, improving the patient experience side and the efficiency gains and all these things like how much uh, like how far can we go down this line to um, really optimize something that just existed for a long time.

Speaker C: Yeah. So let's, let's sort of look at that in terms of how do we take a customer from where they are today to where they need to be into the future. And I very much break this down into transition and transform. And the key thing here is to de risk this transition from where they are today with these legacy on premise pabxs to something which is quite futuristic and cloud based with omni channel capability and AI infused. That's where we're going to get to, but that's not where we start. And the first notion to um, quell is that we're going to replace this on premise hardware with cloud. But cloud is not as service available or service resilient as the PABX is today. Whereas I argue now to these CIOs, well we can demonstrate that we um, have greater service availability than your on premise equipment today, um, and that we will have less service outage, you won't need expensive engineers, you won't have downtime for outages and upgrades and those types of things. So the first point here is um, moving to cloud doesn't mean you sacrifice service availability of voice critical, mission critical services. Um, and the second part is they're always going to be nervous about a transition. So we start in a staged environment, we look at non critical services, we move those across, they understand how the system works, we understand how their network performs and then we start moving into critical areas, whether it be emergency services, whether it be nurses stations, operating theaters and those types of things. Part of that transition allows us to connect the old technology to the new technology. Part of that allows us to connect in these large campus environments, their data center to our data center improves security, improves resilience and reliability. Um, and then within that we build layers of resilience. That's all just in the transition piece. And then we start transforming all of the other services and features that we can um. Again, these legacy PABXs don't provide a lot of functionality other than the telephone. And we know that healthcare uses all the facsimile, they use a lot of sms, they have call centers. And so at the moment they've got multiple vendors with multiple services that are all disparate, they're not unified. Whereas Ringcentral brings all of that into one place. One single admin portal, one Single contract, one single support arrangement to do all of those things that healthcare, um, deems as to be mandatory for running a healthcare operation.

Speaker A: Quick one. Before we dive in, if you want the best of what's happening in Australian digital health delivered to your inbox each week, then jump onto the Talking Health Tech newsletter. It's free, easy to read, and it's where I share my hot takes from the week that you don't hear on this podcast. Head to talkinghealthtech.com newsletter to sign up.

Speaker B: Yeah, interesting. And so, uh, well, that's a good point. Like any kind of large migration, you're often not going to do. You might, I guess, but like you just said, you might transition bit by bit and have like a strategic approach and a gradual kind of, um, flow. But yeah, it's more than just the, the phone line, I think you were saying too. So for the, for the services and the things you do, are there different kind of, is it, is it modular? There's different kind of like areas that health systems can kind of lean into, or is it all kind of just like once you're on, that's the whole kind of kind of kit and you

Speaker C: better use it all? Yeah, that's a fair point. And again, trying to keep this simple, I think the first part is putting the platform in place and let's call that the Ringcentral platform. And then from that we can just build and add functionality and capability, not as a revolution, but as an evolution. And again, coming to this point of once the transition is complete and you have the platform in place, then we start looking at things like how do we help you be more efficient? I'm going to give you some examples in a moment. But then how do we improve that patient experience longer term on ongoing? Um, I've got healthcare customers now that are four into four and five year contracts and we're still going transformational activities because as technology evolves we can help them improve their operational processes and procedures. It just carries on. Um, one of the things we now bring to it that these legacy vendors can't do is start to infuse the AI across the top. And what we're now, it's the buzzword. And what we're starting to do is pre interaction during the interaction and after the interaction, using AI to help those two levers of efficiency and patient experience. One of the things we can do in the transformation is allow patient appointments to be booked using a bot. So rather than having to wait for a human to be available to answer that phone call, that we talked about needs to be synchronous. If they're not available, the bot can make change or cancel the booking. Or in the example where you might be needing to book an MRI, which is a 14 minute process, we might do some triage with the bot and take that 14 minute call down to a 7 minute call, then transfer that to the human being. And we've done two things. We've given the patient a good experience but we've also helped that healthcare provider be more efficient and give them 50% of that FTE back. During that conversation, during an interaction we can live transcribe the call. And we find that really useful in healthcare because in healthcare if you're getting a pathology result or you're talking about some quite technical medical term, having the transcription live in front of you helps the person receiving the call understand what it is you're talking about. And if English is not your first language, we can then live transfer, um, translate that from the patient's preferred language to English for the person receiving the call and then post interaction. We can do all the analysis of what took place during that interaction, what was the sentiment of the call and what were keywords and concepts or phrases that came out of that call. Whether there be competitive information because you're a private sector or whether it's a community safety issue or um, there are uh, words or utterances during that conversation that should be alerted to people to understand what was going on. We're doing this in a um, justice health situation at the moment where they've decided that the telephone used to be a tool for fun for these inmates and we ah, are taking the calls and if the word suicide is used or the word bomb threat is used, we bring that out and we alert the people that need to know what's going on.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's some really good use cases on like it's not just infusing AI technology or avatars and all of that just for the sake of it, because it's cool. It's kind of like you know, these are uh, ongoing issues that haven't kind of had the opportunity to be dress addressed this way. And like you say taking like, and it's, and it's what we're seeing in other parts of healthcare too in terms of the actual consultation and having scribing and things. Uh, seems like a um, a no brainer for a um, CTO to really kind of focus on how you capture that properly.

Speaker C: Pete. To that point what we've seen up until now is that voice has been the last bastion of unstructured data. So organizations, public and private, they can see what's going on in email, they can understand what's happening on their website. There are analytics around all aspects of the business. But the voice conversation, which is the number one app to this point, has been unstructured data. No one knew what was taking place, how well we're servicing those customers, how efficient we're operating as a business. And now we can bring all that data out and not just give it to the IT teams, but we give it to marketing, we give to patient experience, we give to operational officers to understand how to improve.

Speaker B: Um, it reminded me too there's a, and this is a cheap plug to um, check out some other content on the talking podcast. But on the um, you know, the AI receptionist kind of front, I'm, I spoke to so Colette Thomas from one of the health clinics in the U.S. i think on um, those types of um, on a same kind of platform but and two things I think that you know there's a lot of benefits and they've seen like kind of measurable outcomes through, through using that technology. But also kind of demonstrates for you, um, I mean this is a global kind of capability that if it's relevant in other parts of the world, it's going to be relevant in Australia too. Does take me to my next you know, kind of point though. Something super critical in any industry but particularly healthcare, especially if we're documenting and recording more and more information, all of a sudden the bounty on uh, this information gets higher and higher and the, the onerous um, responsibility exists of the art of sovereignty and the risk and security piece. Um, so it's you know, kind of high stakes and um, obviously high reward for the clinics that are and the hospital systems implementing it. It's not done well. Uh, a lot of things can unravel pretty quick too. So I imagine that kind of whole security piece is pretty front and central for Ringcentral given your breadth, size and experience and stuff.

Speaker C: But you tell me, yeah, absolutely it is. And if it doesn't come up in your first conversation, you'll leave that first conversation thinking, oh, there was something we didn't cover. But at the top of every conversation we have with every healthcare provider, the typical questions are where is your data stored? Where is your data processed? How is it secured? Um, and it's something that we do very, very well at Ringcentral. Security is architected right through the platform. Um, and I'll give you some examples that um, we conform in Australia to all of the data privacy principles of Australian law, which you would hope and expect. Um, all of the customer facing patient information is stored within data centers within Australia. Uh, and more and more. So now we're getting the question, where is your AI processed? And we can confidently say all of our AI process is onshore. And I think if we go one step further to that, um, it's not just about um, where the data is stored, whether it's processed, it's where it's accessible and we can make sure that it's only accessible to Australian residents. In turn though, we don't sell data to marketing companies for them to go and do whatever they do and we don't use the data to train AI models for the future either. So it's all contained within the RingCentral platform and all of the data in transit and in rest is encrypted on RingCentral platforms. We do security assessments all the time, whether it's at the beginning of a contract, whether it's an annual review of security. But these security questionnaires can be 150 questions long and they go right through the full gamut of security and data privacy.

Speaker B: Yeah, got you. How do you guys kind of find the landscape of what you do more broadly? Because um, often in healthcare sometimes you know, if someone says oh, who are you? Who are your competitors? Often the competition is uh, complacency or like the act of not, like by not acting, um, and actually the act of not acting because like by not acting you're making the choice not to do something. So um, yeah, but I uh, might have just made some assumptions but the uh, like what, what's your take on the current landscape generally where you fit in it, where you kind of lean into, um, and how that benefits.

Speaker C: It's intuitive question. Um, and fortunately for us it's not the number one reason but one of the, you know, if we ever downgrade an opportunity, the number one reason for downgrading opportunity is not a competitor, it is to exactly what you've described is do nothing. And if I come back to the very first point of CIOs at the moment are working well what do we do next? What comes next after this legacy on premise pabx and it is frequent for us to say to working with this getting close to contract and they say now we're going to kick this can down the road another year, we're going to upgrade and extend the service contract on this existing PABX and we're going to come back to this in a year's time and think about it, because there is a nervousness to making that transition. So that's the first point. Um, the second point is that Microsoft Teams is prevalent everywhere. And as good as Microsoft Teams is, it's not a clinical application. You wouldn't put Microsoft Teams at a nurse's station or an emergency room. Um, it just doesn't have the functionality required for healthcare. It's not architected for the resilience of healthcare. But it is probably the number one app that, um, providers think, well, we're using Microsoft Teams everywhere else. Let's go and put that in the clinical environment. And it's quite easy for us then to move them away from that level of thinking. So we've got to get them over the hurdle of do nothing. We've got to get them over the hurdle of can we just deploy Microsoft Teams every. No, you can't. Um, and that's where we start talking about the differentiators of RingCentral, which is, we are the largest provider of cloud communications globally and not a lot of people know that we have more cloud telephony. That's pretty big.

Speaker B: So I'm just reflecting on that. I mean, that's pretty. There's a lot of cloud communications that goes on.

Speaker C: Correct. And we are by some percentage larger than the rest of the field in terms of cloud communications. We are larger than Microsoft in cloud communications. And if I go back to the other point, we've got 22,000 healthcare customers globally and over 600,000 cloud communications customers globally. So we're up there with, we are the market leader, um, undisputed, if I just take a couple of moments to be indulgent. But, um, we've all heard of the Gartner magic quadrant and it has four quadrants. It's got a leaders quadrant, another good quadrant. Yeah, that's right. They love the quadrant. RingCentral is the only provider in the top. In the leaders quadrant of Gartner 11 years consecutively. So others, other providers have moved in and out RingCentral consistently. 11 years top. Right. Market leader.

Speaker B: And that's, you know, I guess across. Across industries. Right. And across the world. So I guess for Australian healthcare systems that think, oh, not like, if they've not come across RingCentral, I guess they haven't. Probably haven't been looking hard enough. I've seen you out and about it a lot of different things, but, um, yeah, a lot of experience under the belt that probably applies into healthcare, but that, um, experience in the, the system too. If there was any other kind of advice or reflections or things that you kind of, um, would provide to those, uh, health systems that are in that situation, they've got the renewal reminder. I'm sure it doesn't work that way, but the renewal reminder for the PAVX this year and um, they could just keep it on auto renew for another 12 months or they could look at something else. If, like, if we're going to leave with one or two kind of key thoughts, what would those be?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think, um, it's going to, again, sound self indulgent and perhaps even a little bit arrogant, but I think one thing we've talked about a lot is the platform. But I think healthcare providers need to choose a partner for the long term, for the transition and transform and more and more. The more we do in healthcare in Australia or globally, the more I think healthcare providers are recognizing it's not just the platform, the technology, it's the expertise, the advice is the partnership that goes with that that sets us apart from everybody else. The fact that we focus in Australia on healthcare as we do, um, we've got a deep knowledge of that, we've got strong reference capability. We learn from our customers every single day as much as we benefit our customers every single day through efficiency and patient experience. And I think it's often an understated fact. Don't just take vendor A, B and C and look at their technology. You've got to look at their pedigree in healthcare, um, and how they will add value to your business on longer term.

Speaker B: Makes sense. Look, Steve, I appreciate you making the time for this conversation. All the details for RingCentral will be in the show. Notes of this episode on whatever you're listening to or watching it on and there's a comprehensive listing in an article and stuff on our website bat, um, RingCentral and all the content, um, we've done over the years that you can kind of dive into more. And I know you're, you're always down for a conversation, so I'm sure some people can work out ways to get in touch with you.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Um, through the Internets and um, have more of a conversation. So Steve, thanks for making the time. Look forward to doing again soon. Thanks so much.

Speaker C: Thank you, Peter. Thanks for having me. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Talking Health Tech.

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