Healthcare leaders are embracing automation to assist with everything from appointment scheduling and patient check-in processes to billing and more.
To learn more about how intelligent automation and agentic AI in call centers are enhancing patient access and reducing administrative burden, Becker’s Healthcare recently spoke with Jeff Gartland, CEO of Relatient.
From call center to smart access hub
Tools like agentic AI and rules-based automation can help healthcare organizations transform traditional call centers into modern, comprehensive patient access hubs. These hubs rely on multiple touch points to broaden access and better serve their communities.
Relatient’s Dash Voice AI reduces the complexity of running a smart patient access hub and helps staff operate at the top of their license. By automating the handling of repetitive phone calls, the solution frees up scheduling staff to focus on more complex patient inquiries and reduce call wait times (measured by call abandonment rate), which ultimately improve the patient experience.
According to Gartland, smart access hubs must meet four primary patient needs: managing appointments, handling billing and payments, answering clinical questions and refilling prescriptions.
Since appointment management is one of the most important and most time-consuming activities for call center staff, Relatient made it a priority to address this challenge.
The company has embedded Dash Voice AI directly into the tasks that involve booking, cancelling and rescheduling appointments. It routes conversations through to completion or seamlessly connects them to human staff, so nothing is left unresolved for organizations or patients.
Gartland emphasized that today’s AI agents are very humanistic. They’re accurate, quick and can handle the majority of phone calls.
“With Dash, we manage two-thirds of appointment cancellation requests and more than half of all reschedules through automation,” Gartland said. “Dash allows humans to do what they do best and AI to do what it does best.”
Modernizing patient access
When rethinking patient access, it’s important to identify where friction points exist in the journey and where patient leakage occurs. With this knowledge, Gartland recommended layering in a technology platform with modular capabilities that can be implemented over time.
“A lot of performance lift can come by removing two or three pain points in a process,” Gartland said. “That is the beginning of a digital journey. In the short term, technology solutions liberate access center staff and in the longer term, they drive toward more intelligent personalization that scales for patients.”
Leading healthcare organizations view patient access as a strategy. Success comes to those that use technology most effectively and strategically, not necessarily the ones that have the most technology. Rules-based scheduling automation and agentic AI are powerful because they enhance efficiency, while ensuring that humans are available to augment the patient experience when needed.
“At the end of the day, healthcare is a human-to-human interaction,” Gartland said. “The ability to leverage technology with quality, not in quantity, is the key.”
