How Tampa General Hospital cut wait times and abandonment with a conversational AI front door
Lower abandonment rates, shorter wait times, and more scheduled appointments. Tampa General Hospital (TGH) achieved all three by rethinking its call center with a conversational AI agent as the first point of contact.
The move addressed a familiar problem in healthcare: high call volumes packed with routine requests that drain agent capacity and frustrate patients. The result is measurable gains in access and a calmer, more focused experience center.
The problem: routine calls clogging the queue
Tampa General's experience center was flooded with recurring requests-appointment confirmations, prescription refills, insurance checks, directions, and billing questions. Necessary work, but not work that needs a human every time.
"Experience center agents were frequently engaged in low-value tasks rather than focusing on cases requiring empathy, critical thinking or clinical coordination," said Amy Bender, manager of inpatient informatics at Tampa General Hospital. The backlog drove long waits, higher abandonment, and rising stress across the team.
The proposal: an AI agent as the first touch
TGH selected a conversational AI platform from Hyro and introduced an AI agent named "Aimee" to answer inbound calls. Using natural language understanding and intent recognition, Aimee greets callers, identifies what they need, and either resolves the request or routes it to the right department.
Two priorities guided the plan: scale and access. The agent can handle thousands of concurrent interactions, including peak surges, and supports multilingual conversations. Every interaction generates analytics on call drivers and bottlenecks to inform staffing, training, and process improvements.
90-day rollout, integrated with core systems
TGH's IT and experience center teams, working with Hyro, deployed Aimee in 90 days. Phase one focused on conversational routing and triage to ensure every call was answered and sent to the correct queue.
The roadmap expands into appointment scheduling and management-book, cancel, reschedule-so more tasks can be completed without human intervention. Aimee integrates with core operations and telephony, including Epic, Cisco, and SpinSci, enabling caller authentication, real-time data retrieval, and transaction completion.
What changed: results that matter
- Abandonment rates: 56% drop in ambulatory scheduling queues; 35% improvement in specialty queues.
- Wait times: 58% decrease in ambulatory; 29% decrease in specialty clinics.
- Throughput: 17% increase in average daily appointments scheduled by the experience center.
By absorbing routine requests and routing precisely, Aimee reduced hold times and freed human agents to focus on clinical coordination and sensitive conversations-the work where empathy and judgment make the difference.
How the model fits patient access operations
The conversational agent acts like a real-time switchboard that actually listens. It captures intent in natural language, routes with context, and completes simple tasks without handoffs.
For staff, fewer misrouted calls and fewer repetitive tasks mean better focus and less burnout. For patients, getting to the right person faster boosts trust and keeps them engaged rather than hanging up.
Implementation playbook you can reuse
- Map your top intents: scheduling, refills, directions, insurance, billing, and hours.
- Start with routing and triage; add self-service transactions (scheduling, payments) after stability.
- Integrate early with your EHR, CRM, and telephony for authentication and real-time data.
- Set clear KPIs: abandonment rate, average speed to answer, handle time, transfer accuracy, appointments booked.
- Build a tight escalation path to humans for clinical coordination and sensitive cases.
- Use multilingual support where patient mix demands it.
- Review analytics weekly; retrain intents and update prompts based on new call drivers.
- Roll out in phases; pilot on a few queues before expanding system-wide.
Inside Tampa General's next steps
The team is expanding Aimee's scope to manage end-to-end scheduling-book, cancel, reschedule-and to deepen integrations for fewer manual touches. Continuous analytics feed staffing plans and training, creating a cycle of improvement.
The goal is simple: make the first call count, route correctly, and let clinicians and agents focus where they add the most value.
Why this matters for healthcare leaders
Most health systems face the same volume of routine calls and the same pressure on access. A conversational front door lets you absorb that volume, cut holds, and keep patients moving without adding headcount.
The upside shows up in three places executives care about: access (fewer dropped calls, faster answers), experience (less friction for patients and staff), and throughput (more completed scheduling).
Quick summary of outcomes
- 56% drop in ambulatory abandonment; 35% improvement in specialty queues.
- 58% faster answers in ambulatory; 29% faster in specialty clinics.
- 17% more appointments scheduled per day.
Build team skills for AI-enabled operations
If you're preparing your operations, access, or contact center teams to work alongside conversational systems, consider curated AI learning paths by role: AI courses by job.
Aimee's impact at Tampa General shows what happens when triage, routing, and simple tasks move to an always-on agent-and people focus where human judgment matters most.
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