CareCloud, Inc. (CCLD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Hadi Chaudhry, Co-CEO of CareCloud. It's great to have you with us today. I'm also joined today by 2 key leaders from our team, Aman Haq, who heads our AI initiatives here at CareCloud; and Maaz Siddiqui, who leads product adoption, growth and innovation for stratusAI. Aman brings deep experience in AI-driven product development, including more than 5 years at Microsoft as a Senior Product Manager working on AI products, Aman works closely with our customers and product teams to ensure stratusAI delivers real-world impact at a scale. Together, we will walk you through stratusAI Desk Agent, our AI-powered front desk solution designed specifically to modernize patient phone access in health care. Over the next 30 minutes, I will share why the traditional front desk model is no longer sustainable, how AI voice agents address that challenge and what this means in very practical measurable terms for your organization. Now before we drive into the front desk challenges themselves, I would like to get a quick pulse check from the audience by conducting a quick 2 question poll. It will pop up in your chat window. This will help frame the rest of the conversation and also give you a sense of how your experience compares with others on the call. The first question is about where you are today with AI? When we say AI, we mean anything from documentation and analytics to patient engagement or operational workflows. Go ahead and select the option that best reflects your current situation. So this is exactly the mix. We typically see some organizations are already using AI in meaningful ways, and others are piloting and many are still in exploration phase. Let's go to the next question, please. The second question gets to the heart of today's discussion. What's the biggest challenge you are facing when it comes to inbound phone calls? So let's wait for the results. Okay, perfect. This is, again, very consistent with what we had across the industry. So with that context in mind, and based on what you just shared, let's take a closer look at what's actually happening at the front desk today and why these challenges continue to surface across practices and health systems. On this slide, let's talk about the reality facing from front desk today. Phone calls still remain the #1 access channel for patients even as portals, mobile apps and digital tools continue to expand. But when patient needs something important, such as appointments, refills, test results, reassurances, they still pick up the phone. So at the same time, staffing shortages, burnout and turnover at the front desk continue to rise. Training is constant, experience levels vary and coverage gaps are common. The outcome is predictable, which is long hold times, missed calls, frustrated patients and very real revenue leakage. So I'm sure many of you have experienced this first hand and same was reflected by the results of this recent poll. So why hasn't the traditional model been able to keep up? So on the next slide, this slide explains why the traditional front desk model is no longer sustainable. Historically, the response was simple, hire more staff or ad IVR systems. But human only front desk can't absorb unpredictable spikes in call volume and IVR often frustrate patients without resolving the issue. Patients don't want to press buttons or repeat themselves. They want to be heard, understood and helped quickly. Every missed call, as we know, represents more than just an inconvenience, it's a missed appointment or a delayed care or a patient choosing another provider. So this is no longer a staffing problem. It's a structural one and solving it requires intelligent automation, not just incremental fixes. So that brings us to directly to the solution. So with that context, let me introduce stratusAI Desk Agent. stratusAI Desk Agent is an AI voice agent that answers, understands and resolves patient calls through natural human-like conversations. It is available 24/7. There is no hold music, no call cues and no rigid menus. Patients simply speak normally just they would with a staff member and the AI handles the interaction at the end. From the patient perspective, this feels immediate and human. From the organization's perspective, it introduces a new level of scalability and consistency at the front desk. So now let's talk about what really makes this different. So on this slide, our stratusAI was built for health care from day one. This isn't an IVR. It's not even a generic chatbot. It supports unlimited simultaneous calls. It detects intent and sentiment in real time and speaks with an empathetic conversational tone that patients are comfortable with. And because stratusAI integrates natively with CareCloud's practice management and EHR platform, it pulls information in real time and writes back instantly. Appointments are booked, refills are routed and patient records stay continuously accurate. Beyond CareCloud, stratusAI can integrate with other EHR and practice management systems through secure APIs which enables real-time actions and updates without disrupting your existing workflows. For larger organization, this means consistent patient access across departments and locations. And for smaller practices, it means enterprise-grade access without enterprise level staffing cost. Now let's look at the next slide to understand how stratusAI works. It's important to understand that we use AI agents, not bots. So under the hood, stratusAI uses specialized AI agents each trained for a specific front desk workflow. Scheduling, prescription refills, referrals, each handled by an agent that understand the rules and context of that workflow. Multiple agents can collaborate during a single call while preserving context. So instead of transfers or reputation, the patient experiences one continuous intelligent conversation and the result is true end-to-end resolution. Let's look at what means -- what that means for a practice. This slide walks us through what stratusAI can actually handle day-to-day. stratusAI provides front desk coverage, it schedules, reschedules and cancels appointments across providers and locations. It handles prescription refill request, referral authorization inquiries, general questions and intelligent routing when escalation is needed. And all of this happens instantly around the clock, without increasing staff workload. This is about giving patient access when they need it, not just during the office hours. Even if the lunch hours and one of the percent in the pole was there during the lunch hours, the break hours, you face a lot of issues of handling the patient calls. So stratusAI keeps working even when you or the front desk staff is not there. Which naturally raises the question, what does AI handle versus humans? So let's look at this next slide. This clarifies how responsibilities are divided between AI and humans. This is about augmentation not replacement, first of all. So AI handles high-volume repeatable interactions such as the data collection, scheduling, refills, FAQs and et cetera, human focus on clinical judgment, sensitive conversations and complex exceptions. stratusAI continuously evaluates each interaction and automatically detects when a human agent is needed, routing the call seamlessly to the human at that time. That balance is what drives adoption and trust. This point is especially important for our front desk teams here. Now let's shift to the patient experience. But I want to talk about what this feels like from a patient's perspective. Patients don't experience this as an AI. They experience empathy, natural pacing and context-aware responses without waiting. Zero hold time alone has a measurable impact on satisfaction, loyalty and overall perception of care. That experience also has a very real financial impact. Let's look at the next slide. So stratusAI confirms appointments, send reminders and enables instant cancellations and rescheduling that leads to fewer no-shows, better schedule utilization and stronger revenue flow without adding staff members. Of course, in health care, none of this matters without security and compliance. So on the next slide, we talk about our -- this health care, the stratusAI AI is primarily designed in a way that it is completely HIPAA compliant with the end-to-end encryption, access controls, it has full audit trails and secure EHR synchronization. Patient data remains protected at every single step. So what does this deliver in real world? So let's look at the impact we are seeing in production. We are seeing a 97% AI call resolution success rate with nearly 80% of inbound calls handled autonomously. That translate into, as we know, the reduced staff workload and significantly improved patient access. And that's also reflected directly in one of the customers' -- the feedback and we are sharing one of the client testimonials on this next slide. So one of the customer, our customer with Dr. Holden at Lung Care Center, he shared that stratusAI is managing nearly 80% of inbound calls, allowing their staff to focus on complex patient needs while maintaining a higher standard of service. Now the next question is probably many of you must have been thinking our pricing and implementation. So let's talk briefly about pricing and how easy it is to get started. Our pricing model is intentionally simple and aligned with the outcomes. We charge based on successful calls handled by the AI, meaning the calls that are fully resolved without a staff -- a human staff involvement. Pricing varies depending on the size of your organization, the complexity of your workflows and the average length of calls. That flexibility allows us to offer pricing at both competitive and practical from different types of practices and health systems. The most important part is that it's risk-free. We offer a 30-days risk-free trial. And if you decide it is not the right fit and canceled within those 30 days, you will not be charged. If you're entrusted our team will be happy to work with you to design a pricing model that makes sense for your organization. On the next slide, just on the -- from the financial term, let's talk about the economics and how the ROI behind stratusAI. One of the most common question we get is, does it actually make financial sense? So on this slide, we are showing that a simple illustrative example based on real world usage patterns we see across practices. In this example, our practice received about 2,000 inbound calls per month, which is around 80% of those calls about 1,600 are handled autonomously by AI. When we -- when you compare the cost of an AI handled call versus the fully loaded cost of a staff handled call, the saving adds up very quickly. In this scenario that translates into approximately $7,200 in monthly savings or over $86,000 annually with a projected ROI north of 200%. And what's important to note is that this does not even account for the secondary benefit, like reduced no shows, better patient satisfaction and 24/7 availability. The takeaway here is simple. As call volume grows, the ROI compounds because AI scales instantly while staffing does not. On this next slide, many organizations there with this desk agent with stratusAI Voice Audit software, the platform that we have. Desk Agent answer calls, Voice Audit tells you how well they were handled through sentiment analysis, quality scoring, summaries and dashboards. This will also perform on -- for your human-based calls every handler, if the front desk has taken certain calls, it can evaluate the call handled by a human being against the predefined KPIs. So you can even keep an eye on, not only on the AI -- the calls handled by the AI agent, but also by the -- your front desk staff members. So together, automation plus intelligence gives leaders full visibility. Before we go to the sample calls and the live demo, let me address a few common questions that comes in. So can a patients still reach a staff member? Yes, stratusAI AI escalate, complex or urgent calls instantly. Can it handle multiple calls? Yes, that's one of the advantages of using the AI-based agents. It's an unlimited simultaneous calls and it's scaled instantly during peak hours. Does it integrate with your EHR? It's natively integrated with CareCloud Chart, Talk EHR and other CareCloud platforms. At the same time, through an API, it can integrate with any other system, any other EHR and practice management available in the market today. It can speak 32-plus languages, including English and Spanish with an auto detection. The moment you -- the patient start speaking, it automatically detects the language and quickly convert itself into that language. The go-live time typically, what we have seen with the existing -- the initial clients between 2 to 4 weeks after we get started. We can make a client live. And in case if you are using any other system other than the CareCloud Charts or Talk EHR, it may take a little longer. But it's a matter of weeks, not a matter of months to -- from start to finish to make any customer live. On this next slide, before getting into the actual demo, it's time to show you what an actual stratusAI calls look like in a practice. This is a single real-world style interaction where the AI handles multiple workflows in one continuous conversation. So the patient calls in to schedule an appointment with their physician. The AI immediately answers, no hold time and naturally gathers the information it needs to complete the request. During the same call, the AI identifies an outstanding balance, offers to send a secure payment link and the patient agrees and then proactively AI notices that the patient is due for an annual physical and offers to schedule that as well, all without transferring the call or repeating information. In one conversation, the AI completes appointment scheduling, balance collection and preventative care outreach. From the patient's perspective, this feels seamless and helpful. From the practices perspective, this is multiple front desk task completed without staff involvement. So this is the power of AI agent working together. Context reserve, workflows completed and the call fully resolved at the end of the day. Scripts are powerful, but sometimes the best way to understand the value is to actually see how this works in the real time. So with that, I will switch to a quick -- very small -- the demo of the product. This is available on our website. Any time you can -- you guys can go there and test it out by yourself. With that said, let me share -- connect you with our website and let's do a demo. [Presentation]

So this is just the -- this is a very simple example. And -- but it shows how quickly the AI can resolve routine request without staff involvement. And when stratusAI is in production, it can speak and understand, as I mentioned earlier, 30-plus languages. You can even choose between various voices and regional accents and much more can be configured. It was a very rudimentary because it's in a test environment. And just as a disclaimer, it's for demonstration purposes only. Do not use any personal information or PHI, but you can test it out at your convenience. Now let's jump back to the slides, please. So to wrap up, I just want to bring this back to the big picture. The future of the front desk is here. stratusAI Desk Agent delivers immediate patient access scalable operations, happier staff and a better patient experience without adding operational burdens. Let AI handle the calls, so your team can focus on care. At this point, I would like to hand things over to Aman Haq who leads our AI initiatives here at CareCloud. Aman, over to you.

Hi, everyone. Yes, thank you for a great introduction, Hadi. I just wanted to take some time to talk through the development process and what it's like for us when we've been deploying this along now. The agent has been handled thousands of calls between the Voice Agent and the Auditing. We're handling thousands of calls today. And many times when providers come to us, it's similar concerns where they're not sure if their staff or their patients are -- maybe they might be on the older side or they may not be familiar with this technology. And what we see is that we go, we deploy the product and so often patients come and say, oh, you've helped me save a lot of time actually through this when it comes to booking appointments or it's such an upgrade from your previous IVR system. So that is really good news for us to share. And whenever we really have a conversation, what happens typically is that you express interest and then we sit down and we plow every day, we meet for 10 to 15 minutes because we need to understand your practice. So generally, what happens is the agent has some nomenclature that's specific to you. For example, maybe one doctor has one -- sees one type of patient on Tuesdays and another one on Wednesday. Maybe the doctor wants 3 patients booked at the same time. We sit with you, we understand how your practice runs, we incorporate that into the agent and what happens is the agent's success rate starts shooting through the roof. And usually, people come to us and they ask, can you just do appointments for now, right? Let's just start with appointments. Let's start in a demo environment. And then when we go to the demo environment, we put it as part of the IVR. It's one option for people to use it. And when they see the results and when they see the appointments being booked into the calendar really seamlessly, what happens is they wanted for a lab, they want it for patient refills, they want it for everything. And I'm happy to say that the success rate of these agents continuously goes up. The cost also continuously goes down because compute is becoming cheaper, and we have never had a provider actually either reduce the number of agents that they have deployed with AI or not want to use this. Every single time they're really, okay, let's start with one small thing, but then it becomes -- they end up trusting us with a lot of their workflow because then they know this agent can really help save their staff time and if there's ever any need for human intervention, any patient who just asked about it and it immediately gets offered to the human. So like many people mentioned today when they're talking about staff time being potentially used up by these more typical calls, we see that being resolved. And then I think the cherry on top is the audit platform. Any doctor can go to it, you will see each and every call that is made into your office, you'll have it graded across criteria that you give us. You can say, I wanted to be the agent to say ABC, I want them to ask this information for many new patients. You will see that, it will be created. It will have a score and you can actually listen to the call and to the entire transcript of every single call that comes into your practice. So I think in terms of the end-to-end flow when it comes to health care, when it comes to being integrated into our EHR and finally when its the amount of information that we gave you the business and actionable intelligence that we provide, it's a world-class product, and I'm happy to share with whoever is interested in trying it out with us.

Thanks, Aman. And with that, I think let's open the floor for questions.

Yes. So it's a great question. What happens is if someone says -- and this is something we can custom fit for you as well, whichever language you want support for, if someone calls an office and says, [Foreign Language] then the agent will automatically starts speaking in Spanish. Additionally, if someone says in English, I can't speak English, Spanish, please, it'll start speaking Spanish, and that's going to be the same for French, Hindi, Telugu, I mean, German, Swedish, Finnish, almost every -- those 32-plus languages that we spoke about, that's how the agent handles it. Yes. So that's a really, really good question. What we have built, for example, we actually have workflows created today that are live. for individuals, if they say, I want a weight loss appointment, we wanted to ask these 5 questions. If it's a new patient, then you need to ask for it's name, insurance information, look up the insurance, potentially if it's an operation, you can even get it to preauthorize. Those are all workflows that we have built in, and that's part of those first, like I said, the first 2 weeks that we really sit with you, we understand how your practice works. That's really what we're doing there is customizing that agent to make sure that it has the right voice that you want and it talks to patients the right way and it goes and seamlessly fits into your flow as a provider.

Right. And just add one more thing, Aman, there if you're using the practice management platform -- the CareCloud practice management platform and if there are templates and rules created, it does follow those templates and the rules by default. So if you're checking in -- if a human staff member is checking in availability of an appointment based on the location, based on the provider, based on the day of the week, based on the type of appointment, the same rules the AI agent will also follow. So when it's checking for the eligibility or -- I'm sorry, the availability or an appointment booking or rescheduling, it will follow the same rules. Same case if it's a different platform, and if that platform provides us the APIs to be able to pull that information, it will be deployed in the same way.

Thank you. And this is a really good question. So if a practice schedules home visits on geographic locations, AI, other kind of scheduling, Yes, it does allow for that type of scheduling. The key question I would have for you is, if you tell us how does this differ in your calendar, so we can create the appointment type based off of that, we will be able to. And we actually -- in the next few days, are hoping to release an outbound calling agent too. So some providers have told us that, hey, I want to preemptively call some people when it's, for example, to have their physical. What we also can do is have an outbound call go for these patients that haven't been contacted in quite some time. And whatever information that you want to share with that patient, you would be able to, through this outbound calling. So it's a pretty feature-rich system all in all. We have an ability to check how sensitive the patient that the AI is to someone talking and you can sell it such that if they start speaking again, then the agent will ignore it initially or the agent immediately stops any time a person says anything. So the customization options is in your hands in terms of do you want to allow this to be interrupted or not. Generally, we find that there is a bit of -- if a patient does start speaking too soon after the default is it would stop speaking to let the patient speak, but we haven't seen that be a deal breaker. And we've seen a lot of calls. Like I know there's been time with people on the road with a bunch of wind and stuff that I couldn't even comprehend what was being said, the AI was able to.

Great. And I think, Aman, the one of -- maybe because you may have noticed some of those delays in this demonstration. And again, this was not a phone call made. It was over a voice over IP through the website. So most part of the delay disappears in the real implementation because that's the phone call that's coming in. And the way this demonstration is happening, this is just for test or demonstration purposes. It uses a different technology, which sometimes show some delays.

So if -- it can. And if that's something you're interested in, I personally speaking, would always prefer it gather the information, send a task like we mentioned, we can even show the website after where it shows the appointment being created, create a task for your staff to just process the payment. The reason I say so is, obviously, I am the Head of AI and worked on a copilot for quite some time. I understand its power. I would never want it to because of an error or something any sort of glitch have someone's payment be processed once or too many times or not enough time. So it definitely has the ability to. I would recommend caution at least for now in terms of it can send everything to the -- someone on your staff and make it easy for them just to click, okay, accept payment. But I wouldn't have a clicked that button yet to be candid.

And just to elaborate, what Aman said, even though on the AI world, patients speaking saying, this is my credit card number or something and processing the payment. If we already have your merchant account set up and connected and as an example, if you are a CareCloud customers and you already have signed up for Breeze, at this moment, a system AI generates a text to the patient cell and the patient can click on that and can make the payment. So yes, it needs some integration if it's not already there. So it is doable in this text fashion. So it's just at the same moment, send the link for the payment due and the user can click on it and make the payment. Maaz, do you want to take this question?

Sure. Yes. So if you have multiple departments, we could like definitely integrate that for your practice as well. And yes, like we basically roll out a form initially where we asked for some of like your context memory, you want that to be set up. And we configure call routing rules based -- during the onboarding, the AI listens to the patient request, identifies which department or service they need and then route or transfer the call to the correct team. If the request is something AI can fully handle on its own, it completes it. If it needs a specific department or a live staff member, it routes the call accurately instead of like sending the patient in the wrong place. The goal is like fewer misrouted calls and a smoother experience for both patients and staff.

Yes. It can update patient demographics and insurance. And when it comes to verify, if you just let us know which tool you use for that, we'd be able to integrate with it and do it as well.

Okay. And just to summarize this for everyone. You can think about it as the virtual AI staff members. So the way you set up everything in your practice today, whether it's a small practice or whether it's an enterprise practice. You can have a different either group of people or a single people who have been trained to perform certain tasks, whether it's the question with respect to the different departments or is the question with respect to the specific role. The AI can be trained, those agents can be trained for those specific functions and roles and they work together collaboratively so seamlessly that at the same time, we deliver the results. So it's highly, highly configurable. It's very flexible. And as Aman has mentioned, during those first 2 weeks, that's where we sit with you, we go through your needs and understanding. We shared with you what we have seen and come up with the right implementation for your organization. And thank you very much, everyone, for joining today. And if you want to schedule a demo with us, just -- you can follow this link on the screen, just click on it and fill out the form. And our team will reach out to you. We will work with you to schedule a further demonstration like a one-on-one, the discussion and presentation, and we'll make it work for you.

Yes. I like to say one last thing that I would really encourage anyone, I know whenever we speak with providers, again, there's always some nervousness about enabling this and how people will respond. We enable this. We keep it shut so that it's only you who gets to test it out. And only when you're fully comfortable, do we let it goes into a portion of your call process. Usually, it's just let's say appointments. And then once it's really strong in appointment, then we can go and branch out into other labs, refills, et cetera. And again, I'm very convinced that within 2 weeks, you'll start seeing just how powerful it is. And you'll begin to enjoy some of the value here because again, everyone else that we've worked with so far has reported this, and I really just encourage you all to try it. It is risk-free, at least for 30 days. And you'll, at the very least, get [indiscernible] want to continue with stratusAI. Thank you, everyone.