Healthcare
Healthcare Contact Center Automation
Modernized a strained patient contact center with a conversational AI virtual assistant and IVR overhaul, without sacrificing the human touch patients expected.
Client
A multi-site healthcare provider
Duration
9 months
Services Used
AI Readiness Assessment, Adoption & Change Management
The Challenge
- Call volumes had outpaced staffing across scheduling, billing, and triage lines, driving long hold times and inconsistent patient experience.
- Front-line staff were burning out on repetitive scheduling and FAQ-type calls, leaving less time for complex patient needs.
- Two prior automation attempts had stalled after pilot due to clinician and staff distrust of the technology.
The Approach
Mapped against the relevant dimensions of the ACTION™ framework.
Audited call data, scheduling systems, and EHR integration points alongside the two previously failed attempts to understand the real current state and root cause of prior failures.
Worked with executive sponsors to define a clear business case and shared success metrics for this attempt, rebuilding the trust the earlier stalled attempts had eroded.
Established governance jointly owned by IT, clinical operations, and patient experience leadership, with explicit authority to pause the rollout if clinician trust concerns resurfaced.
Deployed the conversational AI virtual assistant integrated with scheduling and EHR systems, sequencing the rollout site-by-site and call-type-by-call-type rather than all at once.
Built a stakeholder and change impact plan specifically for front-line staff and clinicians, with a phased rollout and direct involvement in design decisions.
Tracked hold time, first-contact resolution, and staff sentiment monthly after launch, expanding the assistant's scope only after each site showed sustained adoption.
The Solution
- Deployed a conversational AI virtual assistant integrated with scheduling and EHR systems to handle appointment booking, reminders, and routine billing questions.
- Used retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground the assistant's responses in approved clinical and administrative content for FAQ-type questions, with agentic AI workflows handling multi-step tasks such as appointment management and prescription (Rx) refill requests.
- Modernized the IVR to triage calls intelligently and route complex or sensitive calls directly to staff.
- Sequenced the rollout by site and call type, with staff trained as escalation points rather than bypassed entirely.
The Results
Reduced average hold time
Materially shorter wait times for routine scheduling and billing calls, freeing live agents for complex cases.
Higher first-contact resolution
Routine requests resolved in a single interaction without a callback or transfer.
Improved staff sentiment
Front-line staff reported the automation reduced repetitive workload rather than threatening their roles, reversing prior resistance.
The technology had been available during the two earlier, failed attempts. What changed was sequencing change management and stakeholder trust-building before the rollout, not after it.
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