Empowered Patient Podcast

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-we