Lily picks up the phone

The single largest hidden tax in ASC pre-op coordination isn't insurance verification or chart review. It's the phone. Industry research compiling healthcare call center statistics shows the average healthcare call center hold time is 4.4 minutes, versus HFMA's 50-second target.¹ When that wait is on the patient side, more than 60% of patients abandon calls if they wait longer than a minute.² When it's on the staff side — calling a payer to chase an authorization — hold times of 30 to 45 minutes are routine.¹

MGMA DataDive figures cited widely in the industry put the average medical practice at roughly 53 inbound calls per physician per day.³ A pediatric ASC pre-op protocol documented in a University of San Francisco DNP capstone required RNs to make 25 to 30 calls in a single shift just to complete 72-hour pre-op outreach.⁴ Add payer calls for eligibility, benefits, prior auth status, and peer-to-peer scheduling, and a single ASC case can absorb 30 to 60 minutes of phone time before a patient ever walks through the door.

Voice AI in healthcare gets oversold when it's pitched as a replacement for clinical conversation. It gets undersold when its real strength — high-volume, structured, repeatable phone work — is ignored. Pre-op coordination and payer follow-up are full of exactly that kind of work. None of it requires improvisation. All of it requires persistence, accuracy, and availability outside business hours — including the early-morning and late-evening windows when patients are actually able to answer.

Lily places outbound calls in natural conversation, in English and Spanish, on the schedule the center sets.⁵ She works through the same scripts a coordinator would, but she does it 24/7 across every relevant time zone — which matters for ASCs whose patients commute across state lines or whose payer call centers are on the West Coast.

Lin et al. (2016), in the International Journal of Pediatrics, reported a randomized controlled trial in which text-message reminders dropped pediatric no-show rates from 38.1% to 23.5% — a 14.6 percentage-point reduction.⁶ A 2024 quality-improvement study in Anaesthesia using a structured engagement bundle increased patient engagement from 75.9% to 90.8% and dropped day-of missed appointments from 7.2% to 4.5%.⁷ Voice AI extends those gains by reaching the patients who don't engage with text or portals.

Every minute a coordinator spends on hold with a payer is a minute they aren't reviewing tomorrow's schedule, calling the patient whose insurance just changed, or catching the missing clearance on Friday's case. The labor savings are real. But the larger return on automating high-volume phone work is the operational headroom it creates for the work that actually requires a human.