Podcast: Amazon Alexa for Business and Healthcare With Healthcare Weekly CEO Codrin Arsene

Chatbots often take a beating in the media for being “dumb” but Healthcare Weekly CEO, Codrin Arsene has a decidedly different outlook. 

Recently, Healthcare Weekly CEO Codrin Arsene was featured as a guest speaker on the Inside VOICE podcast by VOICE Summit, where he spoke about Alexa in healthcare and its immense potential to help an array of healthcare companies reduce costs and improve quality of care.

With a background in product management and a passion for artificial intelligence, he strongly maintains that chatbots aren’t dumb. Instead, he identifies two major issues that often hinder chatbot performance,

“Business executives do not think creatively when it comes down to [what] Amazon can do for their business but also what I call a product management failure. Behind any successful digital project, you have a product manager who’s in charge of the vision, the execution, the business rules in place.”

He goes on to explain,

“If you see a chatbot that’s ‘dumb’ or see Alexa kind of stumbling and not being able to understand your request, it’s because the product manager behind that specific skill has not accounted for your specific scenario and that’s why chatbots could be ‘dumb’. They’re not dumb. If you want to use the word ‘dumb,’ Dumb is that… whoever is responsible for building that has not either accounted for a scenario or doesn’t have the right analytics tools in place for when you speak a specific request for them to tweak the algorithms and the scenarios to account for what you’re looking for.”

In essence, your Alexa skills are as strong as the alignment of the teams behind them. 

In the latter half of the podcast, he provides a brief overview of Amazon’s journey into healthcare starting with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) expansion. Its secure storage and application platform made it a prime candidate for the highly regulated healthcare industry.  

Of course, Amazon wanted more than just a support role behind the scenes and moved towards a series of acquisitions that involved the healthcare consumer base. Its acquisition of Pill Pack in 2018 is a prime example. (See what we did there?). 

Alexa is revolutionizing healthcare by helping healthcare startups, hospitals, device manufacturers, pharma companies, and pharma trial companies to work smarter while delivering higher quality of care to consumers.

Can an Alexa skill make wellness recommendations based on heart patients’ blood pressure readings and alert their healthcare teams of any changes?

The answer is a resounding yes. 

As an agency, Digital Authority Partners is helping with blood pressure. Omron’s Heart Advisor is an award-winning, FDA-approved smart watch with an inflatable blood pressure cuff complete with mobile app, website, and Alexa integration. 

In addition, Alexa skills can help patients and caregivers accurately track medications that have been administered, give instant access to first-aid information, provide up-to-date information on local hospitals, and even help users file insurance claims. Despite Alexa’s numerous use cases in healthcare, the one thought Codrin wants to leave us with is,

“ Alexa is industry-agnostic. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. There’s so many different scenarios whether you work in healthcare or not.”

Finally, he offers his predictions on Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, as well as where he sees both going within the next few years. 

Have a vision for an Alexa skill that will help you achieve results or just want to pick his brain? 

Connect with Codrin on LinkedIn or email him directly: [email protected]

In this podcast, you will learn:

• What Alexa for Business is and how to use it
• Amazon’s relationship with healthcare
• Why Alexa is so widely used in healthcare
• Current skills/use cases in healthcare
• How DAP got into voice technology
• Predictions for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant in the future

Tune into the podcast here: