Background

The CORE Institute operates across Arizona with more than 765 employees and 71 contact center staff, delivering high-volume orthopaedic care across multiple locations. As the organization grew, communication workflows between patients, clinical teams, and scheduling staff became increasingly inefficient. Providers and medical assistants were spending significant time listening to voicemail messages to determine patient needs. Each message had to be played in full before staff could determine whether it represented a routine request or a time-sensitive post-operative issue. This manual process created delays in patient response and consumed valuable clinical time.

At the same time, surgery scheduling teams were structured around physician-specific queues. Some schedulers would become overwhelmed with patient requests while others had available capacity but could not assist due to routing limitations. These operational inefficiencies created delays for patients and unnecessary workload imbalances for staff.

“Our goal is simple: patients should make one call and get where they need to go. But without visibility, you can’t see where the experience breaks down—or improve it. With Dialpad, we finally have the insight to pinpoint and fix those moments in the patient journey.”

Chase Williams
SVP of IT Transformation
Core Institute, Arizona

Approach

To modernize communication workflows, hopper deployed Dialpad’s AI-powered communications platform across the organization. The solution addressed three major operational challenges.

#1 AI Voicemail Transcription:
Instead of listening to each voicemail message individually, providers could instantly read transcripts generated by Dialpad’s AI technology. This allowed clinical teams to rapidly triage messages and identify urgent patient needs such as post-operative complications while routing routine requests to administrative staff.

#2 AI-Powered After-Hours Call Handling:
To further streamline patient access, AI-driven call handling was implemented for after-hours inquiries. Rather than routing calls to outsourced answering services, the system uses conversational AI to triage patient needs, capture intent, and route urgent clinical concerns appropriately. This automation significantly reduced reliance on manual after-hours services while ensuring patients still received timely responses.

#3 Data-Driven Workflow Redesign:
Dialpad analytics revealed that patient scheduling was being slowed by siloed physician-based call queues. Hopper redesigned the workflow into specialty-based scheduling pools, enabling any available scheduler to assist patients across the specialty.  This change balanced workload across staff and removed bottlenecks in patient access.

Outcomes

Within the first 30 days of deployment, the impact was measurable and significant:

• 487 hours of voicemail processed through AI transcription

• 50% faster triage when reading messages compared with listening

• 243 hours of provider time reclaimed in the first month alone

• 60% reduction in after-hours service operating expenses through AI-powered call handling

Operational improvements also included:

• Faster identification of urgent post-operative patient issues

• Balanced workload across scheduling teams

• Reduced administrative burden on providers and medical assistants

• Improved patient response times and access to care

By replacing manual communication workflows with AI-powered insights and automation, The CORE Institute significantly improved staff efficiency while enabling providers to spend more time focusing on patient care.