HIMSS 2019: Live with Kristi Ebong of Orbita

VFH Episode 30

In this episode, Teri welcomes Kristi Ebong, the Senior Vice President of Strategy and General Manager of Healthcare Providers for Orbita, a Voice-as-a-Service company.

Orbita is the only enterprise-grade, conversational platform powering HIPAA-compliant voice and chatbot applications in healthcare. They were recently awarded the inaugural award for voice technology at HIMSS 2019 from the Intelligent Health Association in partnership with Pillo.

Kristi was previously Head of Emerging Technology at Cedars-Sinai Health System where she served as an advisor on new and emerging technology and led deal flow for the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator Powered by TechStars. Kristi previously worked as an independent consultant for provider systems, technology startups, and cross-vertical health organizations (including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Healthspottr, and the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT).

Orbita

Orbita is a conversational AI platform for healthcare.
They allow people to build voice, chat and bot interfaces and workflows much faster in the same way that web content management platforms came along to help people build a website. Orbita provides that to developers to allow them to create conversational interfaces more quickly and in more delightful ways, as well as to business users. It’s like SurveyMonkey for voice and bots.
They provide their customers with both the platform itself as well as turnkey solutions within healthcare including digital marketing, symptom checking, consumer and content services, patient member services, patient bedside assistance, remote patient monitoring, and others.
Orbita’s largest vertical is with healthcare providers, but they are live across provider, payer, pharma, and Fortune 500 companies. They are even working telecom companies that are looking at really augmenting their existing presence with aging-in-place solutions.
They both augment existing technologies, products and workflows, and also offer direct out-of-the-box solutions as well, all of it being selling directly to the enterprise.

Orbita’s Success Stories/Use Case Scenarios

They are working with a prostate oncology group to offload some of the call center operations that they are doing. Prostate cancer patients are getting lab results for their PSA labs very regularly. Orbita is augmenting and automating that workflow.
Orbita is the “powered by” behind the scenes for Deloitte’s bedside assistant, DeloitteASSIST, which has been live in Australia. DeloitteASSIST is an AI-enabled patient communication solution enabling patients to request assistance without the need to press a button.
Orbita is also working with large pharma companies for post-acute or patient engagement in the home when it comes to clinical trials and medication adherence.

An organization especially a health system needs to be omni-channel

HIMSS 2019 Live with Kristi Ebong of Orbita

Orbita/Pillo Partnership

This is a great example of where Orbita is operating as an enabling technology.
They are augmenting and supporting Pillo’s conversational interfaces behind the scenes. They use their AI tools to help get that up and running very quickly.

HIPAA Compliance

Their platform is HIPAA secure and their technology is presenting HIPAA secure devices in the marketplace today.
They take privacy and security very seriously. Their team spends a lot of time exploring the workflow around that and the back end. They brought on a vice-president that is focused exclusively on that space and making sure that that is their number one priority as they grow.

Channels

Orbita is omnichannel. They transcend and work across devices. They can augment smartphones and mobile apps. They can with a chatbot, web browser, all smart speakers and even analog phones. This is critical because for example, in healthcare, a lot of seniors are comfortable with analog phones.
In Orbita software and platform, they can write within one of those modalities and deploy to the others (Build Once and Deploy Everywhere)

Future of Voice

Looking at how long it took for the adoption of certain disruptive technologies to reach a quarter of the US market, web took over 2 years, smartphones took 5 years, but voice has already achieved that in 4 years, and so the scale of adoption is extraordinary.
There are a lot of single-channel point solutions in the marketplace with a lot of success. Some of those are expected to keep doing very well.