The Beat

How Bland Is Replacing Legacy IVR Systems and Fixing Healthcare's Phone Problem

Episode Summary

In this episode, host Sandy Vance chats with Isaiah Granet, co-founder and CEO of Bland, for a sharp and eye-opening conversation about one of the most overlooked bottlenecks in healthcare: the phone call. Bland now handles 3.5 million phone calls a week, has raised over $100 million, including a $40 million Series B, and is backed by Emergence Capital, Scale, and Y Combinator. Isaiah brings a refreshingly honest take on what it actually takes to get voice AI into production in healthcare, why most vendors are just talking about it rather than doing it, and why the security risks hiding in third-party AI dependencies should be keeping every healthcare CIO up at night.

Episode Notes

In this episode, host Sandy Vance chats with Isaiah Granet, co-founder and CEO of Bland, for a sharp and eye-opening conversation about one of the most overlooked bottlenecks in healthcare: the phone call. Bland now handles 3.5 million phone calls a week, has raised over $100 million, including a $40 million Series B, and is backed by Emergence Capital, Scale, and Y Combinator. Isaiah brings a refreshingly honest take on what it actually takes to get voice AI into production in healthcare, why most vendors are just talking about it rather than doing it, and why the security risks hiding in third-party AI dependencies should be keeping every healthcare CIO up at night.

In this episode, they talk about:

• Most people call a call center because they are at the end of the line and cannot solve their problem any other way
• The best voice AI systems conform to the caller, not the other way around
• Intake is the fastest path to ROI for health systems deploying voice AI for the first time
• Bland tracks emotional sentiment, call escalation rates, and a unique metric called utterances to measure patient experience quality
• Bland does not use OpenAI or any third-party LLM under the hood, meaning PHI never touches an outside vendor
• Health systems should demand that calls go live within 30 days and measurable automation within 60 days
• A single third-party dependency, three steps removed from a vendor, recently led to a class action lawsuit
• Always declare that it is an AI agent on the call; deceptive practices destroy the trust that voice AI depends on
• The CIO role is becoming one of the most important in any healthcare organization, as AI decisions multiply

A Little About Isaiah:

Isaiah values community, family, and impact above all else. He believes that building for impact is what makes life. In addition to being the cofounder and CEO of Bland, he also sits on the board of the nonprofit he founded, the San Diego Chill.