Revolutionizing Healthcare with AI: Insights from Quadrant Health's Hayes Milani

Hey everybody wendy sellers here the hr lady thanks for coming back to our show hey we're here today to talk about ai shocker i know right but i really want to specifically talk to our expert guests about ai and health care i mean we all need health care i know i'm not getting any younger i definitely have to go see the doctor next week and i'm pretty sure i just got an AI-generated conversation from them today. So with that said, welcome to the show, Hayes Milani, who is from Quadrant Health.

Hey, Hayes, how are you doing? I am doing wonderful, Wendy. Thanks again for inviting me to the show. We are definitely living in some very exciting times with AI and everything that surrounds it.

There's a lot of mystique, but hopefully in our conversation today, we can get down to some of the nitty-gritty and actually some of the reality of how it can actually make some positive impacts in healthcare. Yeah, I just want to dive right in because this is like AI interests me so much. It's scary. It's risky, but it interests me so much.

And I go down some rabbit holes. I teach AI, teach HR people and managers how to use ChatGPT. And every single day when I log on, I'm just like, oh, my goodness. This is just so much time saved.

But I want to talk about from a health care aspect, you know, you've been at the forefront of health care innovation, period. And now we're even in a new area in outpatient care. Can you just give us a high level view of how AI is currently being integrated into health care? Right.

Well, what's, you know, really, really exciting is, for example, you know, you just talked about ChatGPT and teaching HR people, administrators, managers, how to use just ChatGPT. Well, the good news is there are so many companies now utilizing the different large language models, whether it's OpenAI or Gemini, et cetera, that they're There are smaller companies, bigger companies that have grown already within healthcare and non-healthcare, but they're actually creating tools for companies, for individuals with various targeted goals.

And so for healthcare, it's really exciting to see how, as we know, a lot of administrative burden, whether it comes down to insurance. Whether it's compliance, and so many details that a clinic, a hospital needs to abide by. But that puts a tremendous burden on the healthcare employees or providers. And so the fun part here is there's now a lot of companies emerging that are looking at these problems, these pain points that healthcare practices encounter every day, and giving them tools via AI that will actually...

Take away that pain by allowing AI to do simple tasks. So as an example, right now, if you look at most healthcare practices, hospitals, they struggle to answer the phone. This is a big, big bottleneck. You know, reaching your doctor today is like a miracle, right?

And so now, do I want to get angry at the doctor, the provider, or that team in the clinic who is working really hard? Of course not. I have, you know, for example, a smaller practice, just a small pain practice that gets up to 900 calls a day. Wow.

900 calls. I mean, you'd have to have an army of call center people literally answering that phone. And, you know, they're calling about scheduling, prescriptions, referrals, insurance, collection, you know, whatever. There's so many things to call about.

So a lot of these practices in hospitals are just overwhelmed. And so a lot of times, a lot of calls are not answered or they go into a voicemail or I call it kind of like a black hole because nobody ever checks them, right? Or you might get a call back in three weeks. Yeah, right.

And is that intentional? No, they're just overwhelmed. And the fun part now, there's a lot of companies, or there's a few companies now coming out with AI and virtual agents that can actually answer the call within three to four seconds. We'll do scheduling in real time, patient intake, insurance verification, medical records, collections, and so many other things.

So these companies are building these individual AI agents that are going to be doing specific tasks. The beauty of this is, one, your patient engagement improves 100%. Your patients are now engaged and are getting the service they need. Two, you're taking away the burden and the stress from your existing team, which is struggling to survive every day, and then trying to provide the best patient care when the patients are in-house.

So it's really a win-win where you unshackle the workers, the providers in the practice, and let AI actually do some very simple administrative tasks. And the fun part is, as you've probably, you've heard the AI virtual voice is actually very high level and very interactive. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, not regarding health care, but again, I was just on a training this morning teaching HR and management folks how to do chat GPT specifically for hiring.

And so I'll talk to you about that in a second or ask you questions, actually, because we know that, you know, there's a shortage of staff, of qualified staff. But before we get there, I was just playing on just ChatGPT, the voice, you know, I was having her, the ChatGPT voice. They only have about, I think, 10 to 12 options to play the voice, to read the results that I was getting. And it sounded just like a person sitting next to me.

It like blows my mind, the AI. I also have dabbled in it myself and I have an AI version of a voice for me. And I've played it too for some of my friends and they're like, whoa, that is amazing. So it is really cool how AI has come along.

A little scary, right? And even if you do have a great AI team, you gotta be transparent about it, folks. You gotta let your customers know. Hints, they already know, but you gotta let your customers know, like, yeah, we are using AI, we're using technology.

It's gonna become the norm. I think I'd rather have my call answered by a robot than by no one at all. And yes, you got me in the system and you got me an appointment to talk to somebody, but let's go back to the hiring part. I mean, there is, you're an expert in healthcare.

There's a shortage of workers and it's hard to find just administrative staff, nevermind, you know, medical staff. So talk to me a little bit about, you know, where AI can drive changes, is statistics as well. You said how many calls? 900 calls a day?

It's just a small practice, you know. Wow. And every practice is a little different and unique, but many of the practices, even if they don't get the 900, even if they get 100 calls a day for a small practice, that's a lot. Yeah.

And so, and then imagine mid to large size practices, how many calls they get. And so you really have to have a strategy. The problem here is even when they have call centers and things of that nature, they're still not able to manage all the calls. So, you know, to your point and to your question about are you able to find people, the right people?

Are you able to grow them? Are you able to keep them? Well, it is clear in health care, there is a shortage of labor, whether it's providers or on the administrative side. It doesn't matter.

And so we can't forget about what's fundamental and what's important, which is best patient care. So AI can fill a role, a gap where a practice, if they're struggling to find the right people in the administrative team, AI can actually be part of that to complement their existing team and actually elevate the service and make everybody who's there even more successful. I read a stat on your website, Quadrant Health, that the AI scores of 93.7% on the U.

S. Medical license exam being the highest scoring AI in history. Whoa. Right.

it's it's amazing and you know kind of like what you what you highlighted earlier was about how you know your friends were really blown away about how realistic the ai was especially using your voice well what's exciting is that the ai also interacts it's not just you kind of just you know, kind of a one way it's actually a real interaction between. Human anemia. And the fun part is it's only going to get better. And some people might say, oh, well, that's really scary and creepy.

And it is kind of surprising, but I think at the end of the day, at least I can speak for healthcare, we're going to benefit. And why I say that is it is only going to improve our healthcare in America. Because again, we're facing a labor shortage, limited resources, you know, who knows now what's going to happen with Medicaid and Medicare. A lot of practices are going to be impacted by that, especially the FQHCs, the federally qualified health centers that are heavily reliant on Medicaid and Medicare.

So their, let's say, HR strategy has to change. They have to look in creative ways on how can they continue to keep their doors open and successful and be profitable or at least, you know, break even. Yeah. And the interesting thing is like you mentioned before, like about call centers and folks that are listening, it's not just about healthcare.

This is about everywhere else too. We just happen to be talking to a healthcare expert today, but even when you're, you know, putting your customer service inbound and outbound in a call center, it doesn't mean that they're an expert at what they do. So that's the thing that, you know, when I read that statistic on your website, I'm like, oh, my goodness, they're probably more qualified than most office managers or administrative assistants that are answering the phone. Definitely more qualified than probably a call center that may or may not even be in this country.

Right. That's right. That's right. Well, the fun part of the AI is you just have to give the AI all the information for that practice.

If you give it all the information, it literally can handle everything. So, but, you know, I don't want to just talk about kind of the voice side. There's so many other areas where AI can play a major role within a system. Medical practice, hospital, anywhere from also kind of a pre and post-op support.

You know, for example, my father just had a procedure done at a major hospital here in Orlando. I won't call them out, but they called 24 hours later, which was nice. And they, I took the call and they asked me, how's he doing? And I said, he's doing well.

And they're like, great. If you need anything, goodbye. And i was like whoa because really that call should be much more okay you know your father has been at home for 24 hours is he experiencing any pain is he able to eat is he moving around you know having actually a series of medical questions that apply to his condition and his recovery from a major surgery and really do a more compliant survey that then gets uploaded to his medical record. And so there's other ways of using AI like that where the AI can actually call and do such a survey and be compliant and do a much better job.

Yeah. And then the AI notifies the actual human staff to say, hey, something's going on. you need to call or you need to, you know, have them come in. Yeah, actually, that's a great point.

Let's say if suddenly that question, that interfacing with the patient, suddenly that patient said, you know, I just haven't been feeling well. I have a fever, whatever. The AI will then alert the medical staff. Nice.

You know, or it can even, if depending on the instructions you give the AI, you could just, the AI can say, you know, we recommend you call 911 one and we will inform your medical team. So, you know, it will be have options depending on this scenario. But, you know, just that's another way, or I'm sure most people have heard of AI scribes, but that has been a game changer for many providers who spend over two hours a day, they call it pajama time, doing their soap notes from all the patient visits.

So let's say they see 20 or 30 patients a day, they have a. Have to fill out that medical record from that patient. And I really don't know how they do it. If they see 20, 30 patients and they don't take notes, manual notes, I don't know actually how they really do a compliant and a professional note.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, hey, folks, we're on this today on Zoom communicating with each other. And now Zoom even has an AI companion where it can give you a summary of the conversation.

And I only use it once in a while. oh, I'm not using it for this right now. But when I first got it, I was like, oh no, I'm scared. And then I used it.

I was like, oh my God, this is great because I'm horrible at taking notes. Then I have to read my chicken scratch handwriting. So AI can really, really help you. All right, before we wrap up and not to get too political, I wanted to ask your opinion also on how AI.

And your services are going to, I don't know, maybe help or hurt, consider our Medicare system may be changing. And everything is, you know, our healthcare, all of our rules, all of our even private health insurance, it all kind of connects to Medicare, right? Yes. So that's a great question.

Actually, there's a chief medical officer I'm working with, and she brought us into their clinic, and they have about 30 providers. And she openly said, the reason why I want my providers to use an AI scribe is because Medicare is cutting my reimbursement every year by about 3.4%. And I need to find creative ways, mostly innovation technology like the AI, where I can increase the amount of patients that come through my clinic and improve my bottom line and make up for that lack of reimbursement that they're getting hit with every year.

So imagine every year, 3.4 or whatever the exact number is, you're getting hit with, you're going to get reimbursed less. So they have to be proactive in finding ways of, in that environment of lower reimbursement, still to be successful and grow their business. Yeah, I love it.

And so AI, again, has a really great impact because it's able to, it saves over two hours a day for a business. A provider. So the AI is arrived in over two hours. So they could seriously literally see at least four to six more patients, depending on, you know, the time slots that they have broken down for patients.

Yeah. Which I mean, heck, my parents are at the doctors all the time and it's so difficult to get appointments because they don't have the time. So you're putting two more, two more hours a day in just one medical provider's pocket in their schedule. Like, let's do it.

Okay. Okay, I said that was the last question, but I did have one final question, just talking about, you know, especially since we're talking about healthcare specifically, but really any industry, you know, what about, you know, patient or consumer data and privacy and the ethical concerns? Like, how do we address that with AI? Well, again, we are under the same guidelines as any IT informatic company where we have to be HIPAA compliant.

We need to meet certain encryption like SOC2, and we do all that. Our business is 100% healthcare, and we meet or even exceed a lot of those requirements to ensure patient privacy and also safety. I love it. What's your one piece of final advice that you would give to somebody who's skeptical about integrating AI into their health care practice or really any industry, especially where, you know, it's the support system, office support?

Yeah, no, my advice is be open-minded because my belief is as every year passes, there's going to be less and less reimbursement. We're dealing with labor shortages. The market is continuously dynamically changing. AI can be within healthcare a tremendous benefit for anybody who has a practice or even a health system hospital that can truly bring out new savings and also grow revenue and profit.

it. So, and on the same time, it will make a massive impact on the providers because, you know, we didn't really touch upon it, but there's a massive burnout on doctors and AI can help decrease that burnout rate. We can't afford to lose doctors. We don't have enough of them.

So AI can really be a game changer. And I would say those practices, those clinics that don't embrace it over time, it could be. Damaging to their long-term survival. Yeah, I'm 100% agree.

And for those folks that don't know, even though I am the HR lady, I do have two degrees in healthcare administration. So this is something that's incredibly passionate for me as well. One of the reasons I did not end up in healthcare administration was because of the slow pace and was because there's so many hurdles that you had to jump through and so much compliance, which is funny. I ended up in HR, which is driven by compliance, but it's not like, you know, you're not locked into it.

It's like, yeah, these are laws. You got to follow it versus these are laws. You got to follow it. And it's going to take you 14 days to get through one little piece of information.

So I, for one, am thrilled to have AI in our life. Folks, I really encourage you to reach out to Hayes if you have any questions specifically related to a healthcare organization. So with that said, Hayes, Where can people find and connect with you? Well, they can reach me on my email, Hayes at quadrant.

health, or on my LinkedIn page, which is just Hayes Malani. And they can give me a call also, 352-278-2526. Awesome. And I will make sure that I put your LinkedIn bio and your email in the notes of the podcast.

Thanks, everybody, for listening. I hope this has been helpful, and I really do hope that you're going to take a chance on AI to help you get these things off your plate and just maybe maintain your sanity. Take care, be safe, and step outside your box. Thanks for coming, A's.

Thank you. Music.