Consumers have grown accustomed to seamless digital interactions. When they’re handling tasks like shopping online, booking a trip or managing their finances, they can typically get questions answered instantly through apps, chatbots and texts. But in healthcare, the experience is often cumbersome and fragmented.
Sutter Health’s new partnership with Hyro aims to address that problem. The Sacramento-based health system, which operates 25 hospitals and more than 200 clinics, is rolling out Hyro’s AI agents to give patients round-the-clock support for tasks like scheduling appointments, refilling prescriptions and answering billing questions.
Hyro’s AI agents are designed to automate routine inquiries so that providers’ customer service teams can focus on more complex cases. They also feed data into dashboards behind the scenes, giving healthcare organizations a place to track performance metrics and opportunities to improve the patient experience.
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Overall, the deployment of these AI agents seeks to give patients quicker answers and more seamless ways to take care of their healthcare needs.
One “major plus” of Hyro’s agents is the convenience factor they offer to patients, said Jennifer Bollinger, Sutter’s chief consumer and brand officer.
“The experience should feel easy and effortless, regardless of whether patients are seeking information via chat, voice or text,” she stated.
By giving patients 24/7 access to these avenues of communication, this partnership allows people to connect with the health system on their time, she noted.
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“Consumers measure friction or effort largely in terms of time — time waiting, time to resolution and time well spent,” Bollinger remarked.
She said Sutter will monitor improvements in customer satisfaction and first-call resolution rates, as well as measure how Hyro’s technology enables call center staff to handle more complex issues.
Sutter chose to adopt Hyro’s agents over other AI-powered patient communication tools because of the startup’s track record in this space, Bollinger stated.
“Beyond the patient data insights they provide and their wide-ranging interoperability capabilities, they also understand the importance of patient privacy and data security just like we do,” she declared.
Hyro has also works closely alongside Sutter’s AI governance council to ensure that its agents deliver information to patients in a safe and responsible way, Bollinger added.
Instead of chasing trends or rolling out one-off tools, Sutter is playing the long game by building an ecosystem of platforms, partnerships and governance, she said.
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