Meet the start-up: Lifelink Systems

Greg Kefer, CMO of Lifelink Systems, spoke to Med-Tech Innovation News about the US company and its patient experience technology.

Tell us about your company. When did you establish yourself and what do you offer?

Founded in 2016, Lifelink Systems is a California-based healthcare technology company that provides conversational AI to improve the healthcare experience for patients. Large hospital systems and life science companies use mobile chatbots powered by Lifelink Systems to interact and communicate with large, diverse patient populations across a broad spectrum of care workflows, including scheduling, referrals, adherence, education, and intake. Customers include Banner Health, UBC, Roche, Baptist Health, Memorial Health System and Jefferson Health.

Recently, Lifelink Systems announced it had completed its series A funding round, supported by DigiTx Partners, Primera Capital, Baleon Capital, and inside investors. As part of the growth phase expansion, Lifelink Systems recently appointed four new executives to lead commercial and financial operations.

Where did the idea for your start-up come from?

The idea for the company was hatched while sitting around a conference room ping pong table at our first, very funky, office located in the old town district in Oakland, California. We saw a big opportunity.

Despite significant IT investments, healthcare has not yet succeeded in engaging the majority of patients through technology. Patient portals and mobile apps, which are the prevailing solutions, require patients to download tools, remember passwords, and then navigate complex user interfaces. These hurdles result in engagement rates in the 10% range, which means paper and phone calls are still commonplace in healthcare.

At the same time, language and technology have been converging, but conversational innovation had largely passed over healthcare because of process complexity and regulatory challenges. The simplicity of conversational technology could make a difference if it was deployed the right way.

As Lifelink Systems started to build its conversational AI platform, the key innovation wasn’t about using AI to interpret and execute open-ended conversations, as we see with Alexa and Siri. Open-ended, unscripted Natural Language Processing (NLP) is still in its early stages and the risk of a mistake in basic communication could kill someone. However, the ability for the AI to serve as an integrated, conversational engagement layer that blends approved, interactive messaging with the data that’s locked up inside the big systems of record had immense potential. Lifelink Systems technology is now in place around the world, providing virtual care experiences to millions of patients each year.

What difference do you think you can make in your particular sector?

Lifelink Systems works with the biggest hospital systems and pharmaceutical companies in the world to reimagine the patient experience from a domain of paper, phone calls, long waits, and confusion to a place where AI-powered digital assistants interact with patients on their mobile devices. This allows patients to navigate all aspects of their healthcare easily and without the need to download apps or remember passwords.

The conversational technology that we are developing is game-changing and we’re just getting started. The technology is now powering more than 850,000 automated patient conversations per month. Additionally, Lifelink Systems integrates with electronic medical records and customer relationship management (ERMs and CRMs), making each conversation data-driven, personalised, and HIPAA-compliant.

We believe our technology can have profound, lasting, positive impacts on the way healthcare is delivered. For example, one of our clients is Banner Health, a large 30 hospital system that operates in six southwestern states. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, they had to reopen to see patients for routine care but had to do it safely. The medical office waiting rooms could no longer function as they had for the past 50 years. Banner tapped Lifelink Systems to virtualise the waiting room with a mobile chatbot that would handle the entire pre-visit check-in process remotely. It was deployed across their network of 300 clinics in May 2020. They reopened successfully with the virtual waiting room solution supporting in-person and virtual visits. The resulting workflow improvements and high patient satisfaction scores suddenly presented Banner with a new opportunity – do they even need to have physical spaces for their patients to wait? 

In a recent podcast, their VP of Innovation said: “We own a fair amount of expensive real estate dedicated to the waiting room and it’s something our customers don’t value.” Now, as the industry shifts into “life after COVID” mode, Banner intends to make virtual waiting rooms a permanent part of the doctor visit experience. It’s likely waiting rooms will join video rental stores, paper airline tickets and eight-track tapes in the history books.

Tell us more about the technology at the centre of your product and service?

The key IP is the conversational platform that powers all solutions. What a patient sees behaves as very simple, interactive messaging. Scheduling a doctor appointment might resemble a series of texts that you and a friend would use to coordinate a dinner at a restaurant. But, unlike simple texting, below the waterline, there’s an immense technology stack that is required to run an interaction with a patient. It must know your name, your doctor, their office location, what forms need to be filled out, your prescriptions and your history – all information that resides in the healthcare systems of record. That integration is key to delivering personalised experiences that are sticky and long-lasting.

The platform also must be secure and compliant. Healthcare is heavily regulated and any technology that touches patient health information must have a robust, secure stack if it’s to pass muster with customer IT and government regulators.

And lastly, Lifelink Systems has a highly flexible configuration layer embedded in its platform. The ability to test and tune patient interactions to maximise successful outcomes is critical. A particular solution may appear to be common, but the reality is every organisation has its unique workflows that must be considered. We have pre-built solutions that help patients handle scheduling, check-in, adherence, education, and referrals, but the configuration layer allows conversational designers to factor in the specific operational dimensions of each customer.