Empowered Patient Podcast How Agentic AI is Transforming Healthcare Call Centers with Pat Michael Nebraska Medicine
Pat Michael, Director of Patient Contact Services at Nebraska Medicine, highlights the challenges of high-volume patient contact centers and how agentic AI can improve operational efficiency, enhance patient access, and allow human agents to focus on more complex and critical calls. The AI agent offers patients self-service options for scheduling, cancellations, and medication refills, resulting in a 40% reduction in call volume to human operators. Integrating AI into the contact center also enables the prioritization of time-sensitive calls, such as those related to organ transplant coordination.
Pat explains, "I'm the Patient Contact Services Director for Nebraska Medicine, which means I oversee our three main contact centers. They're our ambulatory contact center, which takes and schedules all the calls for our ambulatory clinic, and our radiology contact center, which schedules all of our outpatient radiology services. And then our medical communication center, which is our 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation with our hospital operators and a group of triage nurses."
"So, some of the challenges that we had are that one of the big things is that we deal with the sheer volume of calls coming into the contact center. And so through the three contact centers, we have about 2.5 million calls that come in, but they're not evenly distributed. They come in when they come in. And so the key to success is managing all these complex calls while ensuring accuracy in the call handling. And what does that mean in the simplest terms? You have to have time to handle the calls accurately. Are we actually staying ahead of the volume, or are we just trying to catch up?"
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