Healthcare organizations have spent the last decade investing heavily in digital patient engagement. Patient portals have become the front door to healthcare, giving patients the ability to schedule appointments, view test results, request prescription refills, pay bills, and communicate with their care teams from virtually anywhere. Epic’s MyChart now supports more than 200 million activated patient accounts, making patient portals one of the most widely utilized digital tools in healthcare.
Yet as adoption has increased, many health systems have discovered an unintended consequence: digital access only works when patients can successfully access it.
When a patient is locked out of their account, cannot remember their username, struggles with identity verification or 2-factor authentication, or cannot navigate the portal to find the information they need, the digital front door quickly becomes a source of frustration rather than convenience.
The challenge facing healthcare leaders today is no longer portal adoption. The challenge is ensuring the support model behind the portal can scale with patient expectations.
The Support Burden No One Planned For
Every successful portal activation generates support demand. Some of these interactions are straightforward:
- Password resets
- Account lockouts
- Username recovery
- Registration and account activation assistance
- Portal navigation questions.
Individually, these issues are relatively simple. Collectively, they represent a significant volume of support activity that can often occur outside of traditional business hours.
Historically, organizations have addressed this by adding internal staff, extending support hours, partnering with specialized healthcare support providers such as CereCore, or simply accepting service limitations. As portal utilization continues to grow, each of these approaches becomes increasingly difficult to scale while maintaining both service quality and cost efficiency.
More importantly, the support burden creates a significant opportunity cost.
When healthcare organizations rely on external vendors to manage growing portal demand, support costs often rise in direct proportion to volume growth. When support remains internal, valuable operational resources are frequently diverted from higher-value activities to address routine access issues.
Every analyst spending time on repetitive account-access requests is an analyst who is unavailable to assist with more complex patient needs, EHR issues, or situations requiring deeper technical expertise. In many organizations, the impact extends beyond IT. Clinical staff, patient access teams, practice operations personnel, and front-line caregivers often become involved in helping patients regain access to digital tools needed to manage their care.
This is why patient portal support should not be viewed solely as an IT challenge. Every minute spent resolving avoidable access issues is time that could otherwise be devoted to patient-facing activities, operational improvement, or higher-value care coordination.
This is not simply a staffing challenge. It is a service design challenge.
The portal succeeded in giving patients access. The next challenge is making sure patients can actually use that access when they need it.
Why Agentic AI Changes the Conversation
Much of the discussion around AI in healthcare has focused on automation. I believe that framing is too narrow.
The real opportunity is not replacing people. It is redesigning how support is delivered.
Traditional chatbots are often limited to scripted workflows and predefined responses. Agentic AI represents a different approach. It can understand intent, take action across systems, execute routine tasks, and determine when a human should become involved.
For patient portal support, that may include identity verification, account management, as well as some of the other items mentioned above. But the larger opportunity extends beyond simple automation.
Historically, patient support experiences have been fragmented across departments and technologies. A patient may contact support because they cannot access MyChart, only to discover that the real issue involves scheduling an appointment, updating demographic information, or resolving another operational matter. In many organizations, that patient is then transferred between departments, asked to repeat information, and forced to navigate the healthcare system’s internal structure.
Patients do not experience healthcare in those organizational silos, and increasingly they should not have to.
Agentic AI creates the opportunity to orchestrate a more connected experience by bringing together portal support, scheduling, patient access, and other operational functions into a single engagement. Rather than simply answering questions, AI can help guide the patient toward resolution, coordinating across the appropriate systems and teams while preserving context throughout the interaction.
That distinction matters. The goal is not to replace the human experience. It is to reserve human expertise for moments when it matters most. Routine requests can be resolved efficiently while analysts, schedulers, and operational teams focus on situations that require judgment, empathy, problem solving, or personalized assistance.
For years, patients have associated automated support with rigid phone trees, scripted responses, and frustrating transfers between departments. Those experiences often reflected the healthcare organization’s structure rather than the patient’s needs. Agentic AI creates an opportunity to change that dynamic by orchestrating a more connected and seamless support experience. Most patients do not care whether their password was reset by an analyst or an AI-powered agent. They care that the issue was resolved quickly, securely, and without unnecessary friction. Ultimately, success is not measured by the amount of automation deployed. It is measured by how easy the organization makes it for patients to access and manage their care.
What Happens When Analysts Focus on Higher Value Work?
One of the most significant benefits of AI-enabled support is the impact it has on the role of the support analyst.
At CereCore, we have seen that a substantial percentage of patient portal contacts involve routine requests that can be addressed without analyst intervention. Today, as much as 60% of routine patient portal volume can be resolved through AI-driven interactions, allowing support professionals to focus on more complex and meaningful work. Importantly, these interactions tend to be the highest-volume and lowest-complexity requests, making them ideal candidates for automation while preserving human expertise for situations requiring judgment and empathy. When those interactions are removed from the queue, analysts can focus on issues requiring deeper investigation, broader healthcare knowledge, and stronger interpersonal skills.
That includes complex portal issues, billing-related inquiries, escalated patient concerns, and other sensitive interactions.
Organizations also gain greater visibility into the patient experience. AI-driven quality assurance enables the review of 100% of interactions rather than relying on small sampling methodologies, helping leaders identify trends, recurring friction points, and opportunities for continuous improvement.
The result is a better experience for patients and a more effective use of highly skilled support resources. There is also an operating model benefit. Traditional support organizations often scale by adding staff or increasing outsourced capacity as demand grows. AI-enabled support creates greater flexibility by absorbing routine volume fluctuations without requiring organizations to increase resources at the same rate. As patient portal adoption expands and digital engagement continues to increase, support capacity can scale more efficiently while allowing healthcare organizations to focus investments on higher-value services.
Rather than functioning as a password reset center, the support organization becomes a true extension of the patient experience.
Service Recovery Matters as Much as Service Delivery
One lesson healthcare organizations learn repeatedly is that trust is not built when everything works perfectly. Trust is built when something goes wrong and recovery happens quickly.
I often view service recovery as equally important, if not more important than service delivery itself.
Patients rarely remember routine interactions that proceed exactly as expected. They remember the moments when they needed help and how effectively that help was provided.
Whether a patient is locked out of their portal, unable to access test results, struggling to complete an important task, or facing an issue that requires escalation, the speed and quality of the recovery experience has a direct impact on confidence in the organization.
That is why AI must operate within clearly defined guardrails.
Healthcare support requires strong governance, identity verification controls, privacy protections, seamless escalation paths, and smooth transitions to human analysts whenever necessary.
In a patient portal environment, those guardrails should be both operational and technical. For example, AI should not independently engage in support activities involving minors without appropriate controls and escalation pathways. It should never give clinical advice, interpret laboratory results, assess symptoms, or try to influence care decisions. While it can acknowledge concerns, provide empathy, and guide patients to the appropriate resources, clinical questions should remain with licensed providers and care teams.
Technical guardrails are equally important. If a patient is not making progress toward resolution, has been engaged with the AI for an extended period of time, expresses frustration, or exhibits increasingly negative sentiment during the interaction, the experience should transition seamlessly to a human resource who can provide additional assistance. The objective is not to maximize automation. The objective is to achieve resolution in the most appropriate manner possible.
Success is not measured by how many interactions AI handles independently. Success is measured by whether patients receive the help they need quickly, securely, and confidently.
The Future of Patient Portal Support
Healthcare organizations have invested heavily in creating digital front doors. The next phase of the journey is ensuring those doors remain accessible when patients need them.
The question is no longer whether AI can play a role in patient portal support.
The more important question is whether traditional support models can continue to meet the expectations of increasingly digital healthcare consumers.
Organizations that successfully balance agentic AI with healthcare-trained support professionals will be positioned to deliver a better patient experience, improve operational efficiency, and scale support alongside growing portal adoption.
As someone who has spent much of my career leading healthcare support organizations, I recognize that reducing routine human interactions can feel counterintuitive. Historically, support models have been built around people, processes, and the volume of work flowing through them. The irony is that success may ultimately be measured by reducing many of the very interactions support organizations have traditionally been designed to handle. That requires healthcare providers and support partners alike to rethink long-standing operating models. Yet our responsibility is not to preserve existing models. It is to continuously improve the patient experience. If routine requests can be resolved faster, more consistently, and with less effort for the patient, while allowing human expertise to focus on the moments that matter most, that is a transformation worth embracing.
At CereCore, we view this through the lens of more than three decades of healthcare IT operations and support. Technology alone is not the answer. Success comes from combining technology, operational discipline, and healthcare expertise to create experiences that patients trust.
The future of patient portals is not simply about giving patients digital access. It is about ensuring patients can successfully use that access whenever they need it.
Organizations that solve that challenge will not only improve support operations. They will strengthen trust in their digital front door and ultimately improve the overall patient experience.
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