For a large U.S. community healthcare provider running 23+ community health centers and specialty clinics with 2,000+ healthcare professionals, delivering efficient patient access and support had become increasingly challenging.
Serving a diverse, multilingual, and largely underserved patient population that relies heavily on phone-based interactions, the organization needed a more efficient and scalable approach to managing patient inquiries.
Its traditional multi-branch IVR system had become a significant bottleneck in the patient journey. Patients had to navigate complex phone menus to schedule, reschedule, or cancel appointments, check upcoming visits, or get answers to routine questions.
At the same time, call center teams had to search across fragmented knowledge sources and internal systems to find accurate information, leading to longer handling times, inconsistent responses, and unnecessary call transfers.
To address these challenges, the healthcare provider partnered with Druid AI to gradually replace its traditional multi-branch IVR system with a conversational Voice AI Agent.
The first AI agent - Laura - acts as a patient support agent, available through chat in the patient portal and voice through the contact center platform. Laura runs on the healthcare provider Five9 telephony and works directly with its own medical information system, through APIs.
Laura is a bilingual AI Agent that supports patients in English and Spanish, enabling voice authentication, real-time appointment scheduling, rescheduling and cancellations, appointment lookups, FAQ responses, and seamless transfers to human agents when needed.
The community healthcare provider and Druid mapped 6 IVR lines, then enhanced them with Laura, one branch at a time. Appointment scheduling went live first and is still the highest-volume workflow.
|
Menu line |
Laura handles |
|
Medical appointments |
Books, reschedules and cancels. Reads back upcoming visits. |
|
Dental appointments |
Finds out what the caller needs. |
|
Vision appointments |
Books, reschedules and cancels. |
|
Medication refills and lab questions |
Captures the medication and the request. Logs lab result inquiries. |
|
Patient portal registration |
Helps with portal access. |
|
Other inquiries |
Captures the reason for the call. |
|
Referrals |
Checks status, shares details, resends and refaxes referrals. |
|
After hours, 5 PM to 8 AM |
Runs self-service while the call center is closed. |
When a call needs a person, Laura transfers the call with full context and under clear governance. The community care provider's business rules decide what Laura finishes and what goes to staff. A booking for a child goes to a person. A referral for another adult goes to the referral team with the reason already captured.
Governance is a daily routine. The community health provider reviews a 30 to 40% sample of calls every day and uses Druid's knowledge base toolkit to correct answers. Every interaction runs under HIPAA.
Laura also works outbound. Five9 campaigns call patients who missed or cancelled a visit. A patient who opts in to rebook goes to Laura, who reschedules on the spot. Lost visits become recovered revenue with no extra outbound callers.
The second AI agent acts as a call center knowledge assistant, embedded in Microsoft Teams. It gives staff instant access to approved call center documentation stored in SharePoint, helping human agents answer procedural questions faster and more consistently.
The healthcare organization's goal is a single opening prompt. Laura understands every request and handles it or routes it to the right workflow or department, with no menu. Call volume through Laura is expected to grow 30 to 40% by the end of 2026 as new departments go live.