Few people would rank healthcare at the top when it comes to overall customer service and communication.
Communications can still be a very clunky experience as patients often face a maze of disconnected portals, messages and call centers just to get care. There continue to be significant pain points in patient engagement as medical staff are overwhelmed and most healthcare services are still coordinated over the phone.
A breakdown in communication isn't just an inconvenience, as it can have real consequences for patients and providers.
Nearly two-thirds of patients (63%) would switch healthcare providers due to poor communication or ineffective provider-patient engagement, according to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. patients conducted by health tech company Artera.
Younger patients, ages 17-54, are significantly more likely (73%) to say they’d switch doctors simply because of their customer experience, compared to patients 55 and older (51%).
Nearly half of patients (47%) said they chose not to schedule an appointment due to frustrations communicating with their provider's office via phone, leading to delayed care and missed revenue for providers. This friction in the process can impact patients' health. Among patients who said they avoided scheduling an appointment due to phone frustrations, 61% said it negatively impacted their health, and 40% reported a life-threatening emergency as a direct result, Artera's research found.
"Patient communication isn't just a part of patient access; it is the foundation of it. It's the bridge that connects a patient's need for care with the actual delivery of that care. When communication breaks down at any point—from the first phone call to the post-visit instructions—it creates a barrier that can keep patients from getting the care they need," Guillaume de Zwirek, Artera founder and CEO, told Fierce Healthcare.
A separate survey by global digital consultancy Perficient found similar results, indicating that digital convenience is now a baseline expectation, not a differentiator, for healthcare providers and payers. In a survey of more than 1,000 healthcare consumers, half of consumers who experienced friction scheduling an appointment went elsewhere. Nearly 1 in 4 respondents (23%) said that the scheduling hurdle led to delayed care, and they believed their health declined as a result.
And it's not just the high-friction scheduling that frustrates patients. Communication from health systems and doctors' offices is often fragmented—sometimes over text, sometimes over email, or through a portal—and the outreach is impersonal and typically feels like spam, Artera's survey results show.
When it comes to getting texts from healthcare providers, the majority of patients say they are less likely to read messages from numbers they don’t immediately recognize. Patients also report an increase in short-code SMS text, which can look like spam, and 65% admit they often ignore them, with many of these patients then missing important information as a result, according to Artera's survey.
"Despite the best efforts of our industry, the majority of healthcare access is still coordinated on the phone. Across our customer base, we find that more than 70% of call volume is related to confirming, canceling, rescheduling, scheduling and department transfers," de Zwirek said.
Health systems have made big investments in the past few years to build out "digital front doors" for patients. However, in many cases, all these "doors" lead down different hallways, resulting in a fragmented and disjointed experience for patients, de Zwirek noted.
These communication barriers also impact care access and equity. Certain populations—including non-white patients and those with chronic conditions—are disproportionately affected by poor communication. Artera's report found non-white patients are more likely to no-call/no-show for appointments (49%) compared to white patients (32%). Of the non-white patients who’ve missed an appointment due to frustrations communicating with their provider, 54% report experiencing life-threatening health implications as a direct result, compared to 33% of white patients in the same group.
Patients increasingly want digital-first experiences that are more personalized and conversational, with 76% saying they want the ability to initiate two-way, AI-driven text messaging on any topic. Beyond just appointment reminders, providers can use AI-powered text messaging for payments, post-visit care and other use cases, de Zwirek noted.
Patients are far more likely to engage, follow care instructions, pay their bills on time and keep appointments when providers use a familiar, recognizable 10-digit phone number for texting, Artera's survey found.
Artera's CEO is bullish that artificial intelligence, and in particular agentic AI, has the potential not just to improve patient communications but essentially rewire it.
Healthcare communication can be automated and made available 24/7, "all at a quality bar that is approaching that of real humans. Reducing the burden from these types of interaction elevates staff to tend to higher acuity needs. It reduces hold times, abandonment rates and improves access," he said.
"Over time, and as system interoperability improves, we will be able to address an increasing percentage of routine patient tasks, allowing for a truly bespoke and concierge experience for all patients, all while reducing healthcare operating expenses. And this access will be available on all channels, voice, messaging and web. A concierge-feeling, 24/7-available, socio/economic-considerate experience is the future of healthcare that we are excited about," de Zwirek said.
Artera, formerly WELL Health, is a 10-year-old company that developed a unified patient communications platform aimed at streamlining the numerous texts and emails that health systems send to patients.
The company now works with more than 1,000 provider organizations, including specialty groups, federally qualified health centers, large IDNs and federal agencies, engaging 100 million patients annually.
The company has been strategically building out its AI capabilities with a focus on virtual AI agents. The company's AI agents are designed to support front desk staff in improving patient access, including self-scheduling, intake, forms and billing.
The company has taken the approach of developing adaptive AI strategies tailored to different customer stages, offering AI-powered translations for organizations that want to "dip their toes" in AI technology all, the way to fully autonomous AI agents.
"Our biggest takeaway is that everybody's at a different stage in their AI journey. We adapted our strategy to meet customers where they are. We do a lot of discovery: 'Where are you? Are you ready to have a digital workforce? Or do you just want to enhance your staff?'," de Zwirek said.
Last fall, the company rolled out two AI co-pilot tools to alleviate administrative drudgery for healthcare workers. Its Staff AI Co-Pilot can help healthcare staff with automatic translation, message shortening and conversation summaries.
The company's Insights AI Co-Pilot analyzes patient engagement data to provide actionable insights. That co-pilot is designed to help staff "cut through the clutter" with clear action items and highlighted conversations that require quick attention.
More than 100 organizations are now using the co-pilots, which are integrated into Artera's Harmony platform. Micheal Young, vice president of operations at Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic, said the co-pilot tool helps staff to translate inbound and outbound messages, "freeing up more time to focus on meaningful, high-value patient interactions."
Last year, Artera rolled out its flow agents, rules-based AI assistants that automate routine patient conversations across clinical and administrative use cases. Healthcare providers are using the flow agents to communicate with patients about bills, intake forms, appointment confirmations and care instructions. The company has facilitated 42 million unique "flow agent" sessions this year, saving 250,000 hours of staff time annually, the company claims.
The AI-based agents have been able to nearly autonomize some patient communications, with 94% of patient conversations successfully completed without staff intervention, according to feedback from organizations using the agents.
The use of AI agents isn't just about improving administrative efficiency, but also enables providers to reach patients more effectively. Federally qualified health centers are using Artera's AI tools to improve patient access, "from coordinating transportation and delivering coats, to providing critical support for victims of domestic violence," de Zwirek said. "Our customers are leveraging Artera’s AI solutions in a range of ways, including to boost outreach to their communities more efficiently and drive revenue growth," he said.
These flow agents also have strategic benefits to Artera, de Zwirek said. "It’s a definitive knowledge base of proven pathways that have been hardened over many years across hundreds of institutions and for millions of patients. This knowledge repository is an incredibly useful tool for training fully autonomous agents," he said.
The flow agents represent a "baby step" into fully autonomous AI.
"Healthcare is a highly regulated industry, where technology, especially autonomous AI, can have life and death implications. Flows uses deterministic logic, with natural language understanding (NLU), to guide patients through the specific automated journey. These pathways have no risk for hallucination and jailbreaking, and help build initial comfort in AI for healthcare leadership, and a glidepath to autonomy, our AI Agents product," he said.
Artera has been developing autonomous AI agents that can function like digital office staff, interacting with patients over the phone or via text in a realistic manner.
In healthcare, the race is on for AI agents. A growing list of startups see opportunities to apply AI to patient communications and back-end administrative work, and they are attracting big investments. EliseAI, a company that initially started as an AI company automating communications in the rental and leasing industry, made a move to break into healthcare, seeing opportunities to use AI to tackle administrative tasks. The New York-based company picked up $250 million in series E funding.
Assort Health, a specialty-specific AI platform for managing patient phone calls, recently raised a $76 million series B round, and startup Hello Patient built Gen AI-based agents to handle patient communications for medical practices.
Major players in the health tech industry are quickly building AI agents specifically for healthcare, as demonstrated at the HIMSS 2025 conference last March. Microsoft rolled out a new AI assistant for healthcare professionals that it billed as an all-in-one technology that combines voice dictation, ambient listening and gen AI. Innovaccer unveiled a suite of pretrained AI agents that can communicate with patients for appointment scheduling, managing referrals and answering routine questions. Salesforce also released Agentforce for Health, a new library of prebuilt agent skills and actions.
Agentic AI is the next “AI tidal wave” that is hitting healthcare, de Zwirek noted, and Artera is committed to driving innovation in this area.
"There are new infrastructure upgrades on what often feels like a daily basis that meaningfully advance the technology's potential. This rapid innovation is driving improvements across the board, from reducing latency to improving background noise suppression," he said. In the past six months, Artera has updated its underlying infrastructure over 20 times with exponential improvements to product quality, de Zwirek asserted. "Our latency is below 500ms, we’ve deployed dozens of MCP [Model Context Protocol] tools and servers, our continuous learning framework is in production and ingesting live transcripts, and we’re supporting multiple languages," he said.
While technology evolves, the fundamental challenges of healthcare communication remain constant, de Zwirek said.
Patients need frictionless, asynchronous communication channels to engage with their care teams on their own terms, and providers still need efficient, automated workflows with the ability to bring a human into the loop.
"Our 10 years of solving these core problems give us a significant advantage. It ensures that as we innovate with agentic AI, we are building on a foundation of proven solutions and deep market knowledge," he said.
De Zwirek asserts that Artera's work on AI offers a blueprint for AI-enabled patient communication.
"We’ve gained an unmatched understanding of the market, including the complexities of electronic health record integration, the nuances of healthcare IT and the absolute necessity of robust security and trust protocols. This deep knowledge is why our current agentic AI solutions are so effective today; they are built to solve real-world problems we've spent a decade understanding," he said.