Webinar Recap: Lessons Learned from AI Adoption in Healthcare

ElevenLabs, Slalom, and Renown Health shared the approaches and challenges required when deploying AI agents in real-world healthcare environments. The key is to start with a single 'hero journey' that is high-volume, measurable, and relatively low-risk, such as scheduling, rather than pursuing multiple specialized pilots.

Patient experience is fragmented across websites, patient portals, call centers, EHRs, and billing systems, requiring repetitive identity verification and data re-entry. AI adoption should begin at the touchpoints where patients are present, connecting journeys that offer low risk and high impact.

In the demonstration, a patient seeking a contact lens prescription completed the process from new patient registration to appointment confirmation via a virtual scheduling assistant.

• Collected name, date of birth, and phone number conversationally
• Verified SMS authentication codes and handled recovery from misrecognition scenarios
• Guided patients to bring their insurance card if they did not know their member ID, allowing the process to continue
• Selected one of three available appointment slots and sent confirmation messages via email and text
• The same agent performed identical tasks on phone and SMS channels without separate builds

Handling phone and text channels with a single agent provided a native omnichannel experience, and the demo was built in approximately 2 hours. However, actual deployment requires enterprise-level work such as integration, testing, and compliance.

For healthcare institutions' adoption sequence, ambient listening (in cases not integrated with EHRs), call centers (often viewed as cost centers), and patient education and medication adherence were suggested. The main obstacle to call center automation is physician schedule management, which requires not only standardizing preference cards and schedule templates but also physician champions, leadership support for change management, and individual follow-up coaching.

Renown Health is building trust with its compliance team by starting with pilots that do not use patient information. Early results from schedule template standardization and ambient listening have led to increased interest among clinical staff for further AI adoption, emphasizing that adoption speed is also important as patient expectations have already shifted.