The global healthcare industry faces some growing challenges: a population with complex health needs, patients’ lack of adherence to care plans and a limited workforce to provide necessary care. How care is reimbursed is also shifting — from fee-for-service to outcomes-based models that promote proactive care. But solving these challenges requires more than simply expanding the workforce. Health systems also need to advance their tech stacks.

Healthcare organizations must embrace innovation — leveraging technology, operational improvements and research that enable them to do more with less. Adopting a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform is one way to meet patient and employee needs today – and prepare for the future. When evaluating a cloud-based patient communication and engagement platform for the healthcare industry, it’s essential to consider how these solutions can enhance patient experiences, address your value-based care metrics, reduce the burden on your care team and protect sensitive data.

Communications Keeping Pace with Medical Innovations

The healthcare industry has made strides in adopting cutting-edge technologies — from electronic health records (EHRs) to advanced medical devices and IoT-powered diagnostics. But the industry hasn’t been as quick to adopt innovative technology for patient communication.

While healthcare organizations often have robust digital information strategies, they lack the technology to effectively share it across patients, providers and insurers. Many health systems still rely on outdated tools like zone phones, pagers, voicemail and basic (and painful) phone trees and routing to communicate with patients. These outdated systems can disrupt workflows and negatively affect patient experiences.

By adopting a modern contact center platform for better communications with patients, health systems can bridge these gaps with coordinated digital interactions between all stakeholders. This not only improves communication but also streamlines workflows. This can lead to better outcomes while reducing the communication burden on patients and care teams.

Open Platform for Better Patient Intent Understanding

Reducing patient effort can build loyalty and help improve patients’ adherence to their care plans. At the heart of this effort is understanding patient or care journey intent, which helps health systems connect patients with the right care more efficiently.

By leveraging an open platform that integrates seamlessly with EHR systems, health systems can deliver context-rich experiences, helping to ensure patients receive personalized support at every stage of their journeys.

Traditionally, patients calling a health system might have to navigate multiple staff members before reaching the right resource. By integrating contact center technology with EHR systems, health systems can streamline this process with AI-powered routing and tailored screening questions.

These solutions help connect patients to the right clinical or administrative resources. And that can help reduce friction while freeing healthcare staff to focus on more complex patient needs.

Outbound Communication Drives Proactive Care

Proactive outbound communication is a key component of understanding and addressing patient intent. When health systems recognize a patient’s need, and the communications platform integrates with EHR work queues, personalized outreach can help patients stay on track with their care plans. These communications can include:

  • Scheduling referral appointments.
  • Conducting discharge follow-ups.
  • Addressing questions about medical equipment.

Health systems often depend on patients to schedule referrals or manual outreach from staff. But findings from Genesys research published in the “Healthcare’s Empathy Gap” report indicate that only about one-third of patients surveyed are confident in any part of the patient journey — from choosing the right provider to understanding what they need to do after an appointment.

By leveraging AI-powered virtual agents and chatbots, health systems can streamline the patient journey, reaching out to patients directly to schedule appointments or provide necessary follow-up care. This saves time, reduces friction and ensures continuity of care.

Leveraging AI to Identify At-Risk Patients

To ease the burden on care teams, health systems have enabled non-clinical staff to recognize symptoms that could indicate at-risk patients. Once an at-risk patient is identified, staff would need to manually initiate screening protocols and route patients to clinical resources. But the adoption of healthcare AI solutions has streamlined this process, improving both accuracy and efficiency for providers and payers.

Consider this example: If a health system wants to identify patients calling with chest pain concerns and a patient reports “tightness in their collarbones,” a non-clinical staff might not flag that due to limited clinical knowledge. AI-powered tools can listen for key phrases and prompt targeted screening questions. This can ensure patients are quickly escalated to the appropriate clinical resource.

Insurers can also use these technologies to identify and monitor at-risk members, supporting patient wellness and preserving their ratings. Undetected risks not only jeopardize patient outcomes but can also impact a health insurance company’s performance metrics.

Protecting Patient Data and Privacy

The rise of illegal patient data trade highlights the need for engagement platforms built with strong security and compliance capabilities. While certifications like Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) and laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) help safeguard patient information, health systems must prioritize digital patient engagement tools designed with advanced privacy and security measures to protect sensitive data.

An effective contact center platform should:

  • Fully comply with HIPAA and HITRUST.
  • Implement comprehensive physical, administrative and technical controls.
  • Partner with leading technology providers to maintain a secure ecosystem.

AI can also raise additional privacy concerns for patients, providers and insurers. To address these concerns, health systems should choose technologies that offer an opt-in model for AI training, meaning that data is used only with explicit customer consent.

By selecting technology with these safeguards, health systems can build trust, protect sensitive information and uphold the highest standards of patient privacy.

Improving Staff Engagement in Healthcare

Healthcare workforce management is a key priority for the industry, as it can help alleviate issues like staff churn and burnout while improving wellness. With high turnover and narrow operating margins, health systems face increased pressure to implement workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions that help keep staff engaged, productive and prepared to deliver exceptional patient care.

An effective WEM solution empowers health systems to:

  • Provide care teams with the right information at the right time to better support patients.
  • Drive quality assurance and training to help staff confidently share accurate information with patients.
  • Optimize staff allocation to create streamlined patient experiences and reduce costs.
  • Reduce burden on care teams with AI-powered scheduling and forecasting.

The ultimate goal for health systems is to coordinate, centralize and simplify the patient experience. By implementing a WEM solution, healthcare organizations can leverage technology to ease staff workloads, improve resource distribution and align teams with quality and compliance standards — all of which contribute to better patient outcomes.

The Future of Patient Experience in Healthcare

The healthcare industry is at a crossroads. Companies must balance meeting increasing patient needs with limited available resources while still delivering exceptional experiences for patients and staff.  They need to do all this alongside making operational efficiency improvements and improving health measures. These challenges require operational innovation working hand in hand with technology that can drive more seamless and efficient workflows to deliver better patient outcomes.

Modern platforms built with AI-powered solutions and integrations can help streamline workflows, enhance communication and protect sensitive data, enabling healthcare organizations to improve outcomes for patients and staff.

Download our 2025 contact center buyer’s guide to see how the right platform can improve healthcare operations and patient experiences.