Whitehall PA - CuroAI, an AI voice platform built specifically for healthcare patient access, attended the 35th Annual Healthcare Contact Center Times (HCCT) Conference held June 3 to 5, 2026, in Atlanta, Georgia. The company joined hundreds of patient access leaders, contact center directors, and healthcare executives from across the United States to learn, share ideas, and explore better ways to help patients get the care they need faster and easier.
One thing was clear after three days on the floor: the same problems are showing up in every healthcare contact center, whether the organization runs 50 agents or 600.

At HCCT 2026, conversations kept coming back to the same five challenges that are making life hard for contact center teams everywhere:
Staffing shortages: It is harder than ever to hire and keep good people in healthcare call centers.
FMLA and absenteeism: When staff call out sick or take leave, there is no one left to cover the phones.
Long hold times: Patients are waiting too long just to schedule an appointment or ask a simple question.
Rising patient expectations: Patients today expect fast, easy, and friendly service every time they call.
More demand than teams can handle: Call volumes keep going up while team sizes stay flat or shrink.

These are not small problems. For a clinic that receives 500 patient calls per day, missing calls and long wait times can cost an estimated 1.3 million to 1.7 million dollars in lost revenue every year, according to industry benchmarks. And beyond the numbers, every missed call is a patient who did not get the help they needed.

CuroAI is built by people who spent more than two decades running real patient access operations. As a high-volume healthcare call center, we grew to support over 80 clinics, managing tens of thousands of patient calls every day, and then turned that hands-on experience into an AI platform that works the same way a well-trained human team does.
The founders experienced the same staffing shortages, the same burnout, and the same missed calls that HCCT attendees described on the conference floor. That is exactly why CuroAI was built: to solve the problem from the inside, not to sell software from the outside.

In simple terms, CuroAI acts as an always-on front-line team member that never calls in sick. The platform answers every call immediately, handles routine tasks automatically, and passes complex situations to a human agent with all the context already filled in. No hold time. No missed calls. No dropped handoffs.
The platform handles the following tasks across all hours of the day and night:
Appointment scheduling and rescheduling, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
Intelligent call routing that sends each caller to the right department immediately
Billing and payment support for routine patient questions
Prescription refill coordination routed automatically to the pharmacy
Proactive outbound calls for reminders, follow-ups, and patient outreach
After-hours coverage so patients always reach someone, even when the office is closed

CuroAI works directly inside the EHR systems healthcare organizations already use, including Epic, Cerner, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, and more than 20 others. There is no need to replace existing systems or retrain entire teams. Most organizations are fully up and running within four weeks.

When patients cannot get through on the phone, they do not just get frustrated. They sometimes go to a different provider. They miss follow-up appointments. They delay care that matters. A healthcare contact center is not just an administrative function. It is often the very first experience a patient has with a health system, and that first impression shapes whether they come back.
CuroAI believes every patient deserves to have their call answered immediately, to get help without being put on hold, and to feel like their healthcare provider is organized, responsive, and easy to work with. That is the standard the platform is built to deliver.

There are many AI tools in the market promising to fix healthcare call centers. Most of them were built by software engineers who have never run a patient access team. CuroAI is different because it was built by operators who have personally managed the exact problems their customers are now facing.
The platform includes clinical-grade safety guardrails to make sure the AI handles only what it is trained and verified to handle, and immediately involves a human agent for anything sensitive or complex. Every deployment goes through a controlled four-week pilot using at least 30 days of real call data before the system goes live. Security meets the highest standards in healthcare, including full HIPAA compliance, SOC 2 Type II certification.

The CuroAI team spent three days at Booth 11 having real conversations with patient access leaders who are responsible for hundreds of agents and tens of thousands of patient calls every day. The message from the floor was consistent: healthcare organizations know the problem is real, and they are actively looking for solutions that actually work in the real world.
The encouraging part, as the CuroAI team noted after the conference, is that these leaders are not sitting still. They are testing new tools, sharing what works, and pushing hard to create a better experience for both patients and staff. CuroAI is committed to being a part of that solution.