One Patient Communication System to Rule Them All? Artera Announces New Harmony Platform

Hey, it’s Jessica DaMassa, with WTF Health, what’s the future of health? I’m talking to the who’s who of health tech and healthcare innovation and right now I’m here at Artera’s first ever customer event, Heartbeat. I’ve got the man in charge here, the founder and CEO of Artera, Guillaume de Zwirek. Hey, how’s it going?

Amazing, and you said my name perfectly.

Yes, all that practice finally paid off. Anybody reading the lower thirds right now knows what a challenge that really was. So excited to be here and for those of you who are watching, I’ve got some very exciting news. I have a scoop. I rarely get scoops, but I’ve got a scoop because you announced a brand new product here at Heartbeat and I’ve got the interview that’s going to air that you all are watching now live in real time for the public announcement of this. And so tell me about Harmony.

So yeah you’re right our customers heard it first. We had the pleasure of announcing it to all of our amazing partners here in the room behind us and now the world is hearing about it. We have spent, I started this company in 2015 and it’s been my dream for eight years to bring all of the communications that happen with patients throughout their care journey together into a seamless experience and it just so happens that that’s actually pretty complicated to do. I was really naive when I started this company. I wasn’t from healthcare. I thought this would happen overnight. So we’re finally bringing this vision to life. This is a totally enhanced version of our platform. We call it Artera Harmony. And what Harmony does is it takes the five key building blocks to a communication platform that’s the ability to manage all the conversations that you build in your system, the ability to actually build workflows and conversations themselves and interface for staff to engage with patients when it’s appropriate. The data behind the scenes, the artificial intelligence, brings that all together into a platform and then we open up a set of APIs and a formal developer portal that any healthcare IT vendor can use to route their communications through a health system or private practice’s existing phone numbers. So this is an open platform. We’ve been validating this with our customers really since we started the company and now we’re ready to bring it together for the first time for the market.

I saw the launch. Well, the announcement, the initial announcement here and I watched it unveiled as your customers watched. Pretty exciting and I want to dig into a couple different parts of this. So I think people in the market probably know Artera best as being you know EMR integrated, mostly text message patient communications and now with Harmony it seems like what you said, bringing all these different ways to touch patients together, build those workflows, get the analytics. The thing that really kind of made me pause was the unifying aspect of all of this. So the stat that you gave on stage was that on average, you polled some of your big health system clients, and their patients are getting text messages from eleven different phone numbers on average. And now you’re going to bring together all the vendors, pull them in and and unify this all under one number. I want to know, because this is what I’m thinking, if I’m out there and I’ve got some sort of text message based appointment reminder, whatever so and so thing, what’s in it for the startup or the vendor that decides to come in under the Artera umbrella? How are you going to sell this to them?

Look, one word, it’s engagement. Every company usually specializes in something. I could be an intake company that’s created amazing digital forms. I can be a billing company. I could be a prior auth company. A Population Health company. And prior to this platform, the onus was on all of those vendors to create their own communication modalities and that contributes to the noise and you know the sense of overwhelming, over communication that happens with patients. That’s a resounding theme we’ve heard over the last couple of days, which is that folks in the room are worried about over communicating and messaging with their patients. If you can control that entire flow of communication throughout the entire patient journey, you can deliver a much much better experience and patients are more likely to do what you tell them to do. We had a stat today where UNC shared an integration of a wayfinding vendor and I believe the number was something like a 490+ % increase in usage of that solution and it’s because we’re delivering it in context with everything else. I mean, if I texted you and you had a random five-digit code text you on my behalf, who would you respond to? You’d respond to me. So we are helping the health systems build that infrastructure. The vendors, the partners, all the amazing healthcare IT companies can double down on what they’re doing best. We can guarantee they’ll get higher engagement. They’ll probably save money. We have better rates negotiated to deliver all this traffic. In most cases they won’t have to pay to deliver this communication traffic at all, so it’s a win-win. It truly is.

Alright, and then the health system’s got to be excited then that somebody’s going to take on the onus of managing all of these different vendors and bringing them in, but how much are you at Artera going to be relying on the health systems to help you evangelize for this among those different vendors.

Yeah, so we already have 32 vendors that are signed on to our marketplace. We’re in conversations with 150 more. We have seen overwhelming support for the idea and the concept we have I think 17 that are live in production that we’re delivering communications on behalf of health systems for. We believe in an open system. With Artera we want to be best in class at communication and that is all we are going to do. We’re going to build out those APIs. I’m not interested in competing with the amazing companies who have built phenomenal businesses in all these other areas of healthcare. I just want to enable that last mile to be truly seamless. So I think that’s something that’s positive for the vendors themselves because they know I’m not trying to get in their business. I just want to make them more successful. I want to make the health system more successful. So, I’m not forgetting what your question was, hopefully I answered it, but that’s really what we’re going for.

No, that’s awesome and you did answer the question. Alright, the thing that I want to know next is about patient preferences because this was another thing that I really thought was very cool. It struck me as a very impactful moment in your presentation of Harmony, was that patients can opt in to get certain kinds of messages via text message and certain other kinds of messages via email. So for example, if I don’t want to know about my bill on a text, I’d rather do that on my email, I can change that. And this is a really pretty novel, so talk a little bit about that.

Yeah preferences are pretty antiquated and this goes across all industries. Healthcare is specifically complicated. Text, email, call. It’s kind of binary. You opt out of one, everything switches to another channel. But the truth is, as patients, we all have different preferences for different use cases, so to connect the dots from the platform all the way through to patient preferences, the first thing we did was was build the platform those five components I talked about Then we had to build the marketplace and create the APIs to get all these vendors to integrate. Now that everything is together through a single phone number, you have to think about how to deliver the perfect experience for that individual patient and that means when the patient gets a text about their bill and you don’t like it, you should be able to say I don’t want to get these anymore. We will remove that specific use case as a as a communication you’ll get in the future, but you can still message back and forth with your doctor, you can still fill out your intake form digitally, you can still get your prior off information sent, so you can opt out of the specific things, and we’re handling that at the patient level and at the use case level. So that is an early development. We’re going to partner with a lot of our customers to bring that to life, but you can kind of see the whole thing has been building on top of itself for eight years to deliver that. Look, our goal is to deliver the best customer experience of any industry and I think we’re really really close. We have such engaged partners who are working with us to bring that to life.

I love that. Alright, the last part of Harmony I want to ask about is the analytics. There are a lot of really good points. There was this awesome dashboard slide that’s still burned in my memory. Talk a little bit about what you’ll be able to track because one of the things that actually blew my mind here at Heartbeat was all of the different ways health systems are using text messages nowadays. It’s not just like appointment reminders and billing updates. There are a lot of different use cases, so talk a little bit about the analytics and what a health system could expect to be able to track. And is it just yes you’re engaged, yes you responded? Give us a little bit more about that.

Yeah, well first of all appointment reminders is a taboo word in this company because I I really want to help this industry take a leap forward in their thinking and think about communication as the entire end-to-end journey. So that’s the first thing. So as we as we talk about analytics, there are so many use cases here from the simple ones – are you delivering communications? How likely are patients to open it? How many are opening it? How many are responding? At what step in a conversation are they dropping off and why are they dropping off? Then we go back to the vendors right? When you’re integrating all the communication from all of these different solutions, you can actually see performance and compare performance across all these categories. So I might know that my intake forms that we’re delivering on behalf of Tonic are converting at a 60% rate, but my population health workflows for mammography care gaps are only getting filled at 14%. So you can start doing comparison by vendor, by integration, by use case, and it really allows you to optimize the entire system.The last piece that our analytics provides is staff level reporting. So we have over twenty thousand front office and back office individuals who are on our software every single day and we can actually see how engaged they are with patients, how long it takes to respond to an inquiry, and so many other things. So our customers are driving our roadmap for analytics too and we’re excited to continue building with them.

I love that. I heard the number on stage today, 2 billion expected messages this year. That’s pretty impressive, double what it was last year, which I was excited to see. I want to hear from you too about the market on this, because I feel like you know that if you were to step back and look at the big picture here, this is so much about making healthcare more personalized and more convenient. And all of those things that we as consumers of healthcare, when we’re not patients necessarily, but when we’re choosing whether or not to be. What we want. How much interest is there from health systems? Do you think they’re taking patient experience and patient journey a little bit more seriously now that there’s so much push from the big retail players or the big health tech companies. Like Amazon integrating One Medical and you know there’s just a lot more competition and from these really consumer focused tech driven places. Do you think that this is a way for them to respond and help make sure that their own experience is on par with what consumers are demanding from the retail health players and from other health tech companies?

Absolutely. I mean you’ve been here over the past couple of days and the buzz is palpable. The folks here are all motivated to deliver on that mission that I shared earlier. They want to deliver the best care possible and I really believe that our health systems or our private practice organizations have the upper hand. Patients want to have a relationship with their doctors. We have relationships with our dentist, right? Can we bring that over to Cardiology, Primary Care, all these other specialties? And I think they’re starting to see that they now have the tools and it’s never existed in healthcare. The tools to actually orchestrate and unify the perfect experience for their population and the specific patient. So, I think we finally brought that to life with Harmony.

Awesome, okay let’s talk about Artera, because I can’t not get an Artera update. Alright, so on stage, when you’re launching the announcement for Harmony, talking about how 40% of Artera revenue is going into R&D, now this struck me as surprising because that’s a big chunk. But also, you kind of put around it, you’re like, yeah we’re not profitable yet. So this to me was really interesting, especially at this moment that we’re in right now with health tech in the market. At large, people are being a lot more cautious. This seemed like a risky kind of gamble, but not really. I don’t know, so tell me about the thinking behind this. I mean why double down on R&D, or why spend so much revenue on R&D? Is this where we end up with Artera really being able to leap forward among the pack of startups that you’re currently kind of swimming with in the competitive landscape?

I’m in this for the mission. That’s why I started this company. If we’re not solving this problem there’s no point. This isn’t about revenue. This isn’t about bleeding our customers dry. I want to do everything in my power to deliver on our mission and as things were turning upside down over the past couple of years, I saw it as a massive opportunity to double down and innovate quicker. Our R&D organization is almost half of our company. We have 15 independent, agile teams shipping products every single day and I told my team about a year and a half ago, I told my team I want to be the highest caliber R&D team, not in healthcare, in SAS in general. So we are going to win on product. We are going to win on usability. We’re going to win on the relationships and our ability to respond to customer feedback very very quickly. I was sitting down with a massive health system at lunch and she gave us an idea while sitting at the table and I turned to our head of product and I asked how quickly can we solve this?And I really think we’ll have a solution like Friday. And that is how we’re going to continue to win business. I don’t want to win business being sales driven. I want to win business because we are undeniably the best solution in the market and frankly, for our competitors, I want them to learn from the things that we’re doing so that we can elevate the industry forward. It’s just about the mission. I don’t care how we get there. Let’s just put all the resources behind it so that we can deliver what this industry deserves and what patients need.

Awesome. Alright, so how’s Artera doing? l can probably tell you how things are going. I asked a lot of your customers while I was sitting here at the event. For those who are watching, give us a sense of how the business is going. So I last spoke to you, I think it was maybe six, eight months ago when you launched the new Artera brand. So, at that point you had about 500 different health systems that you guys were working with. Give me some metrics. Give us some numbers on how things are going from a growth standpoint. I heard all those messages that are going to be going out, but give us the provider organizations, or some idea of your client base behind that.

Look, I’ll answer your question, but the challenge as you get better, bigger, I mean hopefully we just maintain an amazing experience. But that’s actually exactly what it is. As you get bigger, how do you maintain that really personal experience with every single customer and I’ll tell you personally, in my job,I I told my business partner I want to talk to a customer every single day and I want it to be me, 30 minutes, one-on-one. I want to hear from them and I want to understand where people come from. So the business is doing great. We’ve grown significantly since we last chatted. I don’t want folks to be scared that we’re running out of business. We are cash flow break even and we’re going to operate cash flow break even. We want to control our destiny, but every single dollar is going to go to R&D, or it’s going to go to customer support and success. I just think that’s the way to continue delivering at the bar that we have been.

Awesome, well I had to ask because I like to learn how to run a startup from different people so just in case I ever had to do this on my own one day. Thank you so much for having me here Guill. It was awesome to watch you guys announce Harmony, but also to watch your customers feedback and response to it. It was just really an inspiring kind of way to spend a couple days, so I appreciate you having me here and letting me help break the news again. I got to help break the brand relaunch, so thank you for including me. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much, always a pleasure.

Alright, well thank you again and for more interviews with those who are changing the way that we do healthcare, you can check out my YouTube channel it’s you youtube.com/WTFhealth and also there you’ll find a special series of interviews that I did here at Artera’s Heartbeat event, that focused specifically on what’s changing in the patient experience and patient journey. So I got to talk to a lot of those clients on camera and find out exactly what they’re thinking and how they’re strategizing in terms of improving that patient patient experience. I’m Jessica DaMassa. Thanks so much for joining us, take care.