9 Healthcare Contact Center Best Practices to Improve the Patient Experience

For many patients, the first interaction with a healthcare organization isn't in an exam room. It's a phone call to book an appointment, ask whether a provider accepts their insurance, or follow up on a referral. That makes the contact center one of the most important, and most overlooked, parts of the patient experience.

Healthcare contact centers are under pressure from rising call volumes, staffing gaps, and patients who expect the same convenience they get from other industries. The organizations that handle this well tend to follow a consistent set of practices: they protect patient data, connect their systems, route calls by need, use AI for routine work, and measure what matters to patients.

This guide covers nine healthcare contact center best practices, with examples from organizations like Fenway Health, Proliance Surgeons, and CareRev, plus the challenges and metrics to watch as you put them into practice.

What is a healthcare contact center?

A healthcare contact center is the team and technology a healthcare organization uses to manage patient and member communications across phone, SMS, chat, and other channels. It typically handles appointment scheduling, referrals, prescription and billing questions, insurance inquiries, and follow-up outreach, while protecting the sensitive health information that comes up in those conversations.

The terms "call center" and "contact center" are often used interchangeably, but there's a difference. A healthcare call center handles phone calls. A healthcare contact center handles phone calls plus digital channels, so patients can reach the organization the way they prefer and staff see a consistent history across channels.

Common types of healthcare contact centers

• Patient access centers: Centralized scheduling, registration, and referral teams for health systems and multi-site practices.

• Provider and clinic contact centers: Front desk and nurse lines that answer patient questions, manage refills, and route clinical calls.

• Health plan and payer contact centers: Member services teams that handle eligibility, claims, benefits, and premium questions.

• Outbound outreach teams: Groups that make reminder calls, post-visit follow-ups, and care-gap or enrollment outreach.

Whatever the model, the goal is the same: help patients get what they need quickly, without compromising privacy or overloading staff.

9 healthcare contact center best practices

1. Make HIPAA readiness the starting point: Proliance Surgeons

Every tool that touches patient conversations, including your phone system, contact center, and anything connected to your EHR, should support your privacy obligations. For US organizations, that starts with a vendor that will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) and offers encryption, role-based access, secure call recording, and configurable data retention. Our guide to running a HIPAA-compliant call center covers what to evaluate.

For Proliance Surgeons, one of the largest surgical practices in the US with more than 80 care centers, consistency came first. "Before Dialpad, we had a variety of technologies, some implemented without any consultation, so we didn't even know what some care centers were working with," says CIO Curt Kwak. Standardizing patient communications on one platform can give IT a single set of privacy and security controls to manage across every location, instead of auditing a patchwork of systems.

2. Run on one platform so teams can work from anywhere: Fenway Health

When phones, contact center queues, and analytics live in separate systems, small changes like adding an agent, opening a new line, or moving staff home can turn into IT projects. A unified cloud platform lets you add users and numbers from an admin dashboard and lets agents work from a browser or mobile app.

Fenway Health moved more than 600 employees across 15 locations to remote work. "We didn't have equipment to send home with folks, but they were able to use smartphones and web browsers to access the call centers, and our call center service levels were unaffected," says Jon DiBiasio, IT leader at Fenway Health. "It was a very easy transition."

3. Connect your contact center to the EHR and CRM

Agents lose time and can make more mistakes when they have to search for a patient record while the caller waits. Integrations that pop the matching record when a call arrives, log calls automatically, and let agents click to dial can cut lookups and manual data entry.

Look for integrations with the systems your teams already use, whether that's an EHR like Epic, athenahealth, or NextGen, or a CRM like Salesforce or Zendesk. Dialpad's healthcare contact center software, for example, connects to Epic through a CTI connector, so agents can see the right patient record without leaving their workflow.

4. Route patients by need, not by phone tree

Long IVR menus and misrouted transfers are two of the most common patient complaints. Skills-based routing sends patients to the team best equipped to help, by department, location, language, or request type, and a short, well-designed interactive voice response (IVR) menu lets patients self-serve simple requests.

Review call journeys regularly to find where calls bounce. "A big problem we used to have was calls getting transferred to the wrong place," says Fenway Health's Jon DiBiasio. "Now we're able to identify those and can get ahead of it. We can see call journeys, catch those transfers, and educate our staff on the appropriate places to route those calls."

5. Let AI agents handle routine requests: Hopper

A large share of healthcare calls are predictable: booking or rescheduling appointments, office hours and directions, refill status, and simple billing questions. AI agents can handle these requests around the clock on voice and digital channels, then hand off to staff with the conversation context when a patient needs a person.

Hopper, a global healthcare technology company, took this approach in its largest contact center. Instead of moving from button-press IVR to speech recognition, the team went straight to conversational AI that answers low-effort questions like hours and directions, listens for post-op risk language like pain or swelling, routes patients to the right destination, and escalates to staff with context when needed. "We wanted the system to identify the goal quickly, confirm it, and execute," says Chase Williams, SVP of IT Transformation at Hopper. Just as important, Hopper doesn't treat automation as the goal: "In healthcare, deflection isn't always a good thing. Less call volume doesn't necessarily mean better care. What matters is the outcome."

Gartner predicts that agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention by 2029. For most healthcare teams, the practical starting point is narrower: pick one or two high-volume, low-risk workflows, like after-hours scheduling, and measure the results before expanding. Many organizations start by putting AI agents for patient access on their scheduling lines, where volume is high and requests are predictable.

6. Coach agents in real time, not just after the fact

New agents learn fastest with support during live calls, not only in a review weeks later. Real-time transcription and sentiment analysis let supervisors spot calls that are going off track and step in, while AI Live Coach can surface guidance on screen when specific topics come up, like insurance verification or a new scheduling policy.

Fenway Health's call center managers saw the difference in training. "Before Dialpad, our Call Center Managers had to be very hands-on with their training, and now we have coaching groups so it's easier to shadow calls," says Jon DiBiasio. "We can review analytics around call lengths, listen in to the audio, and make adjustments based on the agent."

7. Track a focused set of metrics and review them often: CareRev

A handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) can tell you most of what you need to know about your contact center's health: average speed of answer, abandonment rate, first-contact resolution, and patient satisfaction. Review them weekly, and set alerts so supervisors know when queues back up instead of finding out at the end of the day. These metrics also feed your call center quality assurance program.

At CareRev, real-time alerts keep managers ahead of demand. "The notifications I receive go straight to my phone to let me know how many agents are available and how many callers are waiting in the queue, and if someone has been waiting over five minutes to get through to the agent," says Dionne, CareRev's customer support operations manager. "It just keeps me aware of what's going on day-to-day."

8. Forecast demand and staff for predictable peaks

Healthcare call volume follows patterns: Monday mornings, the first days after a holiday, flu season, and open enrollment. Historical data and heat maps show when calls spike, and workforce management tools can turn those patterns into schedules, so you can staff up before queues build instead of reacting after patients start abandoning calls.

9. Measure patient sentiment, not just speed

Fast answers don't help if patients hang up frustrated. Speed metrics like handle time and deflection rate can look healthy while satisfaction drops, especially once AI agents start handling more requests. Pair operational metrics with sentiment and satisfaction data so you can see whether a faster process is also a better one.

Surveys only capture a small share of interactions. Tools like AI CSAT can estimate satisfaction across conversations, which gives supervisors a broader view of where patients are struggling and which workflows to fix first.

Common healthcare contact center challenges (and how to address them)

Missed appointments and delayed follow-ups

No-shows cost providers time and revenue, and many happen simply because patients forget. Automated reminders by call or SMS, plus outbound follow-up for post-visit care, can reduce missed appointments without adding work for front desk staff.

High call volumes

As a practice grows, so do its call volumes. Front desk teams that also check in patients can quickly fall behind, which leads to missed calls and abandoned queues. Centralizing calls into a shared queue, adding self-service for routine requests, and forecasting peaks (best practices 4, 5, and 8) can take pressure off without hiring for every spike.

Long hold times

The longer patients wait, the more likely they are to hang up, and the less satisfied they are when they reach someone. Set a service level target, like answering a set percentage of calls within a set number of seconds, and track it in real time so supervisors can rebalance staff before queues grow.

Aging, on-premises infrastructure

On-premises phone systems need manual upgrades and hardware maintenance, and they can make remote work and new locations harder to support. Cloud-based call center phone systems shift updates to the provider and let teams add users, numbers, and sites as the organization changes.

Platforms that combine unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) in one system can go a step further. When front desk staff, clinicians, and contact center agents share the same platform, transfers between a clinic and the contact center don't cross systems, patient context can follow the call, and reporting covers every patient conversation instead of just the ones that reach a queue.

Covering after-hours and overflow calls

Patients call after hours and during unexpected spikes, and many organizations can't staff for every one of those moments. Outsourcing overflow to an external call center is one option, but it adds a vendor that handles patient information, and its agents, while trained on your policies, may not know your providers, locations, and workflows as deeply as your own staff. Many organizations keep core patient access in-house and cover peaks with AI agents for routine requests, remote staff in other time zones, or both. Our guide to call center outsourcing covers the trade-offs in more detail.

What metrics should a healthcare contact center track?

Which healthcare contact center best practices should you start with?

You don't need to adopt all nine at once. Start with the metric that hurts most today. If patients are waiting too long, focus on routing, forecasting, and AI agents for routine requests. If quality is uneven, start with real-time coaching and sentiment. If you're still on separate systems, a unified platform and EHR integration will make every other practice easier.

The organizations that improve fastest tend to treat the contact center as part of a broader healthcare customer experience, where every patient conversation, whether it's handled by an AI agent or a person, informs how the next one goes. If you're evaluating tools to support these practices, see how Dialpad's healthcare call center software brings routing, AI agents, real-time coaching, and analytics together.