Designing Care That Works: How AI & Motivational Interviewing Strengthens Families and Frontline Teams

AI is changing healthcare — but Modality is proving that the most powerful innovations start with people.

Emily Sylvester sits down with Laura Vitale, Founder & CEO of Modality, for an honest conversation about how we train, support, and retain the frontline workers who form the backbone of our care systems. Laura shares how Modality uses AI-powered “practice conversations” to help staff build real motivational interviewing and trauma-informed skills—skills that can be measured with nuance, tracked over time, and seamlessly brought into supervision to strengthen teams from the inside out.

Together, they explore how Modality is transforming clinical environments by reducing training time, supporting compliance, improving fidelity to evidence-based practices, and reducing burnout by giving staff renewed confidence and support. They also dig into the realities of workforce turnover, Medicaid-centered care settings, and what it truly takes to design innovation with overstretched teams instead of adding to their burden. From replacing day-long trainings with six-minute challenges to embedding skill-building directly into workflows, Laura explains why Modality’s flexible, human-centered design resonates so powerfully on the front lines.

This episode is a thoughtful look at the future of training, the emotional weight of clinical work, the cost of burnout, and the creativity required to build products that genuinely support people doing incredibly hard jobs.

To learn more about Laura and Modality visit findmodality.com.

Follow Laura's journey on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-vitale-87980916/