Voice in the Operating Room with Heather Utzig of Pragmatic Voice

VFH Episode 67

In this episode, Teri welcomes Heather Utzig, the Co-Founder, and CEO at Pragmatic Voice, a tech innovation company that combines big data, analytics, tech & creativity to drive businesses.

Heather has an extensive background in healthcare having worked for companies like Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly & Co with her efforts focused on the rapid growth of their sales and sales teams. She was responsible for managing over 130 field sales and sales managers in the area of Brain Health and Sleep efficacy. Her team won the most awards for sales success. She was awarded the Summit Award for outstanding leadership. She has also been a successful entrepreneur and has helped a lot of people launch businesses in catering, construction, healthcare, etc. She has owned and sold successful businesses, and worked with several technological platforms and implementation projects with companies over the past 10 years.

Key Points From Heather!

The voice applications they have been developing at Pragmatic Voice, specifically, the ones geared towards helping surgeons keep track of instruments in the operating room and so much more.

Her Introduction Into Voice

She was developing technology with one of her companies and she had requested voice to be developed for it because it was around medical instrumentation in general (they worked with medical instrument service providers and were looking at how to prevent infections through the touching of the instruments so voice would ensure that a lot of the processes were hands-free and mobile).
In the process of having that voice application developed, she met her co-founder and learned a lot about voice from him.

Voice in the Operating Room with Heather Utzig of Pragmatic Voice

What They’re Doing In The Healthcare Space

From her healthcare background, she has always considered how voice can be applied to solve the problems in healthcare.
The fact that there is a lot of human connection in healthcare, especially when it comes to doctor-patient interactions, makes voice very crucial in ensuring that there’s more effectiveness in the delivery of healthcare.
Pragmatic works with healthcare companies, facilities, and even physicians to help them place their applications into voice, and advice them on how that is related to HIPAA (privacy) and other areas. They have developed several voice applications in relation to that.
One of those applications is Instrument Voice which works inside a hospital, surgery center or doctor’s office where there are instruments that need to either be repaired, maintained, sterilized, or logged.
Anyone working with the instruments within a healthcare setting can look at an instrument’s history, ask questions, pull out manuals, see videos, and even request repairs through the voice app. Pragmatic is streamlining that whole process to make it easier for the healthcare providers.
They also have Instrument Wiki, an application that enables doctors, hospitals, and manufacturers to collaborate on information to help each other out in working with their instruments and assets in the hospital.
The applications are built on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, with their own proprietary open-source database technology.
Most hospitals have had a problem in unifying their Biomed and sterilization departments, and Pragmatic’s applications, because of their ease of use, can help in bringing a couple of departments in the hospitals together to work in an easier way.

Their Presence

They have been working with some hospitals in New York and they are working on refining several things with plans to go to full-scale market in the next month.