Sam Meckey, President of WestCX – Interview Series

Sam Meckey is president of WestCX, overseeing the Mosaicx and Televox brands within West Technology Group. Sam joined WestCX in 2025, bringing more than 20 years of leadership experience in customer experience (CX), healthcare, and technology-enabled services. He brings a deep understanding of how to drive intelligent engagement, operational transformation, and customer satisfaction at scale. Sam most recently served as CEO of UpHealth, a publicly traded digital health solutions company. Prior to that, he led the healthcare business at EXL, driving its transformation into a tech-enabled services leader with a strong focus on enhancing the end-to-end customer journey. Earlier in his career, Sam held several leadership roles at Optum, culminating in his role as president of the $1 billion global business.

WestCX is a cloud-based AI communication and engagement platform designed to unify and automate regulated interactions for industries such as healthcare, finance, and life sciences. It brings together data, conversational AI, and analytics to deliver personalized, compliant communication across channels like voice, SMS, chat, email, and web, helping organizations improve outcomes such as patient engagement, appointment adherence, and customer satisfaction. The company’s technologies, which include its Mosaicx and Televox brands, are built to handle complex compliance constraints while driving measurable efficiency and trust through secure, AI-native orchestration. Recently, WestCX has expanded its offerings with advanced agentic AI and real-time engagement tools that further enhance automated interactions at scale.

You’ve led major healthcare and technology organizations before joining WestCX. What drew you personally to this role and the vision behind WestCX’s AI transformation in pharmacy operations?

I’ve had more than two decades working in healthcare, CX, and tech-enabled services. What struck me immediately about WestCX was its unique position at the intersection of all three spaces. I came across a company that deeply values patient communication while also innovating across regulated industries. It was a place striving to improve healthcare access and experience for millions of people, aiming to significantly enhance lives. When I saw WestCX’s mission and potential, I knew I wanted to be a part of this work.

I also saw the opportunity to build on an incredible set of assets. We’re shaping an AI-native engagement platform that benefits everyone. It enhances the patient journey, elevates clinicians’ work, and creates real operational leverage for our customers. It’s a vision that combines innovation, transformation, and a sense of purpose. And this kind of vision is rare. It’s some of the most exciting, rewarding work I’ve done.

I jumped at this new phase of my career when I saw what the work demanded. This isn’t simply running a business. It’s a transformation. We’re reimagining what AI makes possible in highly regulated sectors. We’re rebuilding a trusted brand with deep roots in patient communication and established relationships across regulated sectors. It’s a unique task, one that demands equal parts strategy, creativity, grit, and empathy. This combination of demands has energized me in ways I did not necessarily expect.

WestCX just launched its new agentic AI solution for pharmacy-patient interactions. How would you describe what makes this technology different from the conversational AI many pharmacies already use today?

Let’s start with the problem WestCX is solving. Patients routinely expect personalized, seamless experiences from brands. Think about booking a Delta flight or ordering from Amazon. The experience is straightforward and frictionless.

But in much of healthcare, including pharmacies, the experience is far from seamless or personalized. In fact, it’s often fragmented, frustrating, and full of friction. This isn’t the fault of pharmacies. They want their patients to have the best experience possible, but their technology stacks simply weren’t built for today’s expectations. Legacy systems are often siloed and limited. The result is a fragmented experience made worse by friction. This is where WestCX comes in.

AI can dramatically improve the patient experience. Conversational AI can interact with patients in different ways. It processes and understands language, but it’s mostly a reactive tool. Agentic AI, however, can foster a satisfying and seamless customer experience. This is because agentic AI can plan, make autonomous decisions with limited supervision, and is task oriented. Unlike conversational AI, it is proactive, able to address problems and advance patient interactions independently.

Agentic AI handles more customer interactions and solves more problems than conversational AI. This frees up staff to handle high-level, complex patient questions and interactions that require their years of experience and empathy. Ultimately, patients get the service and information they need seamlessly, quickly, and through their preferred language and channels.

The idea of agentic AI is still new to many readers. How do you define it – and how does it go beyond automation to act more like an intelligent partner within pharmacy workflows?

Without getting bogged down in the jargon, agentic AI is defined by its ability to operate autonomously. While these tools possess the same conversational capabilities as other types of AI, what sets them apart is their ability to make decisions independently based on complex goals. They learn and adapt from previous interactions with patients and don’t require the same level of human monitoring as other AI tools.

All of this helps agentic AI provide seamless patient experiences through the channels and in the language they prefer. Agentic AI tools remove much of the friction that often comes from patient interactions with pharmacies. Agentic AI can assist with inbound and outbound patient communications, including email, voice, SMS, and push notifications. Because of its autonomous decision-making capabilities, it can help pharmacies proactively manage refills, reminders, and other kinds of outreach, such as reminders for flu vaccines.

Agentic AI can manage the entire patient journey, making it less confusing and more seamless. This level of automation frees pharmacy staff to assist other patients with complex questions or problems while also fostering and maintaining close relationships with patients. It also improves medication adherence, as patients can access the information they need when and how they want.

Early results are impressive – up to 80% automation of standard inquiries and double-digit increases in refill rates. Which part of this technology is driving the biggest performance leap?

Agentic AI’s ability to make task-oriented, autonomous decisions allows it to automate up to 80% of things like refills, pickup status requests, reminders, and frequently asked patient questions. You can imagine how much staff time that frees up, allowing them to focus on patients who need their expertise and experience.

Automation isn’t just about helping staff provide more timely and empathic care, though. It also increases refill rates by 20% to 35% thanks to personalized and timely outreach. Pharmacies are also seeing higher medication adherence and completed vaccine series.

Agentic AI is proactive, which is a big driver of performance for pharmacies. It can send patients smart map links to simplify pickups, integrate web payments for quicker checkouts, and include pickup barcodes to cut in-store wait times. Its proactivity makes the patient experience much more seamless, something closer to what you would expect from Amazon.

Pharmacies play a vital role in patient adherence and preventive care, yet they often operate under extreme staffing pressure. How does your AI solution balance automation with maintaining the human touch that patients still expect?

A combination of expertise and empathy is at the heart of any good healthcare experience. Patients want to be heard and understood. We want providers to show they care about our lives and experiences. Extreme staffing pressures are very real for pharmacies, and these pressures can negatively impact the patient experience. Our AI solution not only frees staff to have more fruitful and meaningful interactions with patients, but it also embeds empathy into each patient interaction.

Agentic AI tailors its outreach based on context and individual patient behavior. This personalizes each interaction, helping patients stay informed about upcoming refills and vaccine schedules, increasing medication adherence, and enhancing overall care.

AI enhances rather than replaces humans in healthcare. Because it’s able to handle so much of the routine yet essential communications with patients, staff have more time to address complex questions. But time is just one piece here. Freed from tasks like pickup reminders and other routine duties, staff have more energy and empathy to offer in their patient interactions, which allows them to better tap into their deep expertise that makes those interactions so valuable to patients.

WestCX integrates both Mosaicx and TeleVox under its umbrella. How do these brands work together to deliver an end-to-end AI-powered experience across multiple communication channels?

We combined two companies, Televox and Mosaicx, that are leaders in their space. Televox delivers AI-powered, automated solutions in the healthcare and pharmacy industries. Mosaicx specializes in customer experience automation with its cloud-based SaaS solutions. Together, these two businesses give WestCX a broad, unique understanding of the engagement market.

The combination of these two businesses gives us a unique opportunity to innovate. New knowledge and ways of working are often the products of one set of knowledge being recontextualized in another context. Our cross-industry brands work together to shape our understanding of markets and help us keep pushing the edge of innovation forward in both spaces.

You’ve mentioned that the platform uses “agentic intelligence” to tailor outreach based on patient behavior and context. Can you walk us through how that personalization engine works in practice?

Agentic AI helps patients connect with pharmacies on their terms. This means patients get the information, answers, and reminders they need when they need them and in their preferred language and channel.

For example, agentic AI gathers information based on patient behavior and pharmacy data to understand the context of interactions. It looks at data such as whether a patient opened a reminder in an email or SMS, what time of the day or night they clicked a refill link. It’s able to combine that patient-specific data with information from the pharmacy, such as refill histories or upcoming vaccine schedules.

Then in real time, agentic AI uses this context to understand and interpret the patient interaction. It can infer the patient’s intent, their preferred channel and language, even the timing of the next communication. It does all this while ensuring that the interaction meets regulatory and privacy requirements.

Finally, it uses this context and understanding to take the next best action. Perhaps it’s a simple SMS sent to a patient during the time of the day they are most likely to respond. Or the agentic AI might see that the patient is confused or frustrated in a message chain and move the conversation to a better platform or language for the patient. All of this is happening as the conversation unfolds.

In this way, agentic intelligence learns and adapts in real time while ensuring that every patient interaction and conversation is secure and compliant.

Medication adherence is a long-standing challenge in healthcare. How do you see AI reshaping adherence models, not just through reminders, but by truly changing patient behavior over time?

A large part of medication adherence is based on communication. Most patients want to follow medication guidelines. They want to use medication in a way that is best suited to their recovery and wellbeing. But they must understand how best to use medication, and that understanding is based on the quality of communication between pharmacy and patient.

Communication is about delivering the right information at the right time to the patient’s preferred communication channel. This, of course, goes beyond simple reminders, and it’s why agentic AI is a powerful tool in medication adherence. It individualizes communications to specific patients based on context and previous interactions. If a patient prefers to receive important information through SMS, they’re unlikely to answer a phone call with important information.

The same is true for languages. Agentic AI can communicate with a patient in their preferred language, making sure that they are able to understand critical information about their medications and health. Tailoring communications to each patient ensures that important, even life-saving information is communicated in the way that is most beneficial to the patient.

With healthcare data being so sensitive, what safeguards or governance principles are built into WestCX’s AI architecture to ensure compliance and patient trust?

Healthcare data is among the most sensitive information in the world. Because of this, the healthcare industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in existence. Data breaches can devastate patients and cost healthcare organizations millions of dollars, not to mention customer trust.

This is why our tools and AI architecture were purpose-built for security and compliance from the ground up. They are designed to meet the strenuous privacy standards and data regulations of the healthcare industry. Unlike other tools that are built for other industries and purposes and then applied to heavily regulated industries, from its very beginning our AI architecture was conceived with privacy and regulation in mind.

Beyond pharmacies, where else do you see agentic AI making the biggest near-term impact in healthcare, and what’s next on WestCX’s innovation roadmap?

Agentic AI’s applications are far-reaching. One of the most profound impacts AI-powered tools can have is patient communication. Much like the patient experience at pharmacies, communication between patients and healthcare organizations can be fragmented and confusing. The stakes here are high. Patients need the best information delivered to them at the right time, through the right channels, and in their preferred language. That’s a lot for healthcare staff to manage, especially when you consider all the other complicated tasks that fill their workdays and nights.

WestCX’s Engage communication ecosystem combines conversational, generative, and agentic AI to make patient communications seamless and personalized. It enables agentic AI to hold human-like conversations while also understanding, acting, and learning in real time. And it does all this while ensuring every conversation is secure and compliant with industry privacy regulations.

Agentic AI’s impact can fundamentally change not only patient communication but healthcare workers’ experiences on the job. Healthcare is facing a significant burnout problem. Finding meaning in your work is arguably the best way to address workplace burnout. Agentic AI frees up workers to do more purpose-driven, meaningful work, the work they set out to do when they began their careers.

This is why we believe there are technological solutions, and there are real-world effects. Agentic AI can help make the healthcare industry more patient-friendly, more efficient, and more empathetic.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit WestCX.