The current state of healthcare communication creates unnecessary friction. Despite our industry’s best efforts, the majority of healthcare access is still coordinated over the phone. Across our customer base, we consistently find that more than 70% of call volume relates to basic administrative tasks: confirming appointments, canceling, rescheduling, scheduling new visits, and department transfers.
These are fundamentally simple tasks that create bottlenecks in the system. Patients face long hold times, high abandonment rates, and limited access to care coordination outside business hours. Meanwhile, healthcare staff spend valuable time on routine tasks instead of focusing on higher-acuity patient needs.
Patient communication isn’t just a part of patient access; it’s the foundation of it. When we remove communication barriers, we dramatically improve access to care.
I believe agentic AI is poised to accelerate the breakdown of common patient communications barriers – faster and more effectively than ever before.
Agentic AI: A Transformative Force for Patient Communications
Agentic AI represents the next major tidal wave hitting healthcare. Hundreds of companies are entering this space, with hundreds of millions of dollars being raised. The pace of change is extraordinary—faster than any technology revolution we’ve experienced in our lifetimes, including mobile, web, and social media.
We’re seeing new infrastructure upgrades that meaningfully advance the technology’s potential on what feels like a daily basis. This rapid innovation is driving improvements across the board—from reducing latency to improving background noise suppression.
At Artera, we’re deeply committed to driving innovation in agentic AI. Over the past few months alone, we’ve updated our underlying infrastructure more than 20 times, achieving exponential improvements to product quality. Our latency now sits below 500 milliseconds, we’ve deployed dozens of MCP tools and servers, our continuous learning framework is in production and ingesting live transcripts, and we’re supporting multiple languages. These aren’t just incremental improvements—they’re transformational leaps that directly benefit patient care.
Deterministic AI Agents: A Stepping Stone to Autonomous AI Agents
Despite significant technological advancements, our core mission has remained unchanged for a decade: making healthcare number one in customer service. To us, “customer service” refers to how patients experience care outside the four walls of a hospital or clinic.
Our focus has been specifically on communications—enabling seamless, asynchronous interactions between healthcare providers and patients, no matter where they are. The rise of artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how this experience will unfold in healthcare moving forward.
Our AI-powered, deterministic Flows Agents deliver two strategic benefits that align with our vision:
First, it serves as a definitive knowledge base of proven pathways that have been hardened over many years across hundreds of institutions and for millions of patients. This knowledge repository is an invaluable tool for training fully autonomous agents.
Second, Flows Agents act as a stepping stone into fully autonomous AI. Healthcare operates under strict regulations, where technology—especially autonomous AI—can have life-and-death implications. Flows uses deterministic logic combined with natural language understanding (NLU) to guide patients through specific automated journeys. These pathways eliminate risks associated with hallucinations and jailbreaking, helping build initial comfort with AI among healthcare leadership, while creating a clear path toward full autonomy through our AI Agents.
Where to Start: Automating Routine Interactions That Create Barriers to Care
Agentic AI offers the opportunity to automate the routine administrative phone tasks I initially mentioned, while making them available 24/7 at a quality bar that approaches that of real humans. By reducing the burden of simple interactions, we elevate staff to focus on higher-acuity patient needs, reduce hold times and abandonment rates, and ultimately improve access to care.
As system interoperability continues to advance, we’ll be able to streamline more routine patient tasks, creating a truly personalized, concierge-like experience for every patient while simultaneously reducing healthcare operating costs.
This enhanced accessibility will span all communication channels—voice, messaging, and web—ensuring patients can connect anytime, anywhere. At Artera, we’re excited to shape the future of patient communication, where every individual benefits from 24/7 concierge-like care.
The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same
While technology is changing rapidly, the fundamental challenges of healthcare communication remain the same. Patients need frictionless, asynchronous communication channels that allow them to engage with their care teams on their own terms and schedules. Providers, on the other hand, need efficient, automated workflows with the flexibility to involve human intervention when necessary.
I believe our decade of experience in tackling these core challenges gives us a distinct edge as we innovate with agentic AI. By building on a foundation of proven solutions and deep market knowledge, we not only leverage the potential of technology but also address the real, pressing needs of the industry.
Today’s healthcare market is saturated with AI agent solutions, making vendor evaluation difficult for healthcare providers amidst similar claims and significant costs.
To simplify your evaluation, we’ve identified the top five factors that distinguish Artera’s AI agents today. Whether you’re new to AI agents or well into your research for a partner, we hope this distillation proves valuable.
Artera’s blog posts and press releases are for informational purposes only and are not legal or business advice. Artera assumes no responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of blogs and non-legally required press releases. Claims for damages arising from decisions based on this release are expressly disclaimed, to the extent permitted by law.
