VFH Episode 52
In this episode, Teri welcomes Scot and Susan Westwater, the co-founders of Pragmatic Digital, a digital consultancy experienced in designing voice experiences.
Scot is the Lead Strategist at Pragmatic while Susan serves as the CEO. They started the consultancy to help entrepreneurs and marketers understand the opportunity that voice represents and to help them take advantage of it.
Key points from Scot and Susan!
- Designing voice applications specifically with regards to healthcare.
Getting into Voice
- They first heard about voice from Gary Vaynerchuk and they got interested.
- They did some research and saw voice as a technology that had the potential to blow up just like web, mobile, and social media did.
- They saw it as an opportunity to do some good in the world and help a lot of people through education.
- For Susan, what made the selling point for voice is how it makes information accessible.
Creating a Good Voice Experience for Healthcare
- The first strategic move to make when creating a good voice experience for healthcare is to look at the target audience. In healthcare, there are 3 distinct audiences namely; the payer, provider, and patient.
- A business or organization must make sure that they clearly understand what they want to accomplish for either one or all of the three audiences.
- Another thing to consider as an organization is what the desired achievements are with the healthcare experience they want to create.
VoiceFirst = PatientFirst
- This is an idea that you start with the patient.
- A lot of healthcare organizations talk about being patient-centric, but Scot has observed that most of them are not as patient-centric as they say they are.
- Healthcare organizations should start with patients’ needs by ensuring that they are provided with all the information they seek on the healthcare issues they suffer from.
- They should also have empathy for the healthcare conditions that they deal with by putting themselves in the shoes of the patients suffering from them.
How HIPAA Requirements Play Into Things
- Physicians can be able to get disease information out there in a way that most health organizations cannot, because the organizations have a lot of regulatory and legal concerns to consider.
The Barriers
- Scot and Susan just did an informal survey online with the business and healthcare community to try and understand the challenges and barriers that prevent them from creating healthcare experiences.
- Most of them take a more wait-and-see approach because they don’t understand the regulatory and legal issues they might have to face.
The Future of Voice
- In Scot’s mind, voice is going to become the default input for most computing devices.
- The huge inroads being made by companies like Samsung in TVs, refrigerators, and other appliances, demonstrates how voice will become a ubiquitous technology that we interface with.
- Scot believes voice technology will follow us everywhere we go through different devices and experiences.
- Currently, voice is playing a major role in elder care and the potential impact it can have in healthcare is huge. Moving things into a hands-free voice-enabled space can help with everything from physician-patient relationships and how they interact, to patient care and so many other things like symptom tracking.
- There are numerous potential use cases for voice in healthcare.
Their Book
- They have a book coming out in November called Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences.
- The book will include their combined 20+ years of experience and all the voice knowledge that they have gained over the past couple of years, and it will be geared towards helping people create good voice experiences.
Links and Resources in this Episode
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