Social Impact Tech: Kathryn Ticknor Robinson of ‘inVibe Labs’ On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
… The simplicity of the idea is what, for me, is so powerful. What we’re doing here isn’t complicated: we’re essentially removing the typical friction that exists when people try to share their voices with large healthcare organizations. We’re removing the friction that keeps the decision-makers from listening to their key stakeholders. We’re removing the friction that can create static and noise and misunderstanding in those conversations. We’re making listening a standard by empowering people to communicate candidly and conveniently, making analysis effective through a hybrid of human expertise and machine learning technology, and making reporting actionable with visual, dynamic dashboards.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kathryn Ticknor Robinson.
Kathryn Ticknor-Robinson is a sociolinguist and research director at inVibe Labs. As a human-centered design specialist focused on health, pharma, and biotech, Kathryn draws from her background in communication, ethnography, and voice analysis to uncover in-depth insights and make meaningful recommendations to benefit patients and industry.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
Thanks so much for inviting me to be a part of this series. I grew up in northern Virginia, and my parents were both special educators who instilled in me a love of language and a belief in helping others. I knew very little about the business world growing up, and assumed I’d follow the family tradition by going into teaching.
In college, I took a course in linguistics — the study of language. I felt let in on the world’s best kept secret. So many aspects of language consist of patterns and rules that guide our communication and behavior, all of which seem to be happening below the surface of our awareness. From that point on, I knew I wanted to “do language” with my life.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Early in my career, I worked with a group of healthcare professionals who faced a challenge with a group of patients. They were concerned that these patients were underreporting symptoms of an important gastrointestinal disease and, as a result, were not being properly treated.
Through linguistic research, we were able to identify a critical communication gap. Patients simply did not feel comfortable talking to their doctors about their symptoms. Especially since this was a gastrointestinal condition, patients felt it was “bathroom talk” and were often embarrassed to go into detail. With patients’ consent, we shared these concerns with a group of doctors.
They were shocked. As professionals, “bathroom talk” wasn’t just normal for them — it was a critical part of their ability to accurately diagnose and treat their patients! But just because they had become desensitized to such topics, didn’t mean their patients had. Together, we strategized ways for physicians to help patients feel more comfortable discussing their GI symptoms.
Flash forward about a year, and I was driving when an ad came on the radio: a public service announcement that focused on coaching patients to talk to their physicians about “uncomfortable” topics, like “bathroom talk.” And to my delight — it had been produced by the very group I had worked with earlier. I exclaimed out loud, YES! THEY LISTENED!
Maybe it takes a linguist working in healthcare to get excited about a radio commercial on how to talk about bowel movements. But knowing that we had helped to address a real medical problem by simply listening, still excites me today.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
First and foremost, my mentor and advisor Dr. Anna Marie Trester helped me to think about linguistics as a set of tools in addition to a field of study. I’m very grateful for Dr. Trester and the Georgetown University Master’s Program in Language and Communication for their work in helping students re-frame linguistics for audiences outside of academia, and as a viable career path in industries such as healthcare, education, and others.
I also credit Jeff Kozloff, Fabio Gratton, and other clinical industry leaders who recognized early on the value that linguistics could bring to the healthcare industry. By creating space for technologists and social scientists to collaborate, we can truly transform how people engage with their health.
Last but most importantly, my amazing parents, whose experiences with chronic conditions allowed me an early look at the myriad ways communication can go wrong when we’re talking about something as important as our health. I’m very grateful for all the impromptu interviews they let me conduct with them, always wondering, “What did you say? What did the doctor say? And how did you feel?”
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
The quote that has stuck with me and proven itself time and time again is “all growth is a leap in the dark.” In times when I’ve second-guessed myself or my abilities, I try to remember that only by trying new and scary things can we continue to grow, learn, and improve. In my career, there have been times when I have had to jump into the deep end without my metaphorical floaties, and re-framing such situations as simply growing (not drowning!) has been helpful.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Courage (trusting your gut): Years ago I went ziplining with some friends where I met a woman traveling solo. We asked her what brought her to the zipline park, and she replied that she had made it a habit to do at least one thing per month that scared her. By regularly challenging herself, she was building up her bravery muscles. How great is that? I think of this mysterious zipliner often, especially whenever I need to summon up the courage to leap into the dark!
Curiosity (engaging your mind): To be successful in the research business, you can never, ever, ever stop asking “why?” Curiosity means moving from a framework of taking things as they are, to wondering what they might be. And that’s where the magic happens!
Compassion (opening your heart): I truly believe you cannot underestimate the importance of kindness in the workplace. Business leaders are often told to put their emotions aside, but I see this as a false choice. Empathy for all stakeholders is crucial, including our teams, our clients, and our participants. Emotional intelligence is one of the most important traits we can contribute as a leader.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
Despite increased discourse around patient engagement and patient centricity in recent years, healthcare companies still struggle to implement effective ways of listening to those for whom their products and services are designed. Organizations associate the word “research” with long timelines and complicated logistics. While this challenge is not unique to the healthcare industry, it has particularly significant consequences in the context of clinical trials, potentially life saving treatments, and medical devices.
Recently, the FDA issued guidance on incorporating the patient perspective into the drug development process. As a result, more organizations are looking for ways to make listening an integral part of their process. Our goal is to make it easier for healthcare companies to listen to patients earlier and more often, and as a result, make clinical research a truly patient-centered experience.
How do you think your technology can address this?
At its core, our voice-interview platform removes barriers at each stage of the “traditional” research process: collection, analysis, and delivery. Our deeper insights can be extracted thanks to a unique combination of innovative technology plus human linguistic expertise.
First in terms of data collection, at inVibe we know what most people intuitively sense — a wealth of data in our actual voices. So when patients, caregivers, physicians, any healthcare stakeholders are providing input in response to our research questions, their actual voices allow us to capture a depth of detail and emotional nuance that traditional market research surveys and other approaches just can’t.
Voice is fundamental to who we are as people. As humans we’ve been talking for a lot longer than we’ve been writing, so we’re really in our element when we’re given an opportunity to just talk. An added bonus for voice is being a really natural and comfortable way for people to share, which I think is particularly important in health.
That being said, all that additional, messy voice data requires an innovative approach to analysis. At inVibe we apply a hybrid of AI / machine learning technologies with our team’s expertise in linguistics. As a result we have been able to really better understand patient opinions and feelings about whatever the topic may be — their disease burden, treatments, support programs, and marketing collateral. We’re leveraging the best of both: the empathy and expertise of our human minds, plus the scale and speed that these machines can facilitate.
All that data and analytics wouldn’t be worth too much without a platform capable of effectively sharing and socializing those insights with our clients. So our amazing product team has designed a dynamic interface that visually and intuitively shares those insights, along with actionable recommendations for how a pharma company can better reach, engage, and empower the healthcare stakeholders they serve.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
When I was in middle school, my dad was diagnosed with severe, idiopathic cardiomyopathy. His health crisis really transitioned our family into a whole new world of patient activation, long-term caregiving, and quantified selves. I also witnessed firsthand the important role that physician-patient (mis-) communication dynamics played in treatment decision-making, quality of care, and successful outcomes. Studying linguistics –the science of language and communication — provided a methodological lens through which to explore these dynamics and attempt to unpack what was going on around us.
How do you think this might change the world?
The simplicity of the idea is what, for me, is so powerful. What we’re doing here isn’t complicated: we’re essentially removing the typical friction that exists when people try to share their voices with large healthcare organizations. We’re removing the friction that keeps the decision-makers from listening to their key stakeholders. We’re removing the friction that can create static and noise and misunderstanding in those conversations. We’re making listening a standard by empowering people to communicate candidly and conveniently, making analysis effective through a hybrid of human expertise and machine learning technology, and making reporting actionable with visual, dynamic dashboards.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
As a social scientist, I’m a natural skeptic at heart. I think a lot about the privacy implications for generating, analyzing, and collecting voices — even when we’re using those voices with consent, and for common good. As we’re developing technology for social good, we need to be realistic about what others may see as less altruistic applications of the same tech, and be responsible stewards of what we create. That’s why we anonymize all personal information to protect the privacy of each subject, and ensure participants and clients that none of our collection, analysis, or reporting capabilities are ever violative.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
1. Listen early. So much energy and enthusiasm is present in the early stages of creating a new solution or technology that the temptation to tell ourselves we already know everything about the problem we’re trying to solve is strong. We can be lured into thinking that we make good proxies for our end users, or that their input will only be valuable later down the line. At inVibe, we’ve seen how important listening and engaging the voice of the customer is at the very beginning, both for our clients in the life sciences, and for ourselves. As one example, we challenge the clinical research organizations (CRO) who wait until they’re having challenges recruiting for a clinical trial to conduct interviews with patients. Instead, if we engage those patients early — gathering their input on the very design of the trial — that way, we are able to prevent challenges from cascading across the research and development lifecycle by taking a patient-centered approach as early on as possible.
2. Listen often. Listening to the voice of the patient is not a ‘one and done’ exercise. In addition to listening early, we must keep listening, and listening often. What we’re really trying to create is an ongoing conversation where the patient voice is an inherent part of the clinical development lifecycle. And I believe this applies to any tech being developed for social good — ensuring that you’re continuing to understand and meet the needs of the people you are serving, thereby meeting their needs as they evolve in an ever-changing life sciences landscape.
3. Tech is a means, not an end. Have a clear understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve and what success will look like before you design the tech to address it. Especially in healthcare, we often rely on technology that ends up creating more problems than they actually solve — (alert fatigue anyone?). Instead, we need to properly understand the challenges we mean to solve, and then introduce exactly the right technology to help fix it.
4. Be patient. When your objective is to impact society, you’re going to be up against a lot of long-held ways of doing things. You may be agile, but the industry won’t always be. Being patient and relentless is important, always remembering that good things take time.
5. Be kind. No matter what you’re trying to build or what challenge you’re trying to solve, having a positive social impact starts with you. Creating a culture of kindness and psychological safety will get you through the inevitable challenges as you work together in a team. Empathy and shared vulnerability are central to trust and success.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
I’ve found that most people don’t have to be convinced to want to make a positive impact on society. Where there may need some convincing is belief that such a thing can be done. My advice is to remember that you don’t have to tackle it all at once. Find your entry point — mine was linguistics. Where can you make a difference or a positive impact in your area of expertise? Where can you make small differences that will add up to something larger? The most important thing is to start somewhere.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
I would love to have a meal with Dr. Atul Gawande, the celebrated surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. Two of his books, Being Mortal and The Emperor of All Maladies, are beautiful histories of healthcare in America and across the globe. He has led some of the most important research — and design — initiatives aimed at tackling healthcare’s biggest challenges. I would love to hear more about his thoughts on language and medicine.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I’m happy to connect on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathrynticknor/
To connect with inVibe, you can visit https://www.invibe.co/ or follow us at @invibelabs on Twitter
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.