AIDS Healthcare Foundation CIO Values the 'Personal Touch of AI'

For CIOs in the healthcare sector, AI presents an opportunity to both improve patient experience and boost employee productivity.

At the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the majority of the organization's customers want to reach AHF by phone, so managing call volume and minimizing phone downtime is key. AI has become critical to AHF's ability to do just that, while improving patient care, increasing the number of patients served, and providing employees with key data insights, explained AHF CIO Doss Tychicus at Cisco's WebexOne event in San Diego this week. AHF is a global nonprofit with 2.6 million patients in 49 countries.

AI Buy-In Starts at the Top

Deploying AI at AHF has been a top-down process -- the CEO started a task force just for AI that includes all members of senior management. Tychicus is co-chair of the task force, with two other members from the executive team. Before implementing a new AI technology, senior managers must explain what problem they're trying to solve and how AI will help, he said.

Tychicus assesses potential implementations of AI based on three key factors -- customer satisfaction and retention, support for employees and their productivity, and increased revenue.

"[The AI taskforce] wanted more automation on the customer side and productivity," Tychicus said. In addition, AI implementations proposed by senior management require a corresponding business case and endorsement from the CEO.

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"We can't just move for the sake of moving to AI. You need to have a reason and explain how AI is going to solve the problem," he said.

How AI Delivers a Personalized Patient Experience

One way AHF utilizes AI for a personalized patient experience is via Cisco's Webex AI Agent integration with Salesforce to access relevant patient information during a call. Tychicus explained that this integration might relay to a customer service agent that the patient on the call is a Los Angeles Rams football fan, and that could be a positive talking point to build rapport with the patient.

"That increases the productivity of our staff, because they don't need to go to 10 different places to research, and it improves the customer satisfaction a lot," Tychicus said. "If someone calls you and talks about your favorite team and says, 'Oh, congrats. You won yesterday,' that brings a lot of joy."

AHF is one of the early adopters of Cisco's new Webex AI Agents and started beta testing the platform six months ago.

Cisco announced five AI Agents within the Webex Suite this week, including Task Agent for generating action items, Notetaker for summarizing meetings, Polling Agent for creating meeting polls, Receptionist as an autonomous voice agent, and Meeting Scheduler for scheduling future meetings. AHF's employees are using many of these AI Agents, said Tychicus.

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AI for Patient Satisfaction and Employee Productivity

Tychicus acknowledged that employees at some organizations might be wary of AI out of concern that it could replace their jobs, but at AHF the Webex AI Agent's capacity to reduce call volume freed up live agents for calls that require their expertise regarding patient care. AHF has thousands of live agents answering patient calls across various departments, including the pharmacy and clinic teams, Tychicus said.

For example, the AI Agent might respond to frequent but relatively simple requests, such as a password reset. If the question is something the AI Agent can't answer, the call is routed to a live agent. This process has enabled AHF employees to spend more time supporting a greater number of patients, thereby advancing the nonprofit's mission to provide HIV care globally, Tychicus said. In addition, the AI Agent measures employee performance with the aim of giving managers more visibility into how live agents can improve their interactions with patients.

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The AI Agent can also provide call summaries to pass along relevant information to a live agent, which mitigates the need for customers to repeat themselves and reduces dropped calls due to patient irritation. Employees can also use AI-generated summaries during internal meetings to avoid assigning a human notetaker.

Like many organizations deploying AI technologies, AHF isn't using just one AI system. In addition to Cisco, the organization uses AI tools from its electronic medical record (EMR) partner, Athenahealth, to support doctors in note-taking and providing insurance billing codes.

Editor's note: Cisco provided travel and accommodations to the Cisco WebexOne Event in San Diego.