The opportunities to drive innovation in healthcare are seemingly endless. From a technology perspective, AI’s rapid advancement alone has considerable implications and benefits for everything from compliance to the patient experience to broader operational efficiencies.
But what are some specific ways in which healthcare practices and organizations can transform their processes?
Below, we’ll walk through some real-world case studies and examples in which healthcare organizations are leveraging emerging technologies to reshape healthcare delivery, empower their teams, and innovate on existing processes.
4 areas of strategic innovation in healthcare
From improving the patient experience to increasing compliance to regulatory requirements, technology can empower healthcare organizations to operate more effectively in a range of ways:
Patient-centric innovations
Improving patient outcomes is one of the biggest potential use cases for technologies such as AI—and the industry knows it. Sixty-two percent of respondents in McKinsey’s survey of healthcare leaders said that consumer engagement and experience is an area where generative AI has the greatest potential.
For the last few years, organizations such as the National Academy of Medicine have presented ways in which AI can support healthcare professionals in making more informed decisions—e.g., “a physician making a diagnosis, a nurse creating a care plan, or a social services agency arranging services for an elderly citizen.”
Real-world example: Easton Dermatological Associates
But AI doesn’t just help healthcare professionals. For Easton Dermatological Associates, whose business was quickly expanding, their previous on-prem phone system was becoming a hindrance. The phone system essentially consisted of an auto-attendant and a phone menu, and with hundreds of calls a day, it became too much for the system to reliably and efficiently manage.
So, they moved to a more modern contact center platform with more innovative features such as custom call queues and reporting.
“Now we have true call queues to ensure agents efficiently and quickly answer calls, for example, and our managers can easily drop in and monitor agents’ calls in real-time to improve training and performance.,” says Lainie Elliott, Patient Support Manager.
“The best we could do with our old system was say, ‘We received 487 calls today.’ But with RingCX, I can see how many patients are calling to schedule appointments and how many are calling for other reasons. And using data like answer time, average handling time, and how many calls each agent takes in a day, I can now identify our high-performing agents and determine which ones might benefit from additional supervision or training.”
Operational improvements
Technology can also help healthcare practices streamline administrative processes and enhance cross-functional collaboration.
From automating patient data management to predictive inventory management for medical supplies, medications, and equipment, AI is already showing significant potential in transforming healthcare operations and management.
Real-world example: Tarrytown Expocare
As the pharmacy most widely used in the US by healthcare providers caring for IDD (intellectual and developmental disabilities) patients, Tarrytown Expocare receives roughly 1,500 calls every day.
Because one of Tarrytown’s key services is medication delivery, many of these conversations involve providing critical medications for IDD patients. The team needed a more efficient way of analyzing such a large volume of calls and identifying key patterns and areas for improvement to better serve their customers.
“Because I can set up a tracker in RingSense AI to flag calls about delivery issues and immediately alert my team about them, we can catch a pattern of late deliveries anywhere in the country very quickly,” says Matt Pernesky, Director of Customer Experience.
“And considering how important timely delivery of medication is to our providers, that new visibility is invaluable.” When the team was manually reviewing calls, they would be able to audit around 20 of the 1,500 daily calls—or just over 1%.
“Now RingSense AI analyzes almost 100% of those 1,500 calls—with better analysis than we had in many cases—so we’re getting a more accurate picture of our performance and customers’ issues than ever.”
Regulatory and compliance considerations
One of the biggest potential pitfalls for healthcare practices and organizations is in maintaining compliance at all times, with human errors leading to fines, lawsuits, and other penalties.
With new compliance platforms and technologies, it is now possible to automate compliance checks and reduce manual documentation. For example, there is now incident reporting review software, policy approval automation features, and other tools that are designed to help healthcare practices stay compliant.
Real-world example: REE Medical
Founded by an emergency room physician and passionate advocate for veterans, REE Medical is an organization that is dedicated to simplifying the complex process of VA (Veterans Affairs) disability claims.
After experiencing significant growth over the course of two years, REE Medical expanded the team from 40 to almost 400 employees to support growing demand from customers. But maintaining compliance standards over the growing volume of customer interactions was a challenge, even with a larger team.
So, the team implemented a new AI solution, RingSense, which has a keyword tracking feature that has transformed REE Medical’s compliance strategy. Today, the company maintains a targeted list of tracked keywords to ensure that the most relevant and high-risk areas of compliance are continuously monitored.
“Our compliance rate is now 99.86%,” says Scarlet Wheeler, VP of Corporate Compliance. Using AI to augment compliance and coaching efforts was also useful when REE Medical made an acquisition in the same industry.
“During that acquisition, I was able to build specific keyword trackers that allowed us to monitor and ensure everyone was following the right process,” Wheeler says. “Our auditor could provide real-time feedback when a keyword hits a tracker, alerting the caller on how to improve for the next client.”
RingCentral tip: When choosing technology partners, make sure they can help your organization maintain compliance with HIPAA and any other relevant regulations in your region or country. Here are seven questions to ask a vendor about HIPAA-compliance. |
Collaboration and partnerships
Finally, the best way to drive strategic innovation is to collaborate with your technology vendors. Whether you’re looking to improve communication with your patients or empower your teams to be more productive, vendors should be able to speak to specific use cases and how their products can support those requirements.
In fact, Forrester has coined the term co-innovation, or “developing advanced partner strategies that focus on outcomes, share risk, align incentives to motivate all parties, and work in blended teams to achieve better results.” To stay at the forefront of healthcare innovation, it’s beneficial to have this collaborative relationship with technology and service providers.
Real-world example: Sun River Health
As New York’s largest federally qualified health center, Sun River Health serves over 245,000 patients each year with a wide range of healthcare services at 40 clinical sites.
But its previous on-premises phone system had considerable limitations, and the team knew it needed a more modern and robust solution to improve the patient experience and the department’s overall efficiency.
Working collaboratively with its new vendor, Sun River Health brought forward its list of non-negotiables. “We put together an extensive list of must-haves for a company-wide communications solution: reporting and analytics, contact center functionality, cost, mobility, security, the company’s reputation for support, etc,” says Eric Brosius, Vice President of Technology Services.
Together, they were then able to ensure the new system had the specific functionality the team needed, such as a callback option, self-service features, and more detailed analytics.
“Our automated menu now invites callers to request a text link to our patient portal, where they can receive lab results or communicate directly with their provider. Callers used to wait to speak with a live agent for those inquiries, but now we’re turning them into self-serve experiences, which benefits everyone,” says Diana Velez, Director of Sun River Health’s Patient Care Contact Center.
“Thanks to the reporting that lets us analyze call data, and the Workforce Management tools that let us move agents around to meet high-volume times, we’ve improved our answer rate from 75% to 97%—which is a real achievement considering we receive tens of thousands of calls a week.”
Drive strategic innovation with RingCentral’s HIPAA-compliant AI healthcare communications platform
Whether you’re looking to improve the patient experience or provide a more innovative model of healthcare delivery, it’s crucial that your teams are equipped with the right technology and partners to support these initiatives.
RingCentral’s solutions are designed for both internal and patient-facing communications, while empowering healthcare teams to drive innovation at scale.
Book a demo with our team to learn more about how healthcare organizations are using RingCentral’s AI-powered solutions!
Originally published Jan 24, 2025