May 5, 2026
Patty Hayward, General Manager of healthcare and life sciences at Talkdesk, describes how a hybrid model of humans and AI is reshaping healthcare contact centers. Patient access and revenue cycle management are the primary, interconnected challenges for these centers, and modern large-language AI is being used to handle complex scheduling logic. Data analytics helps identify patterns in patient inquiries, predict demand peaks, and move care from reactive to proactive. The expectation is that AI agents will guide patients, becoming a normal and accepted part of healthcare.
Patty explains, "I think that the challenge has always been in healthcare that it's difficult to automate things in comparison to other industries. If you call retail, it's very hard to get a human. You're constantly dealing with bots or being deflected to digital front doors versus in healthcare, as much as organizations have tried to push people to the digital apps and MyCharts and different things like that, it's been difficult. And there are good reasons, and there are bad reasons for that."
"When you think about scheduling, scheduling really drives your revenue cycle because if people don't come to your organization, you can't bill them for things, you can't bill their insurance. And so your organization has problems with the revenue cycles. That's why I say they're inextricably linked, and it's very important to solve the access problem in order to solve the revenue cycle problem."
"So, making sure that you match that patient with the right provider, making sure that you have the right requirements around insurance authorization and things like that. And then, of course, letting the patient understand what their burden will be as far as the charges go for that appointment is all part of the dance, so to speak. And that really requires a large language model that can consume and understand that information. You're right, the decision trees weren't going to work as far as an AI piece goes."
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