Why is Patient Experience Overlooked in Healthcare, with Katie Bowden

Episode Summary

NEXA truly believes that every customer interaction matters, and that’s why they put patient experience at the centre of their focus. They do this by putting themselves in the shoes of patients sitting in waiting areas helping hospitals achieve solutions from their own experiences.

“We’re treating the patient as a whole and not just the conditions that the patient has separately”

Patient Experience

Katie believes that a patients experience really begins several years before being referred to a particular facility. In this episode, we discuss the importance of focusing on all the pain-points that could appear through the patient journey.

Katie also shares an important story that a patient had to go through, of a pregnant woman that was stuck in a never-ending waiting area with no indication of when her go would be (to find out more, watch the full episode). Experiences like this scar and frighten patients, making them uneasy about returning to the hospitals.

“That experience was left with her every time she came into that facility, she had anxiety not knowing what to expect moving forward from the traumatic experience”

Service Design

Service design aims to improve and innovate the delivery of services to enhance the patient customer experience. It aims to create services that are:

• • Efficient

• • Effective

• • User-Friendly

• • Aligned with the needs of patients.

Katie explains to us how NEXA run different validation and discovery workshops in order to discover the negative experiences and stories that people experience in the healthcare industry.

Conclusion

Although the healthcare industry has many difficulties when trying to optimise the patient experience, companies like NEXA help create an environment where needs and preferences of individuals are met. A strong emphasis on service design and preventative care can lead to better health outcomes and reduce the need for intensive medical interventions.

To discover more about NEXA and their specialised operational approach, check out our full episode – available on all your favourite channels. Now including YouTube!

This article summarises podcast episode 95 “Why is Patient Experience Overlooked in Healthcare” recorded by CX Insider.

Written by Octavian Iotu

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Full Episode Transcript

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Katie: I’m dreading these questions, by the way. Absolutely dreading them. Like, I tried my hardest to get out of these questions.

Greg: We’ll start with the easy one. What’s the meaning of life? No, i’m joking, that’s not really one of the questions, don’t worry (laughs)

Octavian: Hey, everyone, before we get into the episode, I wanted to introduce myself. My name is Octavian. I’m going to be the new host producer, social media content creator for the CX Insider podcast. So tune in, you’re going to be seeing me a whole lot more. And yeah, let’s get into the episode.

Octavian: On today’s episode, we speak to the service design and delivery director of NEXA, Katie Bowden, who will be diving into the world of healthcare, talking about the customer journey that patients go through, as well as the design solutions that NEXA brings to customers experience. Before we get started, don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to see the latest CX insider content with brand new episodes every other Monday. Enjoy the episode. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your career? What led you to now?

Katie: Yeah, sure. So my name is Katie Bowden. I have a bachelor’s degree in Health Information Management. It was interesting, when I was at uni, we were supposed to be the people that were bringing in the electronic medical record. And obviously when you go out for placement, which is a requirement of your degree, all you see is paper and nothing is digitised. Storing that paper and trying to find that paper and even read that paper is something that is exhausting. So when we were doing placement, it obviously wasn’t something that I thought would even be close to the next ten years. But one of my first jobs was with New South Wales Health, and there I was lucky enough to be part of the Electronic Medical Record project. So I’m not sure whether you’re familiar with the application or the company called CERNA. They’ve got a package of electronic medical records that go across the hospital, different modules, and we were one of the first projects across New South Wales to roll out that electronic medical record. I started as a trainer doing that and then from there moved from training into business analyst and then from there managed to work my way into one of the projects, which was one of the last that I did across a lot of different hospitals, was to help implement a new facility that they were building. And therefore I was exposed to health planning, infrastructure and all of those complications that come along with, you know, moving everyone from an old facility and putting them into a brand new facility, being able to incorporate the change management change over the electronics of all of that.

Katie: It was really interesting and I absolutely loved that. And then from there, I was lucky enough to help build a comprehensive cancer centre in Sydney. There was the informatics and data manager and I was responsible for all of the IT and the informatics that went into that building. And one of the solutions that we rolled out as part of that was NEXA’s application for queue management. So this particular building had multiple levels and without that application we couldn’t open the front doors to the facility because we had patients who had complex conditions who needed to be in different places at different times. So these patients may have multiple appointments. They might need to be at different levels throughout the day and really ensuring that we had the right patients in the right place at the right time. So the application was critical for actually opening the doors of that facility. And then once it was opened, I was lucky enough to come and work at Nexa and now I’ve been with Nexa for the last six years, which was just like, Oh God, I can’t believe it’s been six years. And yeah, I’m still here today.

Octavian: So what do NEXA do and what does your role entail?

Katie: So Nexa is an Australian company. Surprise, surprise by the accent. Um, we specialise in really streamlining whether it be patient, student or customer experiences and journeys. So really making sure that we’re focusing on making every patient interaction matter. We work across a number of different industries, whether that be health care, government, whether it’s local, state or federal government, education, retail and the space where I spend most of my time, which is across health care as well. So we’re pretty proud about some of the partnerships that we’ve got with large government agencies and obviously large healthcare facilities across Australia as well. My particular role. So I am the service design and delivery director. Most people don’t remember my title because it’s pretty complex, but I’m ultimately responsible for the delivery of the solutions to the customers. I manage the project managers, business analysts, the quality assurance side of the business and also the service design and consultancy arm as well. So I work with some pretty passionate people who do an incredible job delivering solutions to, as I said before, lots of different industries. And the best part really is that there’s a feelgood factor to what we do as well. So knowing that you’re actually providing an application that is going to help people in, you know, in the everyday world and making a difference is a huge thing. And I guess my experience in health care as well really helps. So to be able to step into the shoes of some of these customers and be able to understand. A language that they’re speaking, listen to some of their pain points and be like, Oh, yeah, Remember when that used to happen. Things certainly haven’t changed in some aspects, but it has in others. So being able to really draw on that experience. When I was a customer for NEXA as well, which really helps.

Octavian: Great. Can you share any stories about how negative a patient’s experience can be if they’re not treated well during their journeys?

Katie: Yeah, so I run a number of different consumer workshops, so whether it’s consumers, patients, volunteers, we gather lots of people together, mainly that’s organised through the facilities themselves. Some of them have got workshops and committees that do lots of different work in this space, others don’t. And they put an EOI out to see if anybody wants to be involved in a particular project. We get a really good uptake with this one because it’s a space where there’s room for lots of improvement. So I’ve run multiple different workshops across all states, almost across Australia, and I’ve met some wonderful people along the way. And just even having their voice heard is something that they’re really passionate about. I’ve got one particular story that has really sat with me, and it’s one of the first stories that I ever got told. So there was a patient, I’ll obviously keep names out of this story, but there was a patient who had gestational diabetes. She was recently diagnosed, so obviously she was pregnant. She was pretty nervous and anxious about her experience as a whole. But as part of being diagnosed with gestational diabetes, she was also referred to a number of other facilities. So she was referred to physiotherapy and psychology as well. So on this particular day she had come to the hospital.

Katie: She’d checked in and gone to see the people at the front desk. She’d taken a seat in the waiting area and she waited and waited and waited and waited until she got to the point where, sadly, her blood sugar levels dropped so much that she ended up having an episode in the waiting area and from that point then ended up as an inpatient in the hospital just simply for waiting. You know, prior to that, she’d had other experiences where clinicians had lost her information, she’d had conflicting information or advice being told to her as part of her experience. And she really thought that there was a lack of empathy as well, which is huge. So she, you know, didn’t feel like she could go to the reception desk and ask how much longer it could be or or any of that. And she was so nervous about missing her spot because she’d waited for hours. And this particular patient had, you know, for previous appointments, used her sick leave and used her annual leave because she was waiting. And these appointments were taking so much longer than what she originally thought that even parking something as simple as that. But you know, the parking costs that she was waiting there. So if only she’d known that the wait would have been X amount of time, that she could have actually gone to the cafeteria and grabbed a snack or even just gone to the bathroom.

Katie: As simple and stupid as that sounds, it’s something that really is almost seen as a luxury because you really don’t want to lose your place. If you’ve sat there for a good hour or hour and a half, you think, Oh, I’ll be next, I’ll be next, and someone else’s name obviously gets called out. So, oh, don’t worry, I’ll be the next person. I can wait a bit, a little bit longer. I can wait a bit longer. But unfortunately in this situation it wasn’t necessarily the case. So she obviously had the baby. We found out later and it was a healthy baby girl. But at the same time, you know, the experience that was left with her and every time that she came into that facility, she had that anxiety not knowing what to expect moving forward because she’d obviously had that traumatic experience. And just one more thing on that. So I also run observational studies, which pretty self-explanatory. You literally sit in a waiting area or sit and experience what people are experiencing in that space. When was the last time that you guys sat in a waiting area? I had a staff member that did it yesterday and she said, I’m so sorry, I’m just waiting, you know, in the medical centre, I’ll be up soon.

Katie: I said, No, no, no, hold on. Actually, think about it. Look up, take it all in, because you’re going to be helping a hospital next week. Go live with a solution. You are actually sitting in the shoes of a patient right now. You know, what can you say? You know, what are people doing? So what we look at is really simple things like signage. The environment itself, you know, are people looking frustrated? What can you hear? What can you see. Are People looking down? Are they anxious? Are they nervous? You can gather so much information from doing that. And it really starts a whole service design approach because we then use all of those insights around the environment, be able to validate that information with the patients and the staff as we’re moving forward. So it’s always like, Oh yeah, that does happen. Or, you know, we managed to see this or we saw this. Yeah, actually that happens on a daily basis. But can I just ask you a quick question? So based off what you know, which is probably brief around patients and waiting areas and things like that, what do you think is the number one thing that would be important to patients.

Greg: Apart from like having a seat? Because if you’re waiting for a long time, having a seat is pretty important. I think communication just being somewhat aware of roughly where you stand in terms of how far away you are from being seen, I think is quite often something I’ve experienced myself in those, you know, hospital environments that is quite commonly lacking.

Octavian: What I’ve experienced when it’s come to this sort of situation is that fear of not knowing when your goal is when you’re next. So you can’t listen to music. You always have to be focused because if they call your name out and you don’t react, you don’t answer them, they’ll just go to the next person. You know, it’s a very fast paced environment.

Katie: Absolutely.

Katie: So you’ve pretty much hit both on the head. So first one that you haven’t mentioned is respect. So just literally being treated like a human and having that individuality in the treatment that you are receiving, something as simple as being called by your name. Also good communication. It is huge. The amount of people who just want to be told it isn’t necessarily the wait time itself that is the problem. It’s being informed of that. So therefore then they can manage their own wait experience, which seems silly. But you know, why sit in a tiny little waiting area if you don’t have to? If there’s a park or something across the road where you can be told that it’s okay for you to wait somewhere else and we’ll let you know when it’s appropriate for you to come to the waiting area because you’re nearly ready to be seen. There’s so much power in that. So yeah, they’re probably the top two things that people want along with obviously happy employees, because if the employees seem happy, then they’re so much more approachable. And therefore, if you were sitting in the waiting area and someone was sitting at the reception desk, you could literally get up and go, Hi, how much longer would it be? But if you see someone you know madly typing away and and yelling, why would you go up and ask? So yeah, so there’s plenty to learn in that space. And some of the things are just so simple that we all take for granted. But when it comes to situations like this, it can be quite different.

Octavian: So there we have a perfect example of a patient who has shown a lack of empathy and led towards a stressful and upsetting experience. However, this isn’t a one off. Studies show that two thirds of healthcare consumers have had negative experiences with providers. So how come patient experience is so often overlooked in health care, and what differences does it have compared to other industries?

Katie: I think the number one thing when it comes to patient experience is it isn’t just about patient satisfaction. You know, we’re not just dealing with this patient experience as a whole is quite a large thing. And the Cleveland Clinic, I don’t know whether you’ve heard of them or not, but they were one of the first clinics to actually have customer experience or patient experience as part of their strategy. But they look at it as patient first. So not only are we looking at the patient satisfaction, but we’re looking at quality care, we’re looking at high value care and just making sure that we’re really putting the patient at the centre of that. It’s interesting that when it comes to outpatients or when you have an appointment, which is where we play as what we’re really looking at is that appointment or lots of people think that we’re just looking at that appointment. But really it’s important that we look at the whole patient journey. And for some of these patients, their journey could have started a year or two years before that when they were referred to a particular facility being put on a wait list and then haven’t heard from them at all, just constantly waiting to know when they even get an appointment.

Katie: And they’re obviously shaping their experience. Then, you know, not just the moment they walk to the facility, walk in the front door and they see, a beautiful sign and some nice volunteer greets them, you know, they’ve already built that experience or part of that experience up front. So, you know, it’s everything they see, feel, hear, experience along the way. There’s an interesting study that I looked at recently, which was around the emergency department, and they literally said, we know exactly what our patients want when it comes to experience. You know, it’s all about wait times. We’ve got to fix our wait times. And of course, when they actually sat down, ran focus groups and really looked at those patients, once again, it wasn’t that it was good communication, like you said earlier, Greg, just to know so that they could manage that wait experience. So I think that lots of industries are really trying to improve in this space. I know that a number of them are trying to do that via data and analytics, which is always really important. But if you don’t have the tools or you know the solutions to be able to capture that data, it does make it very difficult.

Katie: So in order to do that, you need the solutions unless you’ve got the resources to do it manually, which doesn’t really help. But you know, it’s definitely the first step in trying to improve that experience and acknowledging that we do want the patient to be at the center of what we’re doing there. I mean, different industries. We’ve all used Uber and Amazon and had something delivered at our house within 1 or 2 hours and, you know, pressed a button and had a car waiting for us out the front that knows exactly where we want to go. You know that transparency. When you think about how quickly and accessible customise that whole experience is, these patients want that in public health and sadly, we’re a long way behind. But that expectation is there. If I can do it for this and do it for that, then why can’t I have that? Obviously, as we talked about before, that care couples with that. But it’s important that we do make leaps and bounds in the way that we are treating patients in health care so that we can try and keep up with other industries as well.

Greg: On that topic, Katie, do you see a difference between public and private health care in terms of what services delivered, how it’s delivered, but also potentially therefore the expectation of patients?

Katie: Yeah. I’m not sure how much you know about public versus private health in Australia. It’s probably very similar to where you guys are. But you know, public health, there’s long waits. You know, you don’t necessarily need to get to pick who your clinician is, but if you are a Medicare patient, it is considered to be free in an inverted commas. So you know that expectation that you will be waiting, whether that’s, you know, on a wait list to have an appointment. But you will be waiting within a facility. If your appointment is at 9:00, you know, expect to wait at least an hour. That’s that’s normal versus private health, which is very finance driven. We want to get the patients in and out as quickly as possible. All of these patients are paying for their consultation and it seems to be more of a one on one where these patients have the option of not only which clinician that they’re seeing, but also when it comes to waitlists, if they are private patients and are willing to pay, then they can skip lines and things like that and be treated in private facilities. So there are two very different things like we’re talking yin and yang here, but we mainly focus on on public health and trying to improve that experience for the public patients that are coming through large numbers of them. Yeah.

Octavian: Queuing is a clear issue when it comes to healthcare, with customers struggling with being stuck in never ending queues daily. This is where ACF technologies can save the day, offering a wide range of specialised customer flow solutions from appointment bookings to queue management and everything in between. Sounds good. Head over to ACF Technologies and find out more.

Greg: I know that NEXA are really market leaders when it comes to service design in health care. Could you tell the audience a bit more about what that means in the health care space? That’ll be amazing.

Katie: Do you guys know what service design actually is?

Greg: I’ve read up on it quite a bit, yeah.

Katie: Yeah, But most facilities that I walk into that is the number one question that I actually ask. And maybe one out of 30 or 40 people have heard the concept or the term before but don’t necessarily know anything about it. They’ve just been told to come to this workshop for this new solution that they might be getting, and we value their input and want their ideas. So it is relatively new. It’s obviously gained some traction over the last couple of years, which is really exciting. So it’s pretty simply implementing and trying to plan and implement and improve a services quality. But not only that, but also focus on the needs of the users. So I personally think that, you know, users, whether they’re doctors, nurses, reception staff managers, executives, patients, consumers, carers, volunteers, anyone who is associated with that particular service. It’s such an untapped resource. In my experience. Back in the day you would be handed an IT solution that someone up the chain had decided was an absolute must, and it was “Here you go. You know, this is the application.” Whether it actually met any of your pain points or solved the issue or anything like that, it was just not really considered as part of the solution. So what we like to do is incorporate multidisciplinary teams, pretty much all of those people that are part of the application and be able to ask them, sit down, do focus groups.

Katie: So we run a number of different validation and discovery workshops with multiple people, as I mentioned before, who all sit down. We provide a real safe space for people to not only share their stories like some of the ones that I was speaking about earlier, but also to talk about their pain points and things that they’d like to see out of the solution. It’s crazy for most of these people. It’s probably the first time, especially when it’s, across industries or even departments, that these people have had the opportunity to sit down and have a conversation. You know, executives and managers have no idea what’s happening on the front line or any of the pain points that they’re actually experiencing. You know, So it’s an opportunity for them to share not only what they’re doing right now, but all the crazy workarounds that they’ve decided. Someone made a decision years and years ago that it was a great idea to, you know, do this. So these problems and things that they’re all experiencing, we try really hard to solve as a collaborative team. So not only are they involved in the discovery side of things, but also the validation. So once we run these workshops, we go away and we prototype all of these things that are part of the solution. So we bring that product typing back.

Katie: We use tools where we can literally click around and experience the whole thing. So whether we’re looking at a check in solution, we time it. You know, we get someone to come up and actually use what we thought the solution should be, the questions we should ask. And it is amazing that you know what you think is a brilliant idea up front. You know, once you see you feel, you experience it, you’re like, oh, maybe actually that wasn’t such a great idea. And the amount of, you know, time, money, effort, finances, all the rest of it, just being able to to see that it’s still in prototype form, but be able to iterate that before you even think about implementing it is pretty powerful in that space. We really promote co-creation. No idea is a bad idea. Let’s prototype it up. Let’s let’s see what it’s like and the amount of feedback that we get from all of these people. The networking in itself is something that they just absolutely love. For some of them, even the management to to hear what’s happening on the front line or even hear some of these patient stories to be able to make even small changes in the background as part of the overall service and then ultimately make that that huge change towards something that hopefully will improve that patient experience.

Greg: I had not thought about all of those legacy processes that you unearthed just simply a result of someone four years ago suggested we do it like that and now it’s stuck and every time someone new joins, they just hand over the process. That must happen all the time.

Katie: Do you know the amount of times that I say just because you’ve been doing it for a really long time doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the right thing to do.

Greg: It’s like telling off a kid.

Katie: Yeah, exactly. There’s also that fear of change “But it kind of works.” Well, no, it doesn’t work. You’ve just told me all the pain points that exist around this little workaround that you’ve provided. Let’s fix the whole problem and not just work on all of these little things and throw these Band-Aids on. Let’s provide this quality service because we can. Now’s the opportunity to do that.

Octavian: Based off the focus that NEXA has with service design when it comes to users and they go through, is it expected that organisations see a benefit in pure efficiency? And are there any other areas that they should expect to see a tick-up in performance.

Katie: If service design’s done right. I think that, you know, the efficiency, the collaboration, the co-creation that comes with that is really beneficial. Obviously, you know, if you can’t get those multidisciplinary teams together and you’re missing resources, you don’t get the same impact. So it’s critical that you’ve got buy in from the executives to be able to spend the time to be able to get the right people in the room at the right time and to have that buy in so that, when we are making decisions, we’ve got the executive back up to be able to see it through. I know that in most industries it’s not just healthcare. Everyone’s expected to do a lot more with less, whether that be resources, time, anything like that. So we want to try and give them the best possible solution we can with what we’ve got. But really, service design sometimes can be seen as, a nice to have. I don’t think we really need it or, you know, maybe we’ll just develop something and we’ll implement it. And I’m sure it’ll be right. But spending the time to go through this discovery or exploration phase, to be able to create what we are, iterate and reflect on what we’ve built and then ultimately implement, they will absolutely see the benefits in that. And you know, once we do put in a patient flow solution, as you talked about before, the efficiency and the data that comes out of that, you know, it then allows you to be able to have those conversations around, okay, well, you know, this particular service patients or whoever are waiting this long and the service time seems to be this. Why are we scheduling six patients in an hour when we can only see two? You know, let’s think about this, you know, can we do this better, be able to put efficiencies not only within the services that are occurring behind the stage or behind the scenes, but also make some efficiencies and, you know, share that communication around what we’ve learned as well.

Greg: How important then is collaboration in driving efficiency? Because what comes to mind initially is just how complex a health care environment is. And how many moving parts there are. How important is just pure collaboration between staff?

Katie: So depending on the organisation, you know, as I was saying earlier, we work quite closely in the outpatient space. So patients that are coming in for appointments in some facilities and newer facilities, they’re creating centralised waiting areas and centralised clinics. So, you know, if I’m coming for a gastroenterology clinic or a dermatology clinic or an EAA or, you know, throat clinic, then they’re all sort of in the same area. So they’re using the same resources in older facilities where everything is decentralised. You could have the gastro clinic sitting over here and you could have the dermatology clinic over here, and they could be doing even though they’re using the same systems, they could have completely different workflows. If I’m a patient that is going to both of those facilities, then I could have two completely different experiences. If I’d only been to one and then I was going to the other, my expectations would already be created at our first clinic. So what we try and do is get everybody together to collaborate on a way forward so that we can try and streamline that patient experience regardless of what clinic or what service you’re going to, your expectations are set. You know, you’ve got lowered anxiety. You know what to expect, You know what to look for. You know what the process is to some degree. Obviously, there’s there’s small things depending on, you know, what you’re doing or who you’re seeing that that might change. But just to be able to provide that consistent look and feel and almost experience where possible, it definitely makes a difference. And as you say it provides efficiency.

Octavian: On the CX Insider podcast. We speak a lot about the future of technology in various different industries, from retail to banking and even the automobile world. But what about the healthcare industry? Is there any technology within the healthcare space that Katie would like to see more of in the future?

Katie: I think one of the big things that I always wanted to see when I started my career was more transparency. Being able to see, you know, a health record that was for everyone and everyone could have access to it, which, you know, at the time was just an absolute pipe dream. But now we are moving towards that space. It’s obviously taking a lot longer than we’d hoped for, but the fact that we’re transitioning into really focusing on patient experience and putting the patient at the centre of their journey, obviously keeping, you know, the care as well as part of that. But, you know, we’re treating the patient as a whole and not necessarily the conditions that patient has separately. So we are, you know, working or trying to work holistically, but, you know, sooner rather than later. I would love to see, you know, one patient record that regardless of where I am anywhere across the world, I know it will start with Australia. I’ll be able to access that record myself to be able to provide, you know, wearable data or mental health information into that. And also for any other health professional who I’ve given consent to be able to access and contribute to that health record so that is a single source of truth and be able to have endless amounts of data that, you know, stored securely and obviously only the appropriate people accessing. But I would love to see that sooner rather than later. Hopefully in the next 5 to 10 years. I know people are working on it, a much larger issue and project, but we are moving in that direction. So yeah, that’s what I would love to see. We’ve all got watches, we’ve all got all of the, you know, the things that we’re collecting all of this data for, but to centrally manage that and be able to, you know, put it into the hands of the right people, I think it’ll really improve the care that we’re providing to our patients and also the overall experience.

Greg: Yeah. I guess centralising data in the health care world is just a huge opportunity because like you say, once you have a centralised health record that can be distributed as and when needed, you can really get the benefit of wearable devices. You can also get the benefit of really advanced technologies like AI, programs that can analyse data in large volumes. I just wondered if are you seeing any use cases at all in Australia where AI technologies are being used at all?

Katie: Not me personally, no. Some people in Australia are still a bit nervous about AI and what it can and can’t do. I know it’s fun to jump on. What is it?

Octavian: ChatGPT?

Katie: Yeah, that’s the one, you know, and ask it something random and it provides you with all the information. But in the health care space and I’m not too sure whether anyone’s doing anything fancy with that at the moment. Yeah, Yeah.

Greg: You know, that’s interesting. It’s always good to know. I think there’s a lot of apprehensiveness around that technology in general in the health care space, certainly. So because you are dealing with extremely complex matters and there’s an element of human error, but there’s obviously technical error. And if technology gets things wrong, it can be really bad.

Katie: So the ethics is all really important too. So there’s lots of conversations still to be had around entering that into the health care space.

Greg: Yeah, I think we’re seeing a similar thing here in the UK in all honesty. I know of a few use cases where it’s being used. The use cases we’re seeing in the UK where AI programs, they’re basically analysing extremely large pools of data to try and identify trends and then identify higher risk patients in certain categories. I know very clearly that the outcome of that is that it goes to a human for analysis, so it doesn’t then make a decision, then like just start driving a patient. I think I may be wrong there, but I’m pretty sure that that is that is the level of authority. So the technology works. But ultimately what it what it churns out as a report or or its findings is then analysed re-analysed by humans because we are in that testing early phase, like you say.

Octavian: So and that concludes the end of the episode. Thank you to everyone for listening. I’ve been Octavian and I hope you’ve enjoyed the conversation. Let us know what you think by continuing on the discussion on LinkedIn or by commenting down below. Don’t forget we also have an Instagram page where we’ll be posting exclusive behind the scenes of the podcast. And by the way, this podcast is sponsored by the Global Leader in CX Software ACF Technologies. Let’s get into some quick fire questions.

Katie: I’m dreading these questions, by the way. Absolutely dreading them. Like I tried my hardest to get out of these questions.

Greg: We’ll start with the easy one. What’s the meaning of life? No, I’m joking. That’s not really one of the questions. Don’t worry. If you could travel anywhere that you haven’t been to yet, where would it be?

Katie: Do you know what? I almost did an impromptu trip to the Greek islands. It was going to be in three weeks time with a friend who was going. So that would probably be one of the places. And the second place would be Paris. I think that would be pretty magical. Been to America a million, trillion times, Hawaii nine times. So I feel like I’ve done America. I really need to make it over to Europe.

Greg: Yeah, Greek islands are incredible.

Katie: I’ll get there one day.

Greg: I was on holiday there not not too long ago. That was my last holiday was we went to Kos and Kos is a really nice island.

Katie: Nice. We were going to Paros.

Greg: Yeah. I think those islands are supposed to be some of the most incredible in the world.

Greg: Do you have a favorite musician.

Katie: It’s got to be Taylor Swift clearly. Yeah. So the amount of time that I spent trying to get those tickets. Did you guys try and get tickets?

Greg: I don’t think I did. I think I knew of quite a few people with Big Taylor’s who were trying as well.

Katie: Line that was just going over and over and over in my sleep. It was terrible, but managed to get tickets for me and a friend for the Monday concert in Sydney, so I will be lucky enough to go and everybody else that missed out on tickets, they can go and pay all the money that they need to.

Octavian: enjoy.

Octavian: A question I have is what item do you think is worth spending quite a bit of money on?

Katie: What do you classify as quite a bit of money?

Octavian: You tell me. You tell me.

Katie: I mean, a house, obviously. But if it’s a materialistic thing, designer handbags. Absolutely. They go up in value more than property does. So I’m lucky enough to have a couple of those. But yeah, that’s probably one of my luxuries which I probably don’t need but want to purchase.

Octavian: That’s a good answer. Another question that you might have to think about a little bit is what has been your favourite age so far?

Greg: That’s a good question.

Katie: It is a very good question.

Katie: But a particular year? I don’t know. I like my 30s. I feel like, you know, you’re old enough and experienced enough to still have fun and act like a kid occasionally, but you still then got your own house, got a well paid job. You look after yourself. Yeah, I haven’t particularly hated any.

Octavian: That’s really good.

Katie: Live life to the fullest.