Mar 14, 2024

Chuck Rinker, CEO of PRSONAS, sees the next-generation workforce of digital healthcare components as digital personalities and avatars that will act as patient advocates and improve the communications between patients and clinicians. With an emphasis on building trust and showing empathy, these digital tools help gather accurate information and break down language and cultural barriers. Avatars can be customized for locations like hospital lobbies and purposes like clinical trial recruitment. With a background in game programming, Chuck brings a deep knowledge of how the emotional bond between gamers and avatars can be applied to building more robust patient engagement.

Chuck explains, "Since technology has been predominant in the healthcare space, we've always had to teach people how to use technology, and the barrier is communication. So, we've said, well, let's just take a different approach. We're not trying to recreate humans, and we're not trying to replace humans. We're just trying to teach all this technology, this scalable healthcare, this improvement in healthcare technology that we have, and make it so that it can communicate to us as humans. We naturally communicate as humans. We don't naturally communicate as an IT specialist, so we're trying to flip it on its head and work it the other way around."

"That was a concept we started way back in 2013. We originally built a few of these as product specialists in the pharmaceutical drug launch space. I think Genentech and Pfizer were probably the first ones to use it. It was meant to support the healthcare professionals. Okay, what's all the information you have, from prescribing information to all the complexities of a mechanism of disease and all that you have to relay over and over and over during a multiphase pharmaceutical launch? So, we built these repeatable humans to be those domain experts."

"We've learned along the way that it was a great, wonderful piece but that the patients themselves are the ones who are getting "lost in the mix." So, our units are trained to speak whatever language is used by the patient population you're targeting. They can be culturally diverse. We do Sign Language - American Sign Language and British Sign Language. So it's really about creating that advocate, breaking down that communication barrier so that every patient feels represented and welcomed and has their own patient advocate to help them through that healthcare journey." 

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