Contact center workers who stay in their jobs frequently suffer from burnout due to chronic understaffing and the pressure of managing high volumes of calls from patients, many of whom have serious health issues and are anxious and/or dealing with pain. These patients may be trying to obtain test results, seeking information about insurance coverage, or in need of help in scheduling an appointment with a primary care physician or specialist.

Compounding the situation, many provider contact center agents must rely on technologies, such as poorly designed user interfaces and workflows that undermine their efforts to help patients. In a typical scenario, a healthcare contact center agent will have to scroll through multiple screens to locate the medical or insurance information necessary to assist a distraught patient waiting on the line while the call backlog continues to grow as others wait their turn.


Many contact center platforms poorly serve agents and patients through a lack of channel options. Patients can have vastly differing preferences for how they want to interact with a provider’s contact center. Some may prefer email, others text, and still others a chatbot. Then there are those who still want to talk to another human being.

Omnichannel options are a necessity in the digital age and not just a nice feature. Still, omnichannel options in and of themselves are of limited value if the information within these channels isn’t accessible to a contact center agent on a call with a patient.

Harnessing generative AI in the contact center
Being able to successfully assist patients is immensely important to both the customer experience and agent job satisfaction. Generative AI can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare contact center agents.

When provider organizations combine AI with automation, they ease the agent burden by removing tasks from their plates while creating a frictionless experience for patients. Generative AI could be used to craft email replies to patients who have questions or need specific information and to summarize discussions with patients for reference by other agents.

Generative AI can help provider organizations dramatically improve customer self-service. Patients could interact with a generative bot to make appointments, ask about post-op instructions, or receive advice regarding the next steps in their care journeys. If needed, generative AI then could transfer the patient to the appropriate agent, department, or web page.

Business Affairs Homepage