Healthcare’s new AI receptionist has arrived

When you call up a company’s customer service line and are greeted by an off-kilter automated voice, how does that usually go?Personally, the call often ends with us yelling “Connect me to a person!” at a robot that just keeps asking the same questions over and over again.

If you relate, we have good news: That might soon be an interaction of the past.

AI agents promise to flip that script by offering live assistants that remember and build off past queries to personalize and improve service. These agents can be online or even take on human-sounding voices to provide guidance over calls—and unlike chatbots, they can act autonomously without being prompted.

The even bigger news is organizations are already rolling these agents out in one of the domains where it’s most important to get things right: healthcare.

“I envision AI agents becoming the invisible infrastructure that handles background work…so clinicians can spend their time connecting with patients,” Max Solano, hospitalist and clinical informatics advisor at Jacksonville, Florida-based Ascension St. Vincent’s, told Healthcare Brew.

What does this look like? AI agents offer a “natural experience” and “open-ended conversation” compared to the sometimes frustrating interactive voice response systems consumers have battled for decades, Israel Krush, co-founder and CEO of agentic AI company Hyro, told Healthcare Brew.

Patient scheduling company Zocdoc and financial platform Cedar are two healthcare companies that rolled out agents earlier this year to assist with scheduling appointments and answering patients’ billing questions, respectively.

Sutter Health, a 27-hospital not-for-profit health system in California, is one of the latest health organizations to hop on the agent train, announcing Sept. 17 it will use Hyro’s tech to offer HIPAA-compliant AI agent-powered patient communications.

The deets. So how do you introduce an AI agent? Very slowly, Jennifer Bollinger, Sutter Health’s SVP and chief consumer and brand officer, told us.

It took about a year to choose a vendor and a bit over a month to integrate Hyro with Sutter’s electronic health record, Epic, she said. Sutter is currently testing the agents for specific tasks, and Bollinger expects the first use case to become available to patients in about 60 to 90 days.

For now, she said the system will focus on using voice agents for basic tasks like authenticating identities, confirming appointments, and giving directions. Patients will be told they’ll be speaking with an AI agent and given the option to opt out, and more complex cases will be reserved for human staff.

Sutter eventually plans to bring Hyro’s agents online and have them take on duties like scheduling and rescheduling appointments, Bollinger added.

“Anything that we have standardized, that’s repeatable at scale across the organization, will be great use cases for the agentic AI,” she said.

To evaluate the tech’s success, Sutter will measure variables like time savings and whether the AI increases first-call resolution, Bollinger said.

Considering concerns. These agents aren’t all good news, however.

Experts have warned AI agents could open up a health system to cyberattacks.

Agents are trained to serve, and hackers may try to order the programs to reveal private patient information, for instance, Healthcare Brew previously reported.

Krush said he understands those concerns and that the company kept this in mind when designing its agents, which he describes as “AI on a leash.”

“When you have guardrails in place, the AI agent basically knows what they’re allowed to do and what they’re not allowed to do,” he said.