Stephanie Glastetter
AI is a part of everyday life, but the hard part is knowing which tools you can truly trust. At Brado, we take a different approach. In this episode, we’ll discuss how we achieve insight into consumers, caregivers, and providers at every step of the health care journey to build smarter training data. Data that addresses today’s needs, anticipates tomorrow’s, and strengthens the connection between patients and providers.
Julia Ahrens
Thank you for chatting today.
Stephanie
Happy to be here.
Julia
Well, your perspective in time is always in high demand, so we’re going to get right to it. Before we start, can you share a bit about your background?
Stephanie
I am the chief strategy officer here at Brado. My background comes more from the agency side. And then a focus on, market research and the insight space, and then have transitioned into being, more on, focused on our, our platform and our products, and translating that into the platform.
Julia
So you’ve been around for the inception of our conversational AI platform, but also for all of the foundational expertise that predated it. And so what role do you and your team have right now in its development?
Stephanie
So the main focus for my team at the moment is continuing to figure out how we take that deep insight, that our insight team achieves into consumer health journeys. So they map all of the tensions, the barriers to care. And so how do we take all of that really rich qualitative information and turn that into something, that the technology can actually leverage within the conversation itself and see that come to life in the experience, which ultimately improves engagement and helps patients overcome those barriers as we drive them to those different, access points for care.
Julia
The attention to detail that we take when we do our primary research and we develop these journeys and how that impacts engagement is going to be the bulk of our discussion, albeit brief discussion. But taking a step back, for those that don’t know what is the core function of the platform today. So we can kind of frame it contextually.
Stephanie
Good place to start. So the platform is designed to engage with consumers during their health journey. And so we find part of this is finding them in the digital wild. So when they’re searching for information, engaging them there driving them into a conversation where we help understand what are their goals, what are their needs? Support them along that journey and then also guide them to help when they need it. So that may be booking an appointment that may be connecting them to resources in their community. So it is all about engagement and then guidance to those right points of care, that they need along that journey.
Julia
And we know that every day there’s more and more entrance on the market of AI tools. There are hundreds, likely now thousands of tools. And the majority we found, I know we’ve talked about, are pretty shallow in nature. So what is why are these tools often limited? And what’s really different about the way your team approaches, building the platform and developing that training data?
Stephanie
A lot of the AI tools out there are great at providing information, and answering questions, especially, you know, more clinically based questions as an example. What we aim to do is really build more of an emotional connection with the users, understand those underlying tensions, that they’re experiencing, proactively address those as part of the conversation. So we don’t consider ourselves an answer engine. It really is about engagement, asking really pointed, follow up questions to dig a little bit deeper into what they’re experiencing, which we think has two main outcomes. One, it increases engagement with the platform, but more importantly, it helps the platform understand what the right next step is for somebody in their journey and to be able to proactively guide them towards that next step is not something that exists in more of these surface level conversations that exist in other, chat functions.
Julia
As you mentioned at the beginning, developing this insight into these consumer health journeys is something that Brado has been doing for a very long time. And you can see how we’re using some of those same exercises to build the platform. So can you talk a little bit about what your team does to create the journey? Just a couple examples.
Stephanie
Yeah. So it’s really important to actually engage with patients or consumers who’ve been on this journey. And so that is a lot of the work of the insight team does. Whether that’s through one on one live conversations or through digital engagement means to, really understand each participant’s story in that journey. So it is really rich, qualitative information that drives the backbone of our understanding of the journey. And then from there we layer in, search behavior. So we mine all of the search questions that people ask Doctor Google, along each of those steps of the journey to give us a little bit of a quantitative view of all of the questions somebody may have related to each stage. And then those questions also become the foundation for the knowledge base that we build for our AI platform. As we’re answering all of those consumer questions and sort of training the platform on the right way to engage in each stage of the journey.
Julia
I think one thing that we find a lot of clients and users don’t know is that the results you receive when you type in a query to ChatGPT or other more general purpose tools, it’s that it’s all based on the readily available and curated information on the web. Like you said, it’s their answer engines and returning in an answer. And only a portion of that information we know is reliable because we’re all online all day, every day. So how is this insight and journey driven approach more impactful? And what do we see as being the most important thing in driving that better engagement?
Stephanie
So I mentioned that knowledge base that we build out, and one input on that is the insight work. So understanding what all of those questions are and then through those real conversations with real patients, understanding the best way to approach answering those questions, and then sitting with our clients on the health system side and understanding all of the, the clinical information they might have, the patient support resources they have and marrying those two things together, both what the patient needs and what our clients have becomes the foundation for how we answer questions and where we guide people to. So we think that’s a really unique space on both taking the patient, perspective as well as the health system perspective and finding that that middle ground where both sides, are successful in the conversation.
Julia
So what do you think is the biggest challenge you have? And what is the team facing kind of keeping up with a technology that is constantly evolving? Things that other companies are constantly chasing. What sort of the team’s posture to making sure that our platform stays relevant and that we’re able to continue this work at scale as more and more people use it?
Stephanie
Yeah, the fast change in technology is, you know, both a risk and a benefit. So the benefit is that we’ve built our platform in a way that’s really flexible and adaptable, so that we can take advantage of some of those latest technologies and advancements on just the LLM side and what it’s capable of kind of out of the box. On the flip side of that, as the technology grows, we, you know, new competitors come into the market all of the time. So, you know, keeping a pace on what they’re doing, how we’re what we’re doing is different, where that overlap may be and making sure that we’re really honing in on our true value proposition and that insight component and bringing that to life, you know, just staying on top of the changing landscape is definitely a challenge.
Julia
So speaking of, what do you think is next for the the future of insight and the platform? And what are some things that you’re most excited about?
Stephanie
To me, it’s the most exciting part of the platform, and I don’t think we’ll ever be done with how we continue to find new ways to leverage that insight, work. One thing we’re exploring right now is, you know, through prompt engineering, how do we almost treat the platform as if we were teaching another human about what we learned in the insight work? So experimenting with things beyond structured data, which is a lot of what we’ve used, and using more, conversational language to start to train the platform and how to engage. That’s a really exciting space as the technology gets better and better and I think is going well, going to allow us to really see more of a depth of that insight come to life in the conversation. And then the way that it does in a structured data set we have today.
Julia
And that future I’m sure will be here before we know it. So, Stephanie, thank you so much for your time. Always fascinating to talk to you. And likely time for both of us to get back to work.
Stephanie
All right. Thanks, Julia.