Anyone who’s tried to schedule a doctor’s appointment is painfully familiar with the sound of healthcare inefficiency: hold music.
The painful experience of listening to Opus No. 1 after giving the office your personal information, only to get transferred to another line and repeat that information again, is universal. What patients don’t see is that, on the other end of the line, staff are juggling phones, portals and insurance rules.
While medical office staff aren’t listening to reverberating synthesizers and an echoed clap track, they’re just as frustrated, operating at the limits of human capacity. They want to help patients faster but are constrained by outdated tools and multiple systems. Staff can only do so much, and patients can only wait on the phone for so long.
Adding more staff, expanding call centers, or deploying chatbots has been marginally helpful for practices, but these are temporary fixes that can’t keep up with the unyielding complexity of healthcare. The only sustainable solution is smarter systems that are able to orchestrate every part of the access experience.
The future of patient access lies in agentic AI that not only understands the nuances of how healthcare actually works, but can restore access to care safely and at scale. It’s here, and it’s empowering clinics and health systems to hang up on hold music for good.
The difference between “AI in healthcare” and “AI for healthcare”
The distinctions are critical. Voice AI and large language modes (LLMs) have existed for a number of years, but they haven’t made a strong impact in healthcare, built on general-purpose language models or voice tools that may work well for simple customer service tasks, but inevitably fall short when applied to the complexity of clinical operations.
Tasks like patient scheduling, referral coordination, and access management require the latter. Assort Health has developed agentic AI that’s purpose-built for healthcare, trained to understand real-world workflows, regulatory requirements, and provider preferences. Assort OS integrates deeply with EHRs, PMS systems, and specialty-specific rules; it remembers patient histories, adapts to each practice’s logic, and ensures every interaction meets organizational standards. Assort’s intelligent platform is built on 55 million (and counting) patient engagements across thousands of providers. This data generates workflows that achieve up to 48% labor capacity increase, industry-leading safety ratings, and 94% PSAT scores.
The results speak for themselves. At one large practice, Assort reduced wait times from over an hour to under 30 seconds. Another brought its call abandonment rate down from nearly 50% to below 10%. Organizations report fuller schedules, stronger ROI, and higher patient satisfaction.
That’s the difference between managing chaos and managing care.
Depth over point solutions
Health systems today are under enormous pressure to show ROI from technology investments. Point solutions can offer temporary relief, but they often create fragmentation, forcing organizations to manage dozens of vendors and disconnected data streams.
The future of healthcare AI won’t be defined by the number of tools, but by the depth and reliability behind them. True ROI comes from AI systems that go deep into the workflows of each practice, learning the real-world nuances that make every organization different.
At Assort Health, that means working shoulder to shoulder with physicians and staff to understand practices’ idiosyncrasies and nuances, developing a library of 1.2 million edge cases, using our proprietary AI tooling to automate workflows – everything from scheduling rules to insurance routing to patient communication preferences. That embedded insight is what allows Assort’s AI to act safely and autonomously, delivering both precision and personalization at scale.
But agentic AI alone won’t reinvent patient access. Patients still want to feel heard, and they expect to know who – or what – they’re talking to. In most cases, patients still want to talk to a human, even when AI performs better than people. The path to acceptance requires building trust. For health systems, that means introducing AI transparently, measuring outcomes carefully, and proving its consistency over time.
Leading organizations are starting small, focusing on auditable, measurable workflows where AI can prove its reliability. Over time, as AI systems deliver consistent results, that trust grows among both patients and providers. So does the impact.
The outcome is a healthcare experience that alleviates administrative burden for staff and feels seamless to patients. No more hold music, no more repeated forms, no more confusion about what comes next – just clear, seamless access to care whenever it’s needed.
For health systems, agentic AI is opening the door to measurable ROI, operational efficiency, and patient satisfaction that scales. Those that start now will set the standard for digital transformation. At Assort Health, our unified agentic platform is ensuring our partners can provide a simpler, faster, and – ironically – more human healthcare experience.
So long, Opus No. 1. You had a good run.
