Your most valuable patient support team members were hired for their problem-solving skills and empathy in working with your patients. They are the human voice of your health system, capable of navigating complex patient concerns with care and expertise. So why do they spend most of their day acting as human ticket routers?
The constant flow of digital requests from patient portals like MyChart, for password resets, appointment scheduling, or prescription refills, has turned skilled professionals into digital traffic cops. They triage, categorize, and forward tickets, a repetitive process that burns out top talent and slows down patient care.
The High Cost of an Overwhelmed Digital Front Door
For a mid-sized health system, the volume is staggering. One Kognitos customer fielded approximately 8,500 digital support tickets per month through a single email address. With no intelligent triage in place, they faced lengthy patient wait times and a nearly 3% ticket abandonment rate, meaning hundreds of patients each month simply gave up on their requests.
That 3% represents a direct failure in the patient experience. It’s a patient who couldn’t access their lab results, a guardian who couldn’t schedule a child’s appointment, or an individual who couldn’t refill a critical prescription. When your digital front door is overwhelmed, patient trust erodes rapidly.
Why Existing Tools Can’t Solve the Triage Puzzle
The challenge of intelligent triage isn’t new, but previous attempts at a solution have consistently fallen short. Both legacy automation tools and the native features within existing healthcare platforms lack the cognitive ability to handle the complexity of human conversation.
- Brittle Bots and Fragile Scripts: Many organizations tried to solve this with Robotic Process Automation (RPA). But RPA bots are brittle; they follow rigid, screen-based rules-driven programming. They can’t effectively understand an email from a worried parent written in conversational language and understand its true intent. Common feedback highlights that when a user interface element changes or wording deviates even slightly, the bot breaks, creating more work for the human team it was meant to help.
- Insufficient Internal Capabilities: Patient portals like Epic MyChart and CRMs like Zendesk are powerful systems of record, but they are not native systems of intelligence. Their native automation capabilities are typically limited to basic, keyword-based routing. For example, a rule that routes any ticket containing the word “password” is useless if a patient writes “I can’t log in.” Reviewers frequently note that building and maintaining the hundreds of rigid rules required to even approach this problem is unsustainable and ineffective. These platforms were built to store and track information, not to interpret and act on it.
From Routing to Resolving: Automation in Plain English
Instead of forcing humans to work like machines, the solution is to empower them with machines that think more like humans. Kognitos is an enterprise automation platform that uses the latest capabilities of generative AI to understand and act on business processes described in plain English.
For healthcare support, the process is transformed:
- Ingest & Understand: Kognitos ingests every ticket from your patient portals and support inboxes. It reads the unstructured language to understand the patient’s actual intent, whether they wrote “I need to reset my password,” “forgot my login,” or “can’t get into my account.”
- Categorize & Act: The platform instantly categorizes the request (e.g., Password Reset, Appointment Scheduling, Chart Request). For simple issues, it takes immediate action, such as automatically emailing the member a link to reset their password. This means that the majority of requests can be fully automated to operate around the clock, without human intervention.
- Augment & Escalate: If more information is needed, say an MRN and DOB to fulfill a chart request, Kognitos communicates with the patient to gather the necessary data before a human ever sees the ticket. Only tickets that truly require human expertise are escalated, complete with a full summary and context. This provides an opportunity for your organization to provide the high-touch patient interaction that these individuals were hired to do in the first place.
This is much more than a drag-and-drop low-code workflow tool or a simple chatbot. We’re talking about AI that has the ability to reason, taking on the cognitive load of triage so your people can focus on care. Organizations can reduce the ticket abandonment rate to less than 1% by providing instant, accurate responses and freeing human personnel to handle the exceptions.
Investing in Your People and Your Patients
By automating the triage, you aren’t removing the human element from patient support. You are restoring it. When your best people are freed from the monotonous task of routing, they can invest their time in resolving complex patient issues, providing empathetic guidance, and improving the very processes that create friction in the patient journey.
This is a strategic investment in both short-term efficiency and long-term patient loyalty. You eliminate a major source of employee burnout while building a more responsive, resilient, and human-centric support system. The choice is simple: continue burning out your best people with low-value work, or empower them with AI that handles the noise so they can deliver the care your patients deserve.
Discover the Power of Kognitos
Our clients achieved:
- 97%reduction in manual labor cost
- 10xfaster speed to value
- 99%reduction in human error
