Community Health Systems and Denim Health Announce a Development Partnership Designed to Broadly Scale Conversational AI Across the CHS Patient Access Center

Business Wire 7-Oct-2024 4:15 PM

CHS and Denim Health are working together to enhance patient experience and generate efficiencies across CHS' proprietary call center that serves approximately 1,000 primary care providers

Community Health Systems, Inc. (NYSE:CYH) ("CHS") and Denim Health have announced a development partnership that is aimed at revolutionizing the call center experience for patients through the implementation of conversational AI in the CHS Patient Access Center ("PAC"). The PAC is a centralized call center serving nearly 1,000 CHS-affiliated primary care providers and handling more than 25,000 inbound calls daily.

CHS and Denim Health have been working together since late 2023 to develop call center workflows that incorporate conversational AI. Following a successful pilot, CHS has deployed Denim Health's AI bot across the PAC environment, making this advanced technology available for all inbound calls.

In the initial phase, conversational AI is being used to authenticate the identity of callers, understand the reason for their calls, and capture additional information to assist agents, before transferring callers to PAC agents. Denim Health's AI bot has successfully authenticated the identities of existing patients with zero instances of misidentification. In cases where the bot is unable to verify a caller's identity, the call is seamlessly transferred to a PAC agent for further assistance.

This use case already has resulted in a notable reduction in total call time, creating immediate efficiencies. The enterprise-wide deployment also lays the groundwork for additional use cases, which will include using conversational AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to enable patient self-scheduling, care gap closures, and other common transactions.

While consumers have become increasingly comfortable completing call center interactions using bots and automated systems, callers to the CHS Patient Access Center retain the option to speak with a human agent at any time during their call experience.

"Our partnership with Denim Health harnesses the power of conversational AI but also recognizes the importance of human interactions, especially for callers with more complex needs," said Tomi Galin, executive vice president of marketing and communications at Community Health Systems. "This initiative empowers our patients to complete their calls quickly and efficiently, streamlines agent workload to the patients who need more attention, and will create savings for the organization."

Denim Health co-founder and chief executive officer Mike Kadyan is equally enthusiastic about the early outcomes of the partnership. "We are thrilled to be innovating with CHS, a large, prestigious healthcare organization that is committed to solving pain points in the patient experience and to quickly driving the value of conversational AI. The scale of our partnership and the speed of our implementation will ultimately benefit other healthcare systems that also want to create patient-centric, streamlined, and efficient call center interactions."

The benefits of conversational AI in call centers include a more satisfactory patient experience, faster access to available appointments, efficient workloads that free agents to handle more complex patient needs, and data-driven insights that can help identify opportunities for additional operational and customer experience improvements.

About Community Health Systems, Inc.

Community Health Systems, Inc. is one of the nation's largest healthcare companies. The Company's affiliates are leading providers of healthcare services, developing and operating healthcare delivery systems in 39 distinct markets across 15 states. The Company's subsidiaries own or lease 69 affiliated hospitals and operate more than 1,000 sites of care, including physician practices, urgent care centers, freestanding emergency departments, occupational medicine clinics, imaging centers, cancer centers and ambulatory surgery centers. Shares in Community Health Systems, Inc. are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "CYH." The Company's headquarters are located in Franklin, Tennessee, a suburb south of Nashville. More information about the Company can be found on its website at www.chs.net.

About Denim Health

Denim Health provides a suite of AI-powered solutions designed to transform call center operations and patient engagement. Its Call Deflection, Patient Authentication, Agent Assist, and other healthcare solutions are improving patient experience while reducing administrative burden and costs. Denim's leadership team is composed of experienced innovators in health tech, each with a proven record of delivering tangible results for hospitals and health systems. The Denim team is driven every day to help clients with their missions, staff, and patients. For more information, visit www.denimhealth.com.

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