As health system executives explore the potential benefits of agentic AI, many see call centers as low hanging fruit to test out conversational AI. Calls centers are costly to run, are often short on staff and there’s a need to make big improvements in the customer experience.
Tampa General Hospital tapped startup Hyro to quickly roll out AI voice agents into its contact center to respond faster to patients’ calls, lower the call abandonment rate and streamline appointment scheduling.
The health system saw a quick payoff, according to Scott Arnold, executive vice president and chief digital and innovation officer at Tampa General Hospital.
Within two weeks of the initial go-live date, TGH witnessed a 21% increase in appointments scheduled by its experience center and achieved its lowest call abandonment rate to date, with daily call abandonment declining by 56%, from 34% to 14.9%. Average wait times saw a 58% reduction, dropping from 6.2 minutes to 2.4 minutes, as Hyro’s voice AI Agents guided patients to the right services and eliminated typical points of friction in the care journey, executives said.
Tampa General Hospital, a health system that has been expanding its geographic footprint, has invested heavily in AI to improve patient care and operational efficiency. TGH is a 1,529-bed, not-for-profit academic health system that includes three additional hospitals in the area as well as Tampa General Rehabilitation Hospital and Tampa General Behavioral Health Hospital.
Call center operations have been a major pain point for the health system, Arnold told Fierce Healthcare. TGH began talking to Hyro in June and had a contract signed before July 4, he noted. The health system also aimed for a fast implementation timeline.
“This was one of those places that hurt the most,” he said. “Our team is hurting really bad on answering calls and getting patients to the right place.”
Working with Hyro, TGH had its digital host, named “Amy,” up and running by late September. “That’s really fast for technology to implement so broadly and widely. Amy has been up and running since September, and up through now, she has answered almost a half million calls,” he said.
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To achieve rapid time-to-value, the TGH and Hyro teams aligned on a shared framework that streamlined implementation and iteration, while Hyro’s agile platform and responsive R&D team quickly optimized workflows based on real-world patient interactions specific to TGH, executives said. The result was a smooth go-live and measurable value within a short timeframe.
As part of the initial rollout, Hyro and TGH focused on appointment management and contextual transfer capabilities. The health system plans to expand into additional specialty-specific scheduling use cases next.
“Our partnership with Tampa General demonstrates what’s possible when two innovative organizations align around a shared mission, making patient communication as seamless and human as it should be,” said Israel Krush, CEO and co-founder of Hyro in a statement. “From day one, the TGH team approached this project with clarity, urgency, and collaboration. They knew exactly what problems they wanted to solve and moved with incredible speed to make it happen. Together, we deployed production-grade AI agents in record time, proving that responsible AI doesn’t have to be slow or experimental, it can move as fast as healthcare needs it to. This partnership shows that when you pair a focused team with agile technology, you can increase access, reduce friction, and deliver real value in weeks, not years.”
Founded in 2018, Hyro announced a $45 million fundraise during the HLTH conference back in October. The startup is backed by One Medical’s Amir Dan Rubin, whose venture fund Healthier Capital led the “strategic growth round.” Norwest and Define Ventures participated in the round, as did five-year client Bon Secours Mercy Health, and ServiceNow Ventures, the investment arm of ServiceNow.
Hyro works with more than 40 health systems including Inova Health, Baptist Health and Sutter Health.
Tampa General Hospital selected Hyro because of its healthcare-exclusive focus and deep interoperability with its technology stack, including the Epic electronic health record system and multiple telephony/CCaaS providers, TGH executives said. The health IT team was also encouraged by the strong feedback it received from other leading health system CIOs and CDIOs using Hyro.
“[Hyro] had some experience already with some of my colleagues at other health systems that I really have a lot of respect for, and they make good decisions. So that was a qualifier. And two, they weren’t trying to boil the ocean. They weren’t trying to do everything or sell into many different markets. They were very focused on healthcare. And three, they had done integration with our electronic health record already, which is Epic, and that’s not an easy task, and that takes a long time. With those three things in place, it just made a lot of sense for us to partner with Hyro, and they were willing to go fast with us.”
