As staffing shortages continue to strain healthcare systems, digital innovation is becoming essential to improve patient access and experience.
During a session at Becker’s 31st annual meeting on the business & operations of ASCs, Jon Wang, co-founder and co-chief executive officer of Assort Health, discussed how voice-enabled agentic AI is reshaping administrative workflows.
Here are four key takeaways from the session:
1. AI takes action
Unlike traditional AI, which provides recommendations based on past data, agentic AI systems are built to complete workflows from start to finish without human intervention.
The technology stands in contrast to more passive generative AI models and is especially well suited to administrative use cases, where staffing challenges are most acute.
“It’s the ability for AI to take action,” Wang said. “We’re not going to replace clinicians, we want to focus on augmenting admin workflows. It gives us the ability to up-level staff impact and allows humans to then focus on patient-centered activities.”
The difficulty behind building this technology is adapting it with the appropriate guardrails and level of bespokeness to understand spreadsheets and binders full of SOPs and rules unique to each practice.
Assort Health has handled over 47 million patient interactions using its agentic AI platform. The technology automates complex administrative tasks, from appointment booking to care gap outreach, with the goal of relieving overburdened staff and improving patient care.
2. AI’s impact on the patient experience
One major goal of Assort Health’s voice AI is to eliminate long hold times and phone tag, common pain points in the current patient access experience. Wang described a real-world case in which a 72-year-old woman waited on hold for 45 minutes only to be turned away at the clinic.
During a live demonstration of the technology, an orthopedic group used Assort Health’s AI agent to automate scheduling. The system verified the caller’s identity, assessed injury severity, checked clinician availability and completed the appointment scheduling.
“One of our goals is to shift healthcare away from this very reactive system,” said Wang. “AI agents become that first layer of interaction, whether that be inbound or outbound, and then humans being that second layer.”
3. The AI trust gap
Despite the technology’s performance—Assort Health’s AI calls are rated 4.5 to 4.6 out of 5 by patients—there is still a trust gap.
“When we disclose that the call is handled by AI, 30% of patients immediately ask for a human,” Wang noted. However, once patients actually interact with the system, they rate their experience higher than a human interaction.”
He referenced research from JAMA showing that patients preferred AI-generated messages when the use of AI was not disclosed, but rated the same messages more negatively when told they were generated by AI.
“Patients just want good care,” Wang said. “Patients care about outcomes, and AI has the capability to generate outcomes that are unheard of and actually help improve patient experiences.”
4. Successful deployment
Assort Health integrates directly with electronic medical record systems, enabling the AI to read visit notes, apply insurer-specific logic (e.g., Local Coverage Determinations), and route patients accordingly. In pain management and orthopedics, for example, the agent can identify prior visit notes, apply payer timing rules and avoid scheduling errors that lead to denied claims.
Wang emphasized the importance of robust security and privacy protocols. Assort Health’s AI is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and only accesses patient data after verifying identity and does not train on customer data.
With capabilities such as multilingual support, agent memory, and integration with referral workflows, agentic AI is poised to become the first layer of patient interaction, one that augments to put patients and providers first.
“AI is here to automate. It’s here to generate tasks and complete tasks, but healthcare is, at its core, human. We need to put the patient at the center of everything that we do,” Wang said.
