South Shore Orthopedics Eliminates its Voicemail Backlog & Keeps Schedules Full with Assort Health

0

End-of-day voicemails (down from 600-1,000 backlog)

100%

Provider schedule fill rate maintained

45%

of inbound calls fully resolved by Assort’s agent

4.4/5

Patient satisfaction rating

"Patient access is the number one thing we've built our practice around: great access with great outcomes. If you're not answering the phone or giving patients ways to reach you, even after hours, you can lose business. Assort’s agent lets us be there 24/7, keeping schedules full and making a huge difference for both our patients and our front office staff."

David Kobasa

Chief Operating Officer, South Shore Orthopedics

About South Shore Orthopedics

South Shore Orthopedics is a privately owned orthopedic practice based in Hingham, Massachusetts. The group has 15 physicians and 13 physician assistants across two locations and sees about 350 to 450 patients daily.

The practice has roughly doubled in size over the past decade. Patient access has been central to that growth, and it's the thing South Shore Orthopedics has built its reputation around. As of June 2026, the practice joined a larger management services organization (MSO), the Northeast Orthopaedic Alliance (NOA).

Challenges Before Assort

As South Shore Orthopedics grew, the volume of inbound calls and referrals grew with it, and the front office struggled to keep pace. Staffing the phones to match demand proved difficult and expensive, and the patient experience suffered as a result.

A voicemail backlog they couldn't eliminate. For weeks at a stretch, the practice had 600 to 1,000 voicemails sitting in its box that staff simply couldn't get to. Patients were leaving messages, submitting forms, and emailing, and waiting far too long to hear back.‍
Staffing that couldn't flex with demand. The front office saw expected turnover, training ramp-up periods, and unexpected leaves. Finding people with the right customer-service skills to register patients, answer questions, and follow up was a constant challenge.‍
Unpredictable call volume. Inbound calls fluctuated through the week: Monday mornings or the day after a holiday, in particular, brought a flood of calls that was nearly impossible to staff for.‍
A poor patient experience. Long hold times, full call queues, and an after-hours answering service that couldn't keep up left patients and referral sources frustrated.

"It was just more work than we could really handle," David Kobasa, Chief Operating Officer of South Shore Orthopedics, recalled. He knew there had to be a manage patient access.

Solution: Specialty-Specific AI Patient Access

After evaluating other platforms, South Shore Orthopedics chose Assort Health due to the technology itself: they were looking for a solution that could actually do the work, and they felt Assort was ahead on agentic AI capability.

South Shore went live with Assort earlier this year. South Shore named the agent “Oscar” and placed him at the top of its IVR, so he handles every inbound call.

Today, Oscar acts as a true extension of the front office team. He:

Answers 100% of inbound calls and resolves a large number of calls: booking, rescheduling, confirming, and canceling appointments.
Solves patient needs including medication refills, referral requests, and clinical messages, and routes them to the right department with context.
Answers frequently asked questions, taking routine, non-clinical inquiries off staff plates.
Keeps physician schedules full. When a patient cancels a next-day appointment at 9 p.m., that slot reopens immediately, so another patient calling in right after that can grab it.
Integrates directly with South Shore's EHR, athenahealth, so that every appointment Oscar books, reschedules, confirms, or cancels flows into the system in real-time.

The partnership has mattered as much as the platform. From a hands-on implementation through ongoing, responsive support, Assort's team has stayed engaged well beyond go-live, continually refining Oscar and expanding the cases he can resolve.

South Shore Orthopedics is now extending Oscar to 24/7 after-hours coverage so patients can book, cancel, or reschedule any time, including evenings and weekends.

Impact

The results were immediate. Within a few weeks of going live, South Shore Orthopedics found itself appropriately staffed and, for the first time in a long while, caught up.

The voicemail backlog disappeared. Staff now leave at the end of every business day with zero voicemails and all callbacks complete, down from a recurring backlog of 600–1,000 voicemails.
10,000+ calls handled every month. Oscar answers every one of the ~10,000 monthly calls, resolving about 45% of them before any handoff to a human is needed.
Schedules stay full. Real-time scheduling and after-hours availability have helped the practice keep provider schedules filled to nearly 100%.
4.4 / 5 patient satisfaction. Patients rate their experience with Oscar an average of 4.4 out of 5 stars. One patient mentioned to the practice how simple booking with Oscar had been.
Relief for front office staff. Instead of facing queues of voicemails, phone staff now handle a manageable few, easing the pressure of repetitive work and dealing with fewer frustrated patients.

Perhaps the clearest proof came when South Shore Orthopedics had to turn Oscar off for a single day during a system update tied to the MSO transition. By 11 a.m., voicemails had piled back up to around 100. The team switched Oscar back on the next morning and was back to normal within 24 hours.

By handling rising call volume without adding headcount, South Shore Orthopedics has made patient access faster and more reliable, and built a foundation that scales as the practice adds providers and grows within its new MSO.