SENTA Captures $1.3M in New Revenue While Boosting Call Center Efficiency with Assort Health

About SENTA Partners

SENTA Partners is a physician-led management services organization (MSO) that partners with leading ear, nose, throat (ENT) and allergy practices in the southern U.S. Their 15 partner practices have nearly 70 locations that serve patients in Kentucky, Virginia, the Carolinas, Texas, and Georgia.

SENTA provides strategic, operational, and administrative support to partner practices, empowering physicians to focus on their patients. As a part of SENTA’s remit, the organization aims to help its partner practices deliver the best possible care to their patients by investing in the latest technology to enhance care and streamline operations. 

Challenges Prior to Assort

Before partnering with Assort Health, SENTA’s call center staff struggled to keep pace with high inbound call volumes, which led to significant operational and patient experience challenges:

• High call drop rate: 24.3% of inbound calls were dropped, meaning thousands of patients were unable to connect with the practice.
• Long hold times impacting patient experience: Patients waited an average of 6 minutes 36 seconds, contributing to rising patient frustration as getting care felt inaccessible. 
• Staff overload: Call center operators were overwhelmed, unable to prioritize urgent or complex calls effectively, with an average of 15,000 calls per month coming into a single practice
• Cost and operational complexity: Scaling staffing was costly and time-consuming due to staff burnout and churn, with the need to regularly hire and train additional staff to support the high call volumes their practices were seeing. 

The overall organizational goal was clear: Reduce staffing costs and complexity while improving patient access and operational efficiency.

Solution: AI-Powered Precision Patient Access

To address these mounting challenges, SENTA partnered with Assort Health to modernize its contact center and support better patient access for its partner practices. At its core, Assort’s Precision Patient Access Platform helps SENTA dramatically reduce patient hold times by using AI agents to answer inbound calls. 

Instead of waiting on hold, patients are quickly greeted by a conversational agent that can help them get what they need. Assort’s Inbound Voice AI agents handle a range of patient interactions, including:

• Answering inbound calls and helping patients book and manage appointments
• Responding to patient questions quickly and accurately
• Triaging calls to the appropriate department when human support is needed, while passing along a summary of patient needs and symptoms so that staff can resolve calls faster
  
  

And, because the ENT and Allergy specialties typically have a high volume of patients that come in from referrals, SENTA needed a solution that could handle the complexity of scheduling referral appointments. Because referral scheduling can be complex, many generic AI solutions struggle to automate this workflow accurately. Purpose-built for specialty care, Assort supports the specialty-specific logic that SENTA needs to automate referral scheduling with confidence – its AI agents automatically and proactively:

• Pull a list of patients with open referrals from each practice’s EHR 
• Enroll them in an outbound campaign to schedule their referral appointment
• Reach out to patients on multiple channels (phone, SMS)
• Schedule appointments or continue follow-up throughout the specified timeframe, depending on the patients’ actions

This approach not only improves operational efficiency, but also significantly enhances the patient experience. Patients can get the care they need without the frustration of long hold times or repeated transfers; when surveyed about their experience they shared that Assort’s agents were “very polite and efficient,” and that “the call was quick and easy.”

Assort also enables SENTA to extend patient access 24/7, giving patients more flexibility to schedule appointments and get information outside of traditional business hours – driving both patient satisfaction and revenue impact.

After seeing early success with Assort’s AI agents handling inbound calls, SENTA expanded its use of Assort to include proactive patient outreach. Assort AI agents now reach out to patients with referrals via phone and SMS to get appointments scheduled, making the referral process more straightforward and convenient for both patients and staff.

Impact

Since implementing Assort Health’s Patient Access platform, SENTA has realized significant improvements in patient access, operational efficiency, and cost savings:

• 64% conversion rate on automated scheduling outreach for referred patients, drastically reducing manual effort needed to identify patients with open referrals, call them, and continue to follow up with them to schedule their appointments. 
• $1.3M additional appointment revenue captured via expanded patient access (24/7 & Spanish-language scheduling options) & proactive referrals outreach
• $400K+ in labor costs avoided annually by increasing staff capacity without additional headcount.
• 250+ hours saved per month for call center staff through automation of routine interactions.
• 97% reduction in hold time, from 6 minutes 36 seconds down to 12 seconds with Assort
  
  

These results have enabled SENTA to increase utilization and fill provider schedules more effectively, all while keeping staffing costs stable.