Why faster access starts with fewer phone calls

In a small-group practice, the phones rarely stop. Staff check patients in, work through the message inbox, chase down paperwork, and answer call after call after call, most of them short and repetitive. When the lines stay that busy, the instinct is to answer more of them: add front-desk coverage, rework the phone tree, shorten hold times.

But high call volume is usually the visible symptom of something happening earlier in the patient journey. Many routine calls come from patients who can’t easily complete a task or find an answer through another channel.

The more productive question should be:

“Why did this need to become a call in the first place?”

Phone volume is just the tip of the iceberg

Call volume isn’t a single problem to solve. It’s the combined result of several unaddressed patient needs, and those needs stop looking alike once you truly identify what the patient was actually trying to do.

• Scheduling friction: The patient wants to book, reschedule, or cancel, and has no practical way to do it without help.
• Information friction: They need directions, prep instructions, hours, or a policy explained, and what they found was hard to locate or hard to understand.
• Visibility friction: They can’t tell whether a referral, refill, or form has been addressed, so they call to check.
• Handoff friction: They already asked through a portal message, web form, or voicemail, and the request never reached the right person or workflow, so they reach out again.

These distinctions are important to surface. Simply answering the phone faster won’t resolve a patient’s inability to see the status of a prior authorization. That’s why each category requires a different response.

Sorting calls this way also surfaces more nuanced workflows. What sounds like a quick question often becomes a chart check, a message to a clinician, a callback, and a documentation task. These are routine patient requests that can quietly consume hours.

This kind of work never appears on the schedule, but it competes for time and attention with refills, referrals, and results, and the delays it creates produce yet another round of calls.

Fewer routine calls can lead to faster access

Once the friction is sorted by type, the response becomes practical: give each category a more direct path to resolution.

Scheduling friction addresses self-scheduling, where patients book or change appointments themselves. athenahealth research found that 67% of surveyed patients prefer to schedule online, and roughly three-quarters said digital tools to manage their healthcare are important to them¹.

Information friction addresses proactive communication: notifications and reminders that carry prep instructions, directions, and what to bring can help answer the right question prior to the patient even thinking of asking it.

Visibility friction is addressed by status. When a patient can see that a refill went to the pharmacy or a referral was sent, the check-in call may not need to happen.

Handoff friction is addressed by connected workflows, so a request made digitally lands in the queue staff are already working on rather than in a separate inbox someone has to remember to check.

These solutions help patients resolve issues through whichever channel fits their needs while preserving limited staff capacity for the situations that genuinely require a “human-in-the-loop”. This can also prevent repetitive administrative tasks that lead to staff burnout².

AI can help conversations reach the right resolution

Digital channels resolve more when they can interpret what a patient is actually asking. Patient Conversations in athenaOne® combines AI-supported two-way texting and secure chat to address routine questions directly, understand and route requests that need action, and bring staff into the conversation when human judgment is required³. This is supported by AI-powered triage that is designed to interpret intent and escalate to staff rather than guess, which keeps expertise in the loop.

At the point of contact, a scheduling request can move toward a booking, an information question can be answered in the thread, a status question can be checked, and a request that needs a person is designed to reach one with the context already attached, so the patient doesn’t have to start over.

Some patients will still call, either by preference or because the situation warrants it. That’s why athenahealth is extending the same approach to voice, with virtual front-desk capabilities designed to handle routine needs within the call and escalate more complex ones to staff.

Text, chat, and voice shouldn’t operate in a silo. They should be more seamlessly interconnected, where technology routes patients toward the right resolution and staff stay available for the conversations that need them.

The goal is better access

A practice that optimizes for the lowest possible call volume is still optimizing for the phone. The better measure is how quickly and easily patients get what they need, and how much staff attention is left over for the work that genuinely requires it.

That means giving patients real options: self-service, digital conversation, voice, or an expert. Fewer routine calls are just a byproduct. Faster patient access is the point.