For all the investment in portals, apps and online scheduling, most patients still pick up the phone. Abandoned calls and long holds rarely show up on a dashboard, but they surface later as unbooked appointments, overtime and patients who take their care elsewhere.
During an Oct. 29 webinar hosted by Becker’s Healthcare and sponsored by Parlance, leaders from Virtua Health, Keck Medicine of USC, and Collaborative Health Partners explained where they put voice AI to work first, how they proved its value to finance and what it took to bring staff, providers and patients along. They were joined by Scott D’Entremont, CEO of Parlance, a conversational AI platform that helps patients easily schedule or reschedule appointments, manage prescription refills, or get answers to common questions. This reduces staff workload and frees human operators and contact center agents to focus on complex, critical patient care needs.
Start with the easy calls
Each organization began with high-volume, routine calls that didn’t require human expertise. At Virtua Health in southern New Jersey, routine calls made up an estimated 50% to 75% of volume on the hospital voice channel. Malik Bahar, AVP of digital and customer loyalty, said Virtua launched at roughly a 50% self-service rate and now holds steady around 70%.
Collaborative Health Partners, which fields about 400,000 calls a year across family practice, walk-in care and imaging sites in Central Virginia, started with basic patient verification questions, and asking patients if they were calling about an upcoming appointment. Before the change, patients sometimes waited on hold 30 minutes to talk to someone. Now patients rarely wait on hold.
“Our complaints about call wait time were our biggest thing on our surveys, and now it doesn’t even get an honorable mention,” Valerie Daugherty, director of patient access at Collaborative Health said.
Keck Medicine of USC in Los Angeles piloted voice AI on a smaller scheduling line before expanding to its 1-800-USC-CARE vanity number, giving the team time to refine workflows and learn where callers hit friction.
The numbers that convinced finance
Jennifer Preciado, performance manager at Keck Medicine, said the baseline was about 12 minutes for a caller to reach the scheduling line: six to seven minutes to reach a live agent, then a second hold of about six minutes after transfer. The scheduling line hold times are down to roughly 40 seconds to two minutes, and the access center meets its goal of 40 seconds or less about 60% of the time, all while absorbing more call volume without continually adding staff.
At Virtua, containment rate was the metric that won financial leadership’s approval. Mr. Bahar’s team measured the AI against staff on the same terms, such as time to service and FAQ consistency, then presented before-and-after costs to executives in a one-pager alongside patient and colleague feedback.
He said credibility came not from any single metric but from tying operational gains to business outcomes and showing they held over time. Virtua’s call volume has grown from under 2 million to nearly 3 million calls a year with little added headcount.
Collaborative Health Partners tracked staffing costs and patient satisfaction. Ms. Daugherty said the group reduced its need for 11 FTEs between Parlance and another AI vendor, never having to fill open positions it had already budgeted for.
Fix the workflows first
Panelists agreed the technology is only as strong as the workflows behind it. Collaborative Health Partners replaced physician-by-physician scheduling guidelines with a one-page standard of 15- or 30-minute appointments, enlisting champion providers and its board president and medical director to win buy-in office by office.
Ms. Preciado said Keck’s rollout went well beyond a systems project. “This definitely just was not a technology change alone. It was total operations, total change initiative.”
Mr. Bahar said leaders also need to address staff fears about job loss, explain the reasoning behind the change and have a plan to shift employees toward higher-touch work. He added that automation magnifies whatever it sits on top of. “If you have broken workflows or things of that nature, the AI is really just going to exacerbate that,” he said.
Asked what they would tell peers on the fence, panelists framed voice AI as a way to get patients to human interaction faster, not to reduce it.
Asked what he would tell peers still on the fence, Mr. Bahar said this is healthcare’s Blockbuster moment. Just as Netflix caught the video chain off guard, disruptors are betting that health systems can’t deliver consistent, easy access to care. He added that patients now expect routine tasks to be handled right away.
“They’re comparing us to their last great experience in general, and technology is really the best way to get there as we continue to go forward as an industry,” Mr. Bahar said.
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