Meet the new hires: How Southwest General put AI on the org chart

Southwest General hired two new coworkers this year who never call in sick. They aren’t super-human – in fact, they aren’t human at all. They’re AI agents, born out of a project that started with nothing more than a spreadsheet and a goal to reduce no-shows. 

In this webinar, three of the people who built these AI coworkers – Kristin Workman (Clinical Applications Operations Manager), Meredith Evans (Pre-Access Manager), and Elizabeth Mamaril (Healthcare IT Project Manager) – walk through how Southwest General went from manual, spreadsheet-driven scheduling to a full AI-powered patient access strategy with two digital hires: 

• Hope handles outbound patient scheduling and inbound insurance FAQs by text and phone
• Ava supports the team behind the scenes on radiology authorizations

Along the way, no-show rates dropped from highs of 11% down to 4%, authorization time fell from 20 minutes to five, and patient satisfaction hit 96%. 

Here’s what you’ll learn in the webinar: 

• How Southwest General built the foundation for AI success – starting small with appointment reminders and expanding into digital intake, scheduling, and authorizations without rebuilding from scratch each time. 
• How they “hired” Hope: holding auditions for her voice, running weeks of test calls, and working to make her sound trustworthy rather than robotic. 
• What a real Hope call sounds like, scheduling an appointment with a patient. 
• How they proved ROI early enough to earn C-suite buy-in for what came next. 
• How Ava cut radiology authorization time by 75% by pulling scattered information into one place for a stretched-thin team of three employees. 
• What’s next for Southwest General’s AI roster, including care gap outreach and a new agent, Acorn. 

Watch the full webinar and get in touch today if you’d like to learn how you can add digital hires to your health system’s org chart.