Every health system, from a 15-location clinic group to a national system with tens of billions in revenue, shares the same overlooked front door: the phone. Yet, almost none of them treat it as a revenue channel. Abandoned calls, long hold times, overburdened agents, and multi-tasking front desk staff quietly erode both patient access and the bottom line.
Calls that go unanswered do not surface on a dashboard. They surface later — as appointments never booked, as front desk staff pulled from patients to answer a ringing line, as overtime, as a patient who went to another hospital or clinic. Patient access leaders already know the pressure is there: they named phone access and hold times among their top patient access priorities for 2026 in Medical Group Management Association polling.
This panel brings together operations and technology leaders from Virtua Health, Keck Medicine of USC and Collaborative Health Partners to discuss where they put AI on the voice channel, what they would sequence differently now, and how leaders should scope voice AI to deliver measurable ROI.
What You’ll Learn:
Designed to be relevant to any size health system.
- How to quantify what the phone is actually costing you — the specific metrics that expose lost revenue and capacity hiding in abandonment rates, hold times, and call volume, and how to build the baseline that makes the case for action.
- Where voice AI pays off first — which operational surfaces (contact center, switchboard, front desk, internal callers) deliver the fastest, most measurable return, so you can sequence a rollout instead of boiling the ocean.
- How leaders proved ROI to finance — the numbers that moved (containment, cost per contact, staff hours reclaimed, speed to access) and how panelists translated them into a business case their CFO accepted.
- What scales and what doesn’t — how the ROI math and implementation differ from a 15-clinic group to a $70B system.