SUMMARY OF SUCCESS

Creating capacity equivalent to 239 full-time employees through AI-powered call automation

Houston Methodist, a nine-hospital academic health system serving the greater Houston area, successfully implemented ActiumHealth's AI-powered patient communication platform to address overwhelming call volumes and operational inefficiencies. They recently shared the results of this implementation on a webinar hosted by the Scottsdale Institute. The implementation delivered tangible results: automating 2.2 million inbound calls annually, generating 49,000 imaging appointments through outbound campaigns, and creating capacity equivalent to 239 full-time employees valued at $18 million in staffing costs.

THE CHALLENGE

Efficiently scaling patient communications

As a major health system, Houston Methodist faced mounting patient access pressure. The organization struggled with four critical challenges:

• Extending team capacity without hiring more staff: Houston Methodist was challenged to do more with less, requiring creative ways to extend current team bandwidth while holding the line on expenses.  
• Managing routine inbound requests at scale: Despite extensive work on appointment reminders and patient prep, Houston Methodist still received many calls from patients seeking reassurance or answers to basic parking and logistics questions that couldn't fit in traditional texts. 
• Closing gaps in outreach for reminders and care follow-ups: Resources and attention focused on inbound requests prevented proactive outreach to patients for generated orders, referrals, and care gaps.  
• Accelerating a QA process that was slow, inconsistent, and hard to scale: The existing manual process involved labor-intensive call listening, scoring, and calibration between individual QA analysts.  

THE SOLUTION

Comprehensive AI-Powered patient communications

Houston Methodist partnered with ActiumHealth to implement an integrated platform featuring three core components:

• Inbound AI Agents: Conversational virtual agents that replace traditional IVR systems, handling appointment management, prescription refills, call routing, spam and silent deflection, and password resets.  
• Outbound AI Agents: Automated campaigns targeting patients with open imaging orders, "Find a Doctor" requests, and physician referrals.  
• Insights Platform: Call analytics, QA automation, and performance insights using large language models to analyze patient interactions and provide comprehensive insights into call center performance. 

Implementation Strategy: From skepticism to strategic alignment

Houston Methodist moved from initial skepticism about whether patients would engage with virtual agents to organizational buy-in. Leadership became strategically aligned around three key benefits: increased capacity, improved compliance, and measurable ROI.

The implementation followed a phased approach, building trust through progressive rollouts. It started with inbound automation, then expanded to outbound campaigns, and finally to QA insights.  

THE RESULT

Transformative impact across operations

Implementing ActiumHealth’s full suite delivered quantifiable results across all three platform components. The following figures represent the run rate for 2025.

Inbound Automation Results:

• 2.2 million inbound calls across hospitals, practices, and service lines  
• 42 FTE equivalent capacity created annually  
• $3.1 million staff cost equivalent per year 

Outbound Campaign Results:

• 731,000 outbound calls  
• 49,000 imaging appointments scheduled  
• 26 FTE equivalent capacity per year  
• $1.95 million staff cost equivalent per year  

QA Insights Results:

• 2.4 million calls analyzed for QA  
• 85% QA coverage, up from under 2% with existing staff  
• 171 FTE capacity equivalent per year  
• $12.9 million staff cost equivalent per year  

Future Expansion

Houston Methodist plans to continue expanding use cases including outbound referrals, inbound expansion across all of their primary and specialty practices, and QA insights powering performance coaching, with a long-term vision of a 360° patient engagement model using AI. 

Key Takeaways

The Houston Methodist implementation demonstrates that AI-powered patient communication can deliver immediate operational impact while building a foundation for transformative patient engagement. Success requires strategic planning and strong IT partnership from day one.