The main pain point they were looking to solve was just making sure phone calls get answered promptly. “Our front desk staff are really focusing their attention on patients in front of them, so the phones were really a pain point  — just answering them in a timely way and giving all of our patients what they deserve in terms of that immediate response,” Taliano said. Patient surveys had shown that phone calls and wait times were a problem. “We weren't able to get to those patients who were canceling or rescheduling, so we weren't able to fill those slots prior to patients coming in.”

At an EHR conference, some of Family First’s clinicians met execs from an agentic AI company called Artera, and were intrigued by the possibilities. The company offers patient workflow automation solutions for health clinics and health systems of all types and sizes.

“One of the exciting things about the space that Artera is operating in is it's a great opportunity for us to take these advances in agentic capabilities, the advances in foundation models to deliver a much richer experience both for patients and for clinics to help safely, effectively, and empatheticlally offload a lot of the work, so that clinics can focus on providing great care for their patients,” said Damon Lanphear, Artera’s chief technology officer and a former Amazon Web Services exec. “That can help make sure that the patients feel heard and engaged with.”

The company says that nearly 300 FQHCs already work with Artera to support their patient communication needs. Artera AI Services supports the multiple EHRs, including ModMed, Athena, NextGen, Epic, Oracle, Meditech, Greenway, eClinical Works, Veradigm, AdvancedMD and others. 



Artera says it sends out “AI Service Squads” that are dedicated to specific provider segments. In addition to the most-requested AI solutions (scheduling, intake, prior authorizations, referral management, payments and closing care gaps), these squads build bespoke solutions based on the specific needs of the clinic or practice. 

“We worked with their squad, which was great,” Taliano said. “It was a small team of individuals, and they knew what they were doing. We wondered if they were really going to be able to help us. We have a lot of nuances with our scheduling. Our patients like certain things, but they were able to help us. They didn't come in with pre-planned templates. We collaborated as a real partnership in order to make sure it was right for our patients,” she added. “They allowed us to go at our own pace. We wanted to do this right. We didn't want to introduce a full-blown system and say, 'this is what you're using now.’ We really just wanted to start in layers, and they allowed us to do that. We are continuing to add in layers as patients get used to each step along the way, and we see those results.”

Working with the agents, patients can cancel, confirm, or reschedule an appointment. “The agents are available 24/7 so if it's late at night and our offices are closed, you're still able to do that. It’s just more convenient for everyone,” Taliano said. 

The next step, she said, is working on allowing patients to self-schedule. “The AI agent really can do those registration pieces that the front desk can do — registering a new patient or having one of our existing patients schedule an appointment when they don't have one. That is what we're working on now. We are also working on being able to do some campaigns to reach out to those patients needing preventive screenings.”

Family First has multiple locations, but was able to start small at one of its specialty services with a go-live with self-scheduling first to see how it goes, before phasing it in at some of the other practices.

Lanphear explained in more detail the role of the AI squads. “Our goal is to understand the populations they serve, how they want to communicate with them, their specific clinical objective, standards of care, which vary quite a bit from from practice and practice, specialty to specialty, and back-end systems,” he said. “In order to meet this need, we've organized Artera’s delivery around customer-assigned teams of AI builders that work closely with the customer directly. Our engineers work directly with our customers to understand their needs and adapt them into representations of agentic implementation. The key insight here is that level of bespoke building that we're doing is ideally to try to find that tight fit between how we're building and what the needs are for our customers and their patients.”

He added that this way of working is a bit of a change for people in the technical space who have worked in professional services models, where the work of a technical person or engineer is kind of behind the curtain, and they're taking requirements through a chain, like basically a game of telephone, and then trying to execute on that and deliver something that is generally applicable. “That's the traditional model. We all know well the ways in which that breaks down,” Lanphear said. “So we're getting rid of that game of telephone and trying to build that relationship. It is a bit of a grand experiment on our behalf.”

A common conception is that smaller clinics and FQHCs could get left behind in an AI arms race where new tooling is expensive to deploy or requires in-house expertise, but Lanphear said the technology can be democratizing.

“This gets a little bit into the topic of pricing, but I think we believe fundamentally these capabilities are going to become a commodity over time, and we really think about our pricing in that respect,” he explained. “How do we price in the same way that a utility might price by utilization, as opposed to these heavy fixed platform fees? The cost per performance suddenly becomes something that can be driven down as the overall infrastructure economy behind AI scales. We have some value-add that we layer on top of that, but what we're doing is following that trail of commoditization and the price dynamics that go with it, as opposed to making that very opaque. I think that's a really key differentiator or key enabler that democratizes what we're doing, as opposed to keeping it this elite technology.”

David Raths is a Contributing Senior Editor for Healthcare Innovation, focusing on clinical informatics, learning health systems and value-based care transformation. He has been interviewing health system CIOs and CMIOs since 2006.

 Follow him on Twitter @DavidRaths