Executive Summary

Most healthcare contact centers are running five or more technologies that don’t talk to each other. They’re hitting speed-to-answer targets, but leaving patients waiting on hold or causing delayed clinical responses. Nearly a third are still using pagers despite their well-documented limitations in urgent response scenarios. Only 40% have integrated with an EHR.

There’s a significant gap between what contact centers need to be able to do and what they’re currently able to deliver. This report examines what 105 IT and operations leaders who oversee operator environments told us about their tech stack, where it’s failing them, and what it would take to fix it.

Key Takeaways

Healthcare contact centers aren’t simple switchboards directing calls anymore. The average contact center now runs 5 or more distinct functions; has over 50 operators; handles clinical alerts, on-call escalations, codes, and patient transfers; and serves over 2,500 employees.

But the tools they use simply haven’t kept pace. Our recent survey of 105 healthcare organizations found that hospital contact centers are struggling with a complicated, frustrating, and poorly integrated tech stack.

Our respondents were primarily senior leaders at large, sophisticated healthcare organizations. You might expect them to report top-of-the-line tech. On the contrary, they told us that they’re stuck with contact centers that are actively damaging their patients’ experience and their operators’ working environment.

The “good enough” contact center comes at a high cost. Technology gaps make it harder to hire and keep staff. Patients get transferred multiple times and still don’t reach the right person. IT teams spend their time keeping aging systems running instead of improving them. Transfers get missed. Code calls take too long to complete. And when organizations try to layer AI on top of all of it, they find the foundation just isn’t ready.

In this report, we’ll break down what’s really happening in healthcare contact centers, what’s getting in the way of improvement, and what operations and IT leaders need to do about it.

The Inertia Of “Good Enough”

Long vendor relationships and high switching costs can create a strong attachment to familiar tools, even imperfect ones. That’s exactly why 51% of respondents said switching vendors would be somewhat or very difficult.

When someone has spent years learning every workaround in a legacy platform, replacing it feels like a significant risk.

The result is that many hospitals put off upgrading their contact center technology until they’re forced to, explains Sean Collins:

“They wait until there’s a big compelling event like an outage, or until the lack of integration leaves someone saying ‘I just can’t do my job anymore,’ or until the person with the tribal knowledge of how the system works leaves.”

Our respondents are aware their contact center systems are failing them.

What An Outdated Contact Center Is Costing Healthcare Organizations

The cost of maintaining the existing stack is often more than the cost of improving it. Sometimes, the savings from retiring legacy tools alone is the biggest, or at least the most immediate, ROI.

Paying for external IT support adds another hefty line item to the budget. Internal teams are stretched too thin to manage the complexity on their own, so they’re often forced to pay for outside help. Only 18% of organizations rely on internal IT alone for technology decisions. Most lean on external consultants (30%), vendor professional services (19%), systems integrators (18%), or peer organizations (15%).

That dependence on external resources isn’t just an expense. 30% of respondents cite it as a barrier to adopting new technology. The complexity that makes outside help necessary is the same complexity that makes change difficult. When consultants and integrators build connections into a fragmented stack, they add yet another layer of complexity.

Where The Communication Tech Stack Breaks Down

Suffice it to say, most contact centers aren’t suffering from a shortage of tools. The problem is whether or not those tools were built for the complexity of a healthcare environment. Can they handle the specific workflows, escalation paths, and variations by speciality, shift, and site?

When the tools don’t reflect how operators have to handle calls — looking up a patient, finding the right on-call provider, routing a transfer — operators have to fill in the gaps themselves.

That leaves them spending their working hours switching screens, re-entering information, and checking a separate system for the on-call schedule. Our research found that the negative fallout from these manual workflows shows up in everything from the patient experience to operator retention.

Workflow Failures

When we asked respondents to identify the biggest gaps in their communication tech stack, the top “moderate or major gap” areas all relate to workflows and tools:

Nearly a quarter (23%) of operators have to manually switch tools during calls — a clear integration issue.

Problems with finding the right person and managing transfers are workflow issues. These respondents are feeling the fallout of using an old system that can’t keep up with the more complex demands of a modern contact center.

Training and onboarding carry the highest “major gap” rate at 16%. Every tool added to the stack is another system a new operator has to learn, so the onboarding problems compound over time.

Duncan Harris, Director of Product Management at PerfectServe, explains that much of the workflow breakdown can be attributed to manual scheduling: “A core component of getting calls to the right place at the right time is having accurate and up-to-date on-call schedules,” he explains. Yet many hospitals are still handling scheduling in a binder, not a digital platform. Operators are printing out faxes and re-entering schedule data they dug out of an email. “It’s still incredibly common,” says Duncan.

Poor Patient Experience

Missing or broken communications tooling is creating real clinical risk, our research showed.

These problems aren’t random. They map directly to communications workflow gaps. Fragmented systems mean calls need to be transferred more often. Poor call routing causes delays in clinical responses when it takes several tries to contact the right provider. And reliable after-hours coverage depends on the system knowing who’s on call and routing calls to them automatically. When on-call schedule data is out of date or lives in a separate system, that routing is bound to break down, serving as a blocker instead of a way to enable a better patient experience.

Recruitment And Retention Issues

Fully 84% of respondents say technology gaps affect agent recruiting, training, and retention. In fact, nearly 2 in 3 (64%) said that reduced operator workload would most justify investment in new tech. That’s ahead of lower operating costs or even faster answer times.

Nearly 1 in 3 (31%) call the impact of new tech significant. The disconnected tech stack is making operators’ jobs harder than they need to be, which in turn makes it harder to hire, onboard, and keep them. And leaders are clearly aware of the issue.

AI Ambition Outpaces the Infrastructure Healthcare Organizations Need

AI adoption in healthcare contact centers is more widespread than you might expect. But most organizations are still testing AI capabilities rather than running them as a core part of daily operations. And the tools they’re using often live outside the core platform, adding another layer to an already fragmented stack.

What AI Adoption Looks Like Now

Most contact centers are somewhere in the middle of AI adoption — past the starting line, but not yet fully deployed.

Where Organizations Want AI To Go

Despite the maturity gap, ambition is high. 98% of our respondents say AI-enabled routing is important to their future strategy, and over half are prioritizing workflow and routing use cases in the next year or two.

Sean reports that multiple health systems hope to be able to use AI to safely triage routine calls, which would allow operators to focus on the top priority: life-saving calls that require human intervention.

Why The Current Infrastructure Isn’t Ready for AI

80% of respondents would like AI built into their existing platform (38%) or integrated via partners (42%) — not bolted on as a separate tool. But AI delivery is currently as fragmented as the rest of the stack.

And, with 68% of architectures still hybrid or on-prem, the infrastructure may simply not be ready for the ambition. To quote Sean, “If your systems are disjointed and not speaking … it’s not like an AI agent’s going to help you. You’ve got to fix your house before you put a solar roof on.”

The path from fragmented, disconnected systems to agentic AI requires fixing the foundation first. In other words, healthcare contact centers will need integrated data, connected workflows, and a stable platform to give AI agents full context before they can see widespread benefit from these AI agents in contact center use cases.

What Would Justify Investment?

Despite the challenges of switching platforms, most healthcare contact center leaders have a clear picture of what would make it worth it.

Speed to answer ranks last. The people running call centers are more interested in improving the day-to-day experience for operators, clinicians, and patients. 84% told us that contact center issues were impacting staffing; 31% said significantly. Training and onboarding was seen as the most common “major gap” at 16%.

Healthcare leaders are less interested in having their contact centers run faster than they are in building a more sustainable, more efficient system. In many cases, the main blocker to investment is simply lack of awareness that a better option exists.

A Better Contact Center Starts With Better Workflows

Most healthcare contact centers have spent years optimizing for speed-at-pickup. The data in this report suggests that was the wrong priority. The problems that really matter to healthcare organizations, such as patient hold times, transfers, routing failures, and operator burnout, have gone untracked and unaddressed.

The path forward isn’t more point solutions. It’s platform consolidation, connected communication workflows, and AI that lives inside the core system rather than alongside it. It’s about the central hub. Healthcare organizations ahead of the curve on orchestration that move first on building an integrated, fit-for-purpose operator environment that covers both internal and external traffic will have a compounding advantage in operator retention, patient experience, and readiness for AI.