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The healthcare industry is undergoing a monumental, AI-powered transformation.
As patient expectations continue to rise and call volumes increase steadily, AI has become a boon for providers looking to lower contact center costs while providing a more modern experience for patients.
One of the key reasons why is that GenAI has made it possible for automation to resolve calls just as effectively as your best agents do. In other words, automation solutions like IVRs, which have traditionally been measured by deflection or routing success, are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
Instead, AI is giving patients a new way to self-serve and enabling CX leaders to drive contact center efficiency like never before.
Gartner predicts that AI will result in over $80 billion in contact center savings by 2026 and healthcare verticals like imaging centers are set to benefit.
Imaging center call types where AI has the greatest impact
Call types that are prime candidates for AI are those that are repetitive, high in volume, and representative of where agents currently spend most of their time. Based on data from millions of calls, the flows that most commonly fit this criteria are:
1. Appointment Scheduling: Scheduling an imaging appointment should be a seamless experience for patients. But these calls can be highly manual for agents and lead to long hold times when volumes spike. With AI, they can be automated naturally, allowing customers to schedule the next available appointment 24/7, or choose their preferred time with a multi-channel experience.
2. FAQs: Imaging centers receive an outsize amount of common questions related to services, in-network coverage, availability and more. With AI, every common and uncommon question can be resolved without an agent via solutions that connect directly to your knowledge base to leverage the latest accurate information from your systems, all with full HIPAA and BAA compliance.
3. Outbound: With AI, outbound calls and texts are not just limited to appointment reminders, but proactive scheduling nudges that help build your pipeline ahead of time. These interactions can have a significant impact on revenue and be completed with zero agent involvement.
4. Account Management: Thousands of agent minutes are wasted every month by calls related to account management, such as existing patients calling to make one-time payments, enroll in autopay, or change their personal information. With AI, patients can resolve these requests 24/7 with zero wait times.
5. Intake: Imaging centers must collect information for every new patient, but this task can take up thousands of minutes from agents, nurses and clinicians. These intake flows can all be automated with AI, freeing agents from collecting tedious information and helping patients get their request resolved faster without having to repeat information.
A high resolution rate in even a single one of these call types decreases average handle time, increases CSAT, reduces agent call volumes, and increases net savings.
How AI transforms insurance contact centers
Before implementing AI, Southwest Medical Imaging (SMIL) was experiencing many of the same challenges facing every contact center:
“Call volumes were crazy before Replicant,” said Kim Wyszynski, Director of Contact Center, SMIL. “That caused long hold times and high abandonment rates. We needed a way to automate straightforward requests so live agents could help the patients that really needed help with the harder things.”
Replicant was deployed to fully automate appointment cancellations and confirmations so agents could concentrate on more complex issues, resulting in a major impact across their biggest challenge areas:
🚀 A vastly improved patient experience:
After going live with Replicant, SMIL’s wait times decreased significantly and agents focused on a smaller set of calls. The average answer rate for agents jumped from about 73% to over 90%, while caller abandonment rates dropped from around 25% to as low as 5% on average.
👩⚕️ An reimagined agent experience:
With Replicant eliminating the need for cancellations to be manually deleted from the system, appointment availability became accurate in real-time, allowing more appointments to be filled and reducing unrealized revenue. Now, it’s not uncommon for SMIL’s agents to have one day a week where they’re not needed on the phones at all and can instead learn new skills and focus on more strategic tasks.
“Replicant takes up to 700 calls a day, which is pretty huge,” said Wyszynski. “That’s the kind of thing that contact centers without automation are missing out on. We’re taking those very repetitive calls off our agents’ plates and upleveling them to learn new skills and spend more time with patients.”
💵 Up to 50% lower operational costs:
When agents benefit from automation just as much as patients do, the contact center equation changes. Agent retention goes up, roles become true career paths, and hiring, training and operating costs are significantly reduced. This is especially crucial in imaging centers, where clinicians are far costlier than traditional agents and should not spend time on non-clinical calls like account management requests.
🏥 Mitigated seasonality-driven challenges:
Whether it’s the annual open enrollment period or week-to-week surges, every imaging center’s contact center experiences seasonality. With AI acting as a first line of defense, service leaders don’t have to guess how much staff they’ll need to account for volume increases. AI can scale up or down instantly depending on agent capacity and call volume, giving contact centers the agility needed to be ready for the unpredictable challenges inherent to insurance.
Taking action: how to get started
While the above call types represent the most common AI-ready use cases across the healthcare and imaging industry, your AI roadmap should start with an analysis of your contact center’s unique data.
By identifying high-volume use cases, leaders can clearly communicate the value of AI to stakeholders by tying impact directly to their respective goals. ROI and net hiring savings, for example, are always top of mind for finance and operations, whereas CSAT and SLAs may matter most to CX leaders.
A Call Assessment accomplishes this with a visually impactful custom report that uses a sample of your calls to identify the use cases agents spend the most time on, as well as the short-and long-term cost savings you’d see by resolving them with automation.
