Rebuilding Patient Access for a Multi-Site Community Health System
A federally funded health system was losing patients before they ever reached a provider. Nearly four in ten callers hung up before anyone answered. Within one engagement, call abandonment fell below 3% — and the system had enough confidence in its access operation to open a third location.
Snapshot
The Situation
The client is a federally funded community health system serving multiple locations with a wide range of specialists, including OB/GYN, pediatrics, and behavioral health. Its call center is the front door to all of it — appointment scheduling and full patient intake, billing and insurance questions, transportation coordination, prescription refills, and urgent messages routed to providers.
That front door was failing. Five agents worked the phones without supervision. Roughly 40% of callers abandoned the call before being helped. The team ran on Epic and had functional processes, but none of them were written down — no standard workflows, no training documentation, nothing that could be handed to a new hire or measured for quality.
The consequences landed downstream. Because intake documentation wasn’t completed before patients arrived, front-office staff absorbed the data entry, and appointment delays compounded as the day went on. The system wasn’t just answering fewer calls. It was losing patients.
What We Changed
Supervision and service levels, from day one
The Problem
Five agents operating independently, with no oversight and constant front-office interruptions pulling them off the phones, produced a ~40% drop rate.
What We Did
Replaced it with a professionally supervised outsourced team working to defined service levels and call handling standards. Call abandonment fell below 3%.
Documented workflows in place of tribal knowledge
The Problem
Processes lived in people’s heads and varied by location, which made training slow and quality inconsistent.
What We Did
Built a full library of standard operating procedures and training materials, supported by step-by-step video, so new hires ramp quickly and patients get the same handling at every site. It’s also risk mitigation — the operation no longer depends on any one person’s memory.
Full intake moved off the front desk
The Problem
Intake paperwork went unfinished before arrival, so clinical and front-office staff absorbed the data entry and appointments ran late.
What We Did
Shifted appointment scheduling and complete patient intake to the call center — including multi-insurance verification, financial aid navigation, billing questions, and transportation coordination. Paperwork is finished before the patient walks in.
Staffing built around Epic's certification cadence
The Problem
Every agent must complete Epic certification, and training slots open only every two weeks — which makes both scaling and backfilling difficult for most operators.
What We Did
Synchronized hiring cycles to Epic’s training calendar and gave agents pre-certification study materials so they pass on the first attempt, with a blend of full-time and part-time staff keeping coverage complete inside that cadence.
The Outcome
Patient access stabilized. Abandonment dropped from roughly 40% to under 3%, intake burden came off the clinics, appointments ran on time, and urgent messages and refill requests reached providers through a coordinated channel rather than an overwhelmed front desk.
The clearest measure of the result isn’t a call center metric at all: with a dependable access operation behind it, the health system opened a third location.
What This Kind of Work Takes
Document what already works.
Functional processes still need formal documentation before they can be trained, measured, or scaled.
Treat training assets as living.
Policies and provider rosters change; documentation that isn’t maintained becomes a liability.
Supervision multiplies performance.
Coaching and accountability are what hold quality steady.
Design for real patient needs.
Bilingual support, financial aid navigation, and transportation coordination aren’t extras in community health — they’re the job.
Respect the platform's constraints.
Hiring and onboarding have to be built around Epic’s certification cycle, not fought against it.
Build agility in deliberately.
Fast updates, daily huddles, and adaptive content management keep information accurate in a shifting environment.
Talk to Us
Every health system’s front door looks different. If yours is dropping calls, running on undocumented processes, or pushing intake onto clinical staff, we’d like to hear about it.