In a Nutshell

How can healthcare organizations ensure patients receive immediate assistance after hours without overwhelming on-call Physician Assistant staff or relying on costly answering services?

A specialized Orthopaedic surgery ASC clinic in New Jersey adopted an AI-powered after-hours medical answering agent to handle patient calls outside of normal business hours.

Within the first month, the AI assistant handled 868 patient calls, dramatically reducing PA-interruptions and eliminating the need for a third-party answering service.

The result: an 87% reduction in physician call burden, improved patient responsiveness, and measurable cost savings to the Orthopaedic practice.

The Challenge

Like many healthcare practices, the Orthopaedic clinic struggled to manage growing volumes of after-hours patient calls.

Patients frequently contacted the practice during evenings and weekends with questions about medications, appointment scheduling concerns, and pre-op and post-op procedural issues. These calls often interrupted PAs unnecessarily and created operational bottlenecks.

Key challenges included:

• Frequent after-hours interruptions for physician assistants due to high call volume and inefficient call triaging.

• Reliance on a costly external answering service with inadequate clinical decision support.

• Operational inefficiencies and an inconsistent patient experience overwhelmed PA staff managing next-day follow-ups, with limited after-hours support.

The clinic needed a scalable, intelligent solution that could assist patients immediately while ensuring that physicians were contacted only when clinically necessary.

The Solution

The clinic partnered with Otomo Health to deploy an AI-powered medical answering agent designed specifically for healthcare practices. The conversational AI assistant was configured to provide:

• Automated Call Handling: The AI agent answered all incoming after-hours patient calls using a natural voice conversation, ensuring patients received an immediate response.

• Intelligent AI- Assisted Clinical Triage: The system gathered patient information and determined the urgency of each request, escalating only clinically necessary calls to the on-call provider.

• Task Routing and Follow-Up: Non-urgent requests, including appointment scheduling, prescription questions, billing inquiries, and other administrative issues, were automatically routed to the appropriate staff or department for next-day follow-up. For example, billing questions were sent to the billing team, scheduling requests went to the scheduling team, and other inquiries were routed based on their nature.

The Results

Within the first month of deployment, the AI medical answering agent delivered measurable operational and financial impact to the Orthopaedic practice.

• Operational Performance: Achieved a 49% reduction in administrative workload and improved resolution time for calls routed to administrative staff for next-day follow-up

• Physician Impact: 87% reduction in after-hours call burden

• Cost Efficiency: Fully replaced a third-party answering service, reducing costs by 55% while streamlining after-hours call handling.

By intelligently triaging calls, the AI agent ensured that physicians were contacted only for urgent cases, while routine inquiries were handled automatically.

The Bottom Line:

This deployment demonstrated how AI-powered patient engagement can transform after-hours operations.

By replacing manual call handling with intelligent automation, the clinic achieved:

• Better overall patient responsiveness & satisfaction

• Reduced PA workload

• Lower operational costs

• A scalable foundation for 24/7 patient communication

With Otomo Health’s Voice AI, the clinic turned after-hours patient support from a continuous operational burden into an efficient, automated system that helped both patients and providers.

Ready to re-engage your patients?

Discover how Otomo Health’s AI-powered medical answering agent can assist your practice by instantly responding to every patient call, intelligently routing urgent issues to the on-call provider, and automating routine inbound requests. This helps reduce PA-staff interruptions & burnout while improving overall patient access.