How AI-Powered Conversation Intelligence Is Transforming Healthcare: Highlights from Our Xtalks Webinar
On June 25, 2025, mpathic participated in a featured Xtalks webinar showcasing how AI-powered conversational intelligence is advancing clinical performance across healthcare systems.
The event brought together clinical leaders and technology experts to discuss the future of communication in care delivery—and how AI is playing a pivotal role.
What We Covered
The session featured expert insights from:
- Dr. Nicolas Fernandez, Director of Minimally Invasive and Robotic Assisted Surgery, Division of Pediatric Urology at Seattle Children’s Hospital
- Julie Soukup – VP of Biz Dev at Medical Memory™
- Dr. Grin Lord – Founder at mpathic
- Dr. Alison Cerezo – SVP of Research at mpathic & Associate Research UCSB
- Dr. Amber Jolley-Paige, Ph.D. – VP of Clinical AI Product at mpathic
Key topics included:
- How analyzing patient-provider dialogue reveals hidden patterns that impact care quality
- The role of real-time feedback and coaching in improving provider communication
- Strategies to implement AI ethically and securely within clinical workflows
- The measurable ROI of improving communication—across outcomes, efficiency, and team cohesion
Why It Matters
Clinical communication is one of the most underutilized data sources in healthcare. By turning conversations into actionable insights, mpathic helps care teams improve performance, consistency, and empathy—at scale.
This webinar offered a behind-the-scenes look at how health systems are adopting these tools to:
- Standardize provider behaviors across teams
- Improve protocol adherence
- Support equity and reduce bias in clinical encounters
- Drive better outcomes in clinical trials and complex care delivery
What’s Next
If you missed the session, take a look at the full length webinar linked here and the transcript from Dr. Lord’s introduction below. In the meantime, we’re continuing to roll out new features that bring transparency, empathy, and performance analytics to clinical communication.
Dr. Grin Lord: The Time is Now for AI in Healthcare
Good morning. I’m Dr. Grin Lord, clinical psychologist, researcher, and founder of mpathic. I’ve been working on research in conversational intelligence since 2008 – beginning in trauma and substance abuse settings and expanding from there.
As a psychologist myself I wanted to start with a simple truth: conversations are care. Every diagnosis, treatment decision, and plan for follow-up happens through dialogue. And while we take vital signs of our patients and assess them quantitatively, historically these conversations have been largely private or invisible — unmeasured and unoptimized — even though conversations are foundational to everything we do in healthcare.
With managed care there has been emphasis on billing codes, satisfaction surveys, and EHR clicks – all of which provide data about what happened — but they lack the how or why. The behaviors, tone, timing and trust that is embedded in clinical dialogue – all of these things hold the key to understanding what truly drives clinical quality and connection.
When we analyze language at scale, we see patterns that traditional metrics can’t detect. Two healthcare providers may spend the same amount of time with a patient — but one builds trust and promotes improved care, while the other misses a key symptom or unintentionally shuts the patient down. That difference is the words, pauses, affirmations, and empathy — not in the documentation. This is true for conversations between ourselves as providers as well – where the collaboration between teams improves medical outcomes.
At mpathic, we use a science called conversational intelligence — we combine natural language processing (NLP), clinical behavioral coding, and evidenced-based psychological approaches that draw on research from common factors and motivational interviewing. We operate in a number of different settings from clinical trials to surgical and counseling but today we are focusing particularly on healthcare.
I’d say conversation intelligence isn’t about Big Brother grading or punishing providers — it’s about giving folks the opportunity for self-reflection, training and improvement. We believe in creating a culture where communication can be measured and improved — just like surgical precision or imaging accuracy- we can now optimize for human connection — with the same rigor and respect.
Before we go to the rest of the speakers, I wanted to say that the time is now – the healthcare landscape is changing faster than ever. Ambient transcription tools like automated note-taking and clinical summarization are already being deployed across major health systems today — not in five years; this is now. Ambient documentation is only the beginning. The true transformation is happening when we analyze how conversations occur and use AI systems to coach improvements.
Systems that fail to adopt AI augmentation won’t just miss out on efficiencies — they’ll fall behind in satisfaction, patient experience, and operational insights and other key outcomes.
Those who build conversational intelligence into their workflows now will lead the charge in delivering scalable, personalized, and data-driven care. This is not just an opportunity. It’s an imperative to use conversations as one of our strongest levers for change.
