Paula: 

Welcome to the AI Factor, the podcast that dives into how AI is transforming business communications and the world at large. In today’s AI Unleashed episode, we’re joined by Frank Fawzi, CEO of IntelePeer. We’re taking a deep dive into AI’s impact on healthcare, especially for private equity-backed organizations under pressure to do more with less. From streamlining admin work to driving revenue and improving care, we’ll unpack the transformative power of AI in healthcare. 

Frank, welcome. 

Frank Fawzi: 

Thank you, Paula. It’s great to be here. 

Paula: 

Thank you. It’s great to have you. I always enjoy speaking with you. Before we dive on in, I usually like to start with AI in the news. And I recently read an article in the Atlantic magazine and this article was on the growing frustration, I actually think it’s kind of a continuing frustration, with customer service and the Atlantic, the writer referred to a term called sludge, which I had not previously heard of. And this term basically describes paperwork and other nuisances that consumers really don’t want to deal with, but companies make them deal with it in order to prevent them from getting what they want, which is a solution to their problem. This often leads to a sense of defeat by the consumer and frustration. Besides that being an interesting and perhaps intentional business decision, companies should be looking towards AI and automation as the solution. 

So Frank, the article called out the miserable state of customer service. Where do you think AI is helping flip the script in healthcare, particularly in how patients engage with providers? 

Frank Fawzi: 

Thanks, Paula for the question. Yeah, certainly, I’m familiar with the article. Doesn’t it seem to you that most healthcare problems surface between Friday evening and sometime Sunday and then you’re waiting for Monday morning so you can get on the phone and call your doctor, only to find out that when you’re calling that doctor, every other person in the universe is probably trying to call that same office? And the poor individual sitting in that front office is taking as many calls and scheduling as many appointments as they can handle with all the patients that experienced an issue over the weekend. Missed calls are a huge issue for healthcare, especially Monday mornings, sometimes Tuesday mornings as well as a carryover, and creates a significant patient satisfaction or dissatisfaction issue. 

While I do think that there are certain businesses intentionally created a sludge issue, I think sometimes issue is not sludge per se, as the Atlantic defined that term, but it’s more of a mismatch between the needs of consumers to be able to access a business, the capacity of that business to be able to handle spikes in demand, being able to match the availability of resources to the inbound calls from patients or interactions from patients. And this is where AI shines and shines, not only to help improve the patient experience and take away this dissatisfaction that you probably would have if you are calling a healthcare, trying to schedule an appointment because you’re experiencing pain or another symptom from a weekend healthcare crisis, only to find out that no one’s picking up your phone call, you quickly got put on hold and you waited 20 minutes, or that everyone was very rushed when they responded to you. 

AI can take that call, it can pleasantly respond, it can respond to as many inbound calls at the same time as you desire and it can essentially then tell [inaudible 00:03:30] “I can do that.” And it can deliver that higher level of patient experience and get the job done. 

Paula: 

Yeah, that’s super interesting and I find it hard to believe that companies are intentionally implementing this sludge, but you make a great point in regards to with AI, you have 24 hour service seven days a week, which whether it’s healthcare or any other industry, what could be better than that? 

Frank Fawzi: 

I would think there’s an opportunity today with the current state of AI and it has evolved significantly. AI today is not what we had two years ago or five years ago. It is truly more comprehensive in its capacity to be able to have that intelligent human-like conversation with a patient, address their needs, answer their questions, get them to accomplish the job that they set out to do, whether it’s support and management, whether it’s asking a question about an upcoming procedure, or they’re trying to understand certain symptoms they experience and so forth. Plenty of use cases and applications that we’ve been able to apply AI. And no, candidly, it is very complementary to what healthcare providers want to be able to accomplish, which is to provide superior patient care and the highest possible of a level of patient experience efficiently. And those things that have to happen hand in hand, the efficiency of driving or delivering that patient experience and the level of that higher level of patient experience have to come together and truly could be delivered by AI. So to your point, I don’t think we really can do much better than that. 

Paula: 

I love it. So let’s jump on into the heart of the matter, why we’re here to talk today. So private equity backed healthcare firms are navigating a minefield. They’re dealing with rising labor costs, shrinking margins and regulatory scrutiny which is just a few of the many things they’re dealing with. AI isn’t just a tech plate, it’s a survival strategy. Frank, what specific pressures are private equity backed healthcare companies under that make AI adoption a business imperative? 

Frank Fawzi: 

I think there are four stages probably of the private equity ownership for really any business, but just make specific to AI to healthcare here and obviously the first stage is the acquisition, is where they’re acquiring the healthcare group or the healthcare clinics. The second stage is trying to improve the operating margin. This is really where AI truly can play a pivotal role in helping the ownership improve the operating map margin. I would say the third stage or maybe the jump to the second stage is to increase the scale and the size of the group by acquiring other clinics, by building new ones and to meet the expand and increasing demand for healthcare in the market in the United States. And then of course eventually if you pull all these things together, they’re obviously looking at a good return and an exit that where they can sell the healthcare group or deliver the value to their stakeholders, the shareholders from that investment that they made back several years ago. 

One of the truly differentiating elements of what we can bring to the table, what IntelePeer has been focused on, is how we can help with improving those operating margins. Early on in the cycle of soon after the acquisition and throughout the life cycle of the ownership wanted to increase profitability and the operating margins through efficiencies delivered with AI by doing things such as optimizing the use of labor so you can use the same labor or less labor to be able to deliver the same level of patient experience and engagement and interactions by also improving utilization and revenue. And that’s through mechanisms such as reducing the notional rates, filling up the schedules better so you don’t have doctors and clinicians sitting waiting for a patient that cancels last minute and not have a replacement to fill into their place. Optimizing that revenue is part of what we do and what helps with improving the operating margins and there are other techniques. There are many ways to be able to improve those operating margins, both on the administrative side of the cost structure for healthcare provider as well as on the clinical side of the cost structure for those same healthcare providers. 

Paula: 

Excellent. So in your view, what does the next 12 to 18 months look like for PE-backed healthcare organizations that aren’t adopting AI? 

Frank Fawzi: 

I wish them luck. Yeah. Look, I think it’s going to be a pretty immediate disparity in valuations. The way most of these healthcare providers are valued is on multiples of their profitability, of their earnings, of their cash flow, the capacity to be able to improve operating margins. And there are many cases and examples of customers that have adopted and deployed IntelePeer solutions that have been able to achieve operating margin improvements in excess of 400 basis points. That’s 4% improvement of operating margins. So if you’re a hundred million dollars business, that’s $4 million more that go to the bottom line. Imagine those businesses that don’t do that, they’d miss all the opportunity to increase their operating margin by those 4 million and more depending on the size of the business. 

And of course there’ll be the multiple, the valuation that’s based on a multiple of the profitability of the business will suffer and I think possibly they become acquisition targets at a lower valuation for this successful cohort in those adopted AI solutions early on. And the worst case potentially if they have a heavy debt load, they might completely collapse under the combination of increasing cost of running the businesses, the challenges that you mentioned earlier for that healthcare providers tend to face such as increasing labor costs, the high turnover rates there, especially in the administrative staff and so forth. All these challenges makes it less likely for those non-AI adapters to be able to survive and thrive over the next 12 to 18 months. 

Paula: 

Yeah, in this day and age, I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t be looking at AI to improve their operations. So yeah, I think you’re spot on with that, Frank. Up to 45% of healthcare administrative tasks can be automated, actually probably more. So that’s not futuristic right now. That’s current, that’s what happening, we see it with our customers every day. What kind of administrative tasks are ripe for automation today, Frank? 

Frank Fawzi: 

Look, I think every single administrative task presents an opportunity for building a use case around automating that administrative task. However, I think the question is more around which ones should happen first and today. So if I think about what we’ve been successfully implementing for the last several years, certain use cases have emerged as the most compelling, the highest value, the ones where the combination of the resulting outcome of successful implementation plus the likelihood of rapid success of implementing rise to the top. I would say appointment management by far seems to be one of the most compelling use cases. 50% or more of all interactions between healthcare providers and patients are around appointments, make an appointment, cancel appointments, reschedule appointment, confirm appointment, and so forth. Related to that, of course, are wait list management. That’s when an appointment is canceled, how can I fill it back up from wait list or the likes of what’s called recall list, which is the opportunity to ask the patient if they want to come back again for a second hygiene appointment that year or for hygienist appointment if it’s a dental or for an eye exam or get a dermatologist to check out my skin three, four times a year. 

And again, they recall me three or four times a year to make sure that certainly if I’ve attended to all my appointments. Those kind of appointment related stuff is probably by far the most compelling one. But that doesn’t stop there, I wouldn’t say that’s a starting point. And related to use cases, we’ve seen incredible success around patient responsibility collections where we are collecting receivables that have been outstanding over 90, 180, and in some cases even over one year. And then I would say there are other administrative tasks around insurance verifications, pre-authorization, physician accreditations, and several other areas that can be leveraged and capitalize on AI to be able to automate those tasks and make it a lot easier for the administrative staff in the office to be able to do their job without burnout and efficiently. 

Paula: 

Yeah, it’s amazing, that 50% stat you said at the top of that response. Imagine being able to offload 50% of someone’s workload, all the other things that they could be doing that would just make them so much more productive and probably a heck of a lot happier, so that’s pretty darn amazing. 

Frank Fawzi: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And look, I think the opportunity is truly massive on continuously improving administrative efficiency for healthcare providers. 

Paula: 

Excellent. So what technologies? We have robotic processing automation, natural language processing, agentic AI, of these technologies, which ones are delivering the most impact in streamlining healthcare operations? 

Frank Fawzi: 

Since we at IntelePeer have been on this journey for quite a while, in fact, we launched our workflow engine for communications in automation back in 2019, we have a great viewpoint for the history of technology and evolution. There has been a significant ramp in what we could do today versus we were able to do two years ago or five years ago. Agentic AI is by far delivering more compelling results and more measurable results for our clients and our customers in healthcare than the other technologies. In fact, I’ve seen customers after customers that have moved from the early stages of automation with RPAs to natural language processing type automation to agentic AI achieve significant improvements. Agentic AI in our estimation is delivering at least three X the magnitude of what natural language processing was delivering just a few years ago and probably five X what workflow automation and RPA were doing prior to that. The capacity to be able to not only understand the human conversation, but also to communicate and connect with other systems, pull the data necessary, have the history of the patient attractions and prior conversations and be able to pull all of that information and act upon it and deliver the outcomes for the business and for the patients for that matter is unique to what agentic AI can do today and will continue to grow into the future with more capabilities and more competence. 

Paula: 

That’s pretty amazing. This has been, what? Only in a couple of years that things I feel like have really taken off. It’s pretty darn impressive. 

Frank Fawzi: 

I haven’t seen anything like this. In fact, I’ve been in technology for a long time and certainly have seen these tech waves that have taken us from, if you will, the pre-internet era to the internet era, to the pre-mobile phone era, and then of course the abundance of mobility solutions today. All that has been dwarfed right now with what I’m seeing with the adoption and the technology evolution for agentic AI solutions on what they could do. What’s happening is not only the level of change and capacity to deliver more has increased, but the amount of time, the rate of change that has occurred is truly impressive compared to the last several tech wave cycles. It shrank everything. What is happening right now is within the scope of three months or six months, what we could do today is significantly better than what we were able to do six months ago or two years ago and so forth. 

Paula: 

Which is probably part of the, I’m going to say the freak-out that the regular person has because we thought things changed so quickly with the iPhone, but now within a matter of months things have completely changed, which kind of I could see brings on the fear factor a little bit for people who maybe want to take things a little bit slower. 

Frank Fawzi: 

Yeah, there’s no question. Look, we’re not all built to adopt and accept change in a similar fashion, but this is really true for every tech wave. Every tech wave has happened. One of my favorite books by Geoffrey Moore is Crossing the Chasm and one of the things about Crossing the Chasm is how there are early adopters, early majority and of course, late adopters. That has been true probably since the availability of the printing press if you will, since the 1600s or actually earlier than that. With that being said, this has created a significant opportunity for those early adopters to be able to leverage the solutions and achieve an early leadership positions using AI to be able to deliver those solutions to their patients and benefits from that for their investors and shareholders. 

Paula: 

Excellent. So how does IntelePeer’s platform help clinical staff refocus on care instead of paperwork? 

Frank Fawzi: 

This opens up, actually this is a really good question because it actually, it allows me to talk about how we as a company are evolving our solutions and the way we like to think about where AI can go in healthcare in the future. To go deeper and more into not only improving patient experience around the administrative tasks, but also to improve patient care by helping clinicians become more efficient, by allowing them better access and more immediate access to information. By giving them hints and ideas and suggestions in terms of based on other similar symptoms and so forth. So where I think the future is going for the healthcare industry is to be able to start with where we started with, let’s look at the administrative efficiency we can drive and then move forward into the future with clinical efficiency where it allows us to be able to leverage a clinician’s time much better. 

And clearly, look, I think we all understand that we have here, at least in the US and maybe worldwide, an aging population that demand for more healthcare with a limited supply of doctors and nurses and clinicians. Being able to make them more efficient allows them to be able to deliver better patient care and more accurate patient care, which is really important, not just more efficient, but also more accurate care through leveraging AI solutions such as some ongoing solutions that we’re currently in either in our labs or in trials with our customers around clinical care and use of AI to drive such outcomes. 

Paula: 

Yeah, actually that’s really interesting. McKinsey and Harvard partnered up and did a research project and they found that there could be a cost savings of up to about 360 billion across healthcare in the US alone. That’s a huge lift. What are your thoughts on that number actually becoming a reality? 

Frank Fawzi: 

Yeah, so healthcare in the US is roughly about 20% of our GDP. Our GDP is 30 billion that places healthcare at about 30 trillion. That places healthcare about $6 trillion. 360 billion number does not surprise me. In fact, I think it’s very modest and probably only speaking to the healthcare as it stands today because those healthcare costs have been rising at a rate higher than inflation and with the pressures that we all have societal pressures, whether it’s the reduction in Medicare spend that we need to do, whether it’s the insurance limitations, whether it’s the increasing cost of clinical care in general, being able to drive $360 billion in efficiency is not only essential for our success, but really truly doable and achievable I think in the course of the next few years of using solutions such as IntelePeer to drive such outcomes. 

Paula: 

Well, I appreciate that. That kind of helps put things into perspective. Thank you. So what are some of the financial KPIs that PE firms are tracking for when evaluating various AI solutions? 

Frank Fawzi: 

Yeah, not just PE firms, but of course healthcare providers and our relationship spans both, certainly the healthcare companies and providers’ leadership teams as well as in some cases the private equity operating partners and others. And we work collaboratively to show them what we have been able to achieve and accomplish across the different subverticals of healthcare. Healthcare can be viewed as one big $6 trillion market, but it also is divided up between its different segments from dental to eye care to orthopedic to elderly care and so forth, veterinary care and so forth. So we look at not only the KPIs across healthcare, we look at KPIs across each subvertical and what have we been able to deliver to our customers in those individual subverticals? They have commonality, they also have things that differentiate them and make them unique to some degree, surgery centers are different than dermatologies are different than eye care and so forth. 

Dentistry on the other hand has a more retail type feel to it. So whether the KPIs, it has to do a lot to do with, of course, one of the key elements is automation rates and what’s the baseline. So part of what we do to our customers, help them understand what is the baseline, what are you able to do today? And if you deploy our use case to do, for example, appointment management or triage or wait list management and scheduling reminders, what does that mean an improvement of your profitability of the automation rates, of the patient experience? Are you setting up more appointments than you were before? Are you filling up more empty wait slots than you were before? Those are the things that are really critical. It’s truly the business outcomes that end up delivering the ROI that end up driving those operating margin efficiencies that I talked about earlier. 

Paula: 

I love that, I actually had the opportunity to interview Danielle Anderson and we spent a fair amount of time, the whole conversation was around implementing and how best to go about implementing an AI project, and one of the things, it was like the measuring for success and she stressed exactly as you did, you need to understand where you’re starting at, you need to have that baseline established. Without that, then you don’t really know what you’re driving toward and where you can really go. So I appreciate that you and her are in sync on that topic. 

Frank Fawzi: 

Yeah, look, I think we all think about it that way. This is the one thing and I hear this feedback a lot from customers, analysts and others who are IntelePeer, we’re really truly focused on AI not only being self-funding and yes, we have incredibly sophisticated AI platform that allows us to be able to deliver solutions, but what are the measurable business outcomes that impacting our customers are deploying and implementing our solutions that we view that as an important element of our differentiation in our go-to-marketing approach as a company. In fact, we’ve invested heavily, heavily in what IntelePeer or smart analytics platform that allow you to be able to baseline those capabilities. So our smart analytics platform not only listens in to every single conversation all the time, but does it across both the AI agents as well as the human agents. 

And of course that allows us to create a baseline to compare the human agent performance or the human front office worker performance versus the AI agent performance. Why is that important? It actually creates learning and coaching opportunities in both directions. If an AI agent cannot automate, cannot understand how to deal with a certain situation, we could look at our smart analytics as well. How does a human agent deal with that particular use case or that corner case? And then take that learning and impact, incorporate into AI agents. Similarly, when there’s a live agent that is struggling with a response or tripping into a regulatory or compliance issues that they should not be getting into, we’re identifying those issues with our smart analytics and it creates a coaching opportunity for that particular agent to perform at a higher level next time around. 

Paula: 

Oh, that’s great. That’s the circle of continual feedback. That’s wonderful. So let’s talk about how AI is delivering wins in the real world. I think we have a dental organization that booked approximately 1500 appointments in 30 days. I’m not sure how that breaks down. That sounds like an awful lot to me. What did that deployment look like? 

Frank Fawzi: 

Yeah, I think that is pretty common for our customers to be able to deploy a significant number. Well, they deploy our solutions significant number of appointments. In fact, what we’ve seen typically is the number of patient appointments that are scheduled by customers that have deployed IntelePeer’s AI solutions is roughly over five percentage points than those with that prior to us deploying our solutions. So when talking back about the baseline, we’ve always been able to achieve that. This particular example that you’ve highlighted is a dental service organization of 60 clinics nationwide that implemented our AI point in management solutions and they were able to, of course, the first thing I remember, I started the conversation talking about the Monday morning missed calls. Well, there are no missed calls. So that automatically increases the number of appointments they are able to set up. And so of course that’s not just Monday morning. There are no hold times. People don’t hang up because they get tired of waiting. All of this yields significant higher number of appointments scheduled by our AI solutions. 

Paula: 

Excellent, excellent. So we also, I believe we’ve been doing this, but I think we have a relatively new customer, another DSO who’s actually aggressively using AI to recover costs, back payments that haven’t been paid by patients, probably people like me. What can others learn from this? 

Frank Fawzi: 

I think there’s a significant opportunity. Okay, I think to your point, we’re all patients, have been patients and we receive these letters in the mail, which if you even look at your mail, that maybe have an outstanding balance from your last visit to your dermatologist of $25 or $75 or sometimes more significant, if you had a procedure, maybe it’s $300. Well look, a lot of times what happens is people don’t see their mail, the practices themselves don’t have the time to dedicate people to go and make those phone calls to collect. 

And as a result, or maybe it’s too expensive, you’re only trying to collect $25 and you have to call the patient three, four times. You just killed more than $25 of cost of that person that made that phone call. So you don’t do that. So as a result, the collections is not completed, the receivables, the patient responsibility [inaudible 00:26:06] keep growing. We walked into one particular customer that had over $20 million of outstanding patient responsibility that had been accumulated that’s over 90 days. Usually between zero to 90 days, those collections are very doable. You start looking at accounts that are outstanding for more than 90 days, more than 180 days, more than a year, good luck trying to collect those. And most firms and most providers end up writing them off or handing them to a collection agency and maybe getting a few cents on the dollar. 

We, with our voice AI solutions, can call, can collect, can allow the customer to fill in, either provide us with their credit card, can help set up a payment schedule if it’s a few hundred dollars. Although at a incredibly small cost per customer, per patient conversation that we have. So all of that allows us to have an efficient collection mechanism that helps our healthcare providers from day one collect significant amount of dollars for outstanding balances over 90 days or for that matter, immediate outstanding balances, collecting millions of dollars in cash that probably would’ve had to write off or not collect at all. 

Paula: 

Wow. That’s some hard core numbers there and the impact that would have on any healthcare entity is amazing. So I’m glad we’re in that realm of providing those type of solutions for our customers. For the PE firms, they have various goals, margin expansion, exit readiness, better patient experiences, and AI definitely is the key to unlocking it, but there are still a lot of misconceptions. What’s one misconception you still hear about AI in healthcare that maybe makes you a little bit batty? 

Frank Fawzi: 

Well, here’s the good news, there’s a lot less of what I used to hear now than I did just even a year ago. So the market acceptability and adoption and the customers and the healthcare providers we’re talking to has significantly improved, which is really important. Just truly amazing, just a year ago versus today is very different. However, I still hear usual refrains, “Oh, people are not willing to engage with AI. I always say, ‘Agent, agent, agent.'” Things like that. Well, I think there is still a segment of the population that might do that. Being able to schedule an appointment without being dropped or waiting online or not connecting with anyone has its own significantly more value to patients that they’re willing to engage. 

And we’ve seen those engagement rates improve over time because people get more comfortable and they recognize now this is not your old IVA that gave you only three, four choices, but this is truly a capable agentic AI solution that allows you to be able to get completed with what you want started with all the way til scheduling, rescheduling, confirming, canceling, paying, et cetera. So whatever it is that you want to do or even ask questions about the procedure you’re about to have and so forth. So very different world we live in today. I would say this is the biggest misconception I still hear is the amount of level of engagement that folks are willing to do with AI. 

Paula: 

Nice. So for those PE firms evaluating AI vendors, what advice do you have for them? 

Frank Fawzi: 

I would say I have really two important ones. Two very, very important one and they’re important in this order. One is has this vendor operated in the vertical and sometimes even in the sub-vertical where you’re in? It is AI as a horizontal platform is great. It allows for a lot of innovation and capabilities. AI needs to be verticalized to be able to deliver for the specific use cases that you need that’s different in eye care than it is in dental care, that’s different in GI versus other segments of the healthcare market. So very important to understand, have they done the integrations? Do they have partnerships in the ecosystem? Do they have pre-built use cases? Do they have KPIs from existing customers? That becomes a really important element. And then the second thing I would say is the comprehensiveness of their solution. There are a lot of small players in the market that are offering one solution and one only use case. 

For example, maybe just appointment management and while they’re maybe competent in appointment management, do you really want to have 15 to 20 different vendors supplying a different AI solutions one for appointment management, the other for collections, the third for wait list management, the fourth for authorization of insurance? You don’t. So you want to have a platform that has all these use cases and then the minute you want to turn up another use case onto that type of the platform such as IntelePeer platform, be able to do that rapidly and effectively at a small incremental cost rather than having to procure yet another solution from yet another vendor. 

Paula: 

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with that one. There’s nothing that frustrates me more than looking at a vendor that they can only do one thing and it’s like, “Well, I actually need six things done and I’m not going to go get six vendors. I’m going to go find another vendor that can do all six.” So I think that’s a super important point that you highlight there. So let’s do the shameless plug and tell me a little bit, I do have a little bit of insight working for the company, I obviously have some insight, but let’s let our listeners know what’s on IntelePeer’s roadmap in the healthcare space? 

Frank Fawzi: 

Thank you for asking the question. We’re really truly excited about what the future of innovation that we’re delivering with our platform. As we started this journey several years ago, our capacity to deliver these use cases with measurable return on investment, measurable on business outcomes is definitely the differentiator for IntelePeer. But we continue to add and we’re now progressing from being able to do use cases that are driving administrative efficiency such as the ones I talked about, like product management and so on, to move into a whole new set of use cases around clinical efficiency and productivity. This is where we’re going to get to the point where we’re going to make not only the healthcare company’s business more efficient, but the doctor’s lives, burnout likelihood or clinicians I should say in general, burnout reduced by delivering use cases such as after hour triage, calls are coming to the doctor on duty or the nurse on duty that continuously to disrupt their [inaudible 00:32:33] when they’re on duty versus being able to handle many of those use cases through our AI clinical triage use case. 

We’re working on these use cases where the different specialties in medicine, we’re looking at delivering those in the course of the next few quarters. Additionally, I’m really excited about the things we’re doing on the clinical side. I think this is taking our solution into a whole new world in terms of what we could do for our healthcare providers, it reduces clinicians’ burnouts, it makes them more efficient. I mentioned the clinical triage, there are other use cases that we have delivered under our own trials with, such as patient intake and capacity to be able to stratify the urgency based on symptoms and things like that are some of the clinical use cases. Additionally, on the administrative side, we continue to innovate insurance on being able to offer pre-authorization capabilities and insurance verifications, physicians accreditations and the likes of that are some of the other use cases we’re working here on IntelePeer. We’re very excited about how we can continue to deliver and expand our capabilities and the value we deliver to our customers. 

Paula: 

I love it and it’s one of the reasons I love working here. There is always something exciting on the horizon. We definitely don’t sit on our laurels. So thank you for giving us that insight. I appreciate it. So before we go, I like to end my segments with kind of, it’s a rapid fire three questions. You can give me one word answers, you can expound upon your answers. The choice is yours. But I like to let our listeners get to know you a little bit more outside of the barrage of questions I just subjected you to. So with that, I’m going to subject you to three questions, answer as much or as little as you’d like. First one, what’s one technology you couldn’t live without? 

Frank Fawzi: 

Well, if you ask my wife, it’s probably iPhones, but considering I live in Florida, probably air conditioning. 

Paula: 

Yeah, I think I’m in the air conditioning first, then the iPhone. That’s great. If you weren’t in tech, what would your dream career be? 

Frank Fawzi: 

Farming. 

Paula: 

Okay. Any specific segment? 

Frank Fawzi: 

I was going to leave it at that. I really love to create and produce things. I’m an engineer heart and I think farming is another form of creation and creating products and things that consumers can benefit from, so I love that. Yeah. 

Paula: 

I just came back from a weekend at a vineyard and I could definitely see you being a vintner, I think they’re called and tending to the grapes. I could see you out there doing that. Okay. What’s a book or podcast you always recommend? I know you mentioned one earlier in the call. 

Frank Fawzi: 

Yeah, actually I mentioned Crossing the Chasm because we are really truly in a tech wave and that’s a great book for everyone to read if they haven’t read, I’m sure a lot of people have read it. I would encourage to even maybe if you read it 10 years ago or 20 years ago or three years ago, read it or listen to it again. It’s really something else. I would say from a podcast perspective, I love All In, great podcast, very insightful, very AI-centric in many ways, but just generally technology, All In podcasts and you can listen to it on YouTube. It’s a great podcast. 

Paula: 

I’m going to have to check that one out. So we are actually at the end of the interview. Frank, I always enjoy speaking with you. It’s always a fun conversation. You bring so much good information and insights into any discussion we’ve ever had. Thank you so much for joining us. 

Frank Fawzi: 

Thank you very much, Paula. Enjoyed this conversation as well. Thank you. Have a great day. 

Paula: 

Wonderful, thank you. So thanks for joining us on the AI Factor. If today’s episode sparked ideas for your organization, be sure to subscribe and share. And if you’re a PE-backed healthcare leader looking to drive transformation, you know who to call. Until next time, stay curious, stay informed, and stay ahead.