Why Patients Keep Calling and What Health Systems Can Do About It

By Alex Connor, VP of Product, WestCX.

At 8 a.m., a patient access team opens its phone queue to dozens of people asking familiar questions. Has my referral gone through? Can I move tomorrow’s appointment? Where should I go for my procedure? Did the pharmacy receive my prescription?

Many of these patients have already received a text, a portal message, an email, or an automated call. The communication reached them, yet it didn’t provide enough context or a clear way to complete the next step. The inbound call is the patient’s attempt to finish a process the organization left open.

This pattern creates a hidden access problem. Staff spend time resolving repetitive requests while patients with complex needs wait in the same queue. When healthcare organizations shift from engagement to orchestration, they can manage operational demands while improving patient outcomes at scale.

The call often begins somewhere else

Phone demand usually reflects an earlier breakdown in the patient journey, like a reminder omitting preparation instructions, a portal notification announcing a result without explaining when the clinician will follow up, or a referral moving between organizations without a clear status update for the patient.

Clinicians already feel the effects of the growing volume of patient-initiated messages. More portal messages can mean more after-hours time spent reviewing charts, responding to patients, and closing care loops. Clinicians who receive the highest volume of messages spend roughly 2.6 additional hours each week in the EHR after work compared with those who receive fewer messages, adding to the administrative burden that can contribute to burnout.

Calls, portal messages, and other patient requests often stem from the same underlying sources of confusion, reinforcing the need to address those issues earlier in the patient journey.

Five steps to reduce avoidable inbound demand

Health systems can address the burden by redesigning a small number of high-volume journeys. The following steps create a practical starting point:

1. Categorize calls by reason and journey stage

Teams need a consistent way to label why patients call. Categories should connect each contact to a journey stage, such as scheduling, pre-visit preparation, referral management, post-visit follow-up, billing, prescriptions, or test results.

A weekly review can reveal where demand clusters and which issues produce repeated contacts.  That view helps leaders prioritize upstream fixes that can reduce avoidable demand and give staff more time for higher-value work.

2. Rewrite outbound communication around the next action

Every message should answer three questions:

1. Why am I receiving this?
2. What do I need to do?
3. What happens next?

Clear language, sent at the right time, via the patient’s preferred channel, reduces the effort required to understand a message. Those principles should shape every channel in the patient journey.

3. Give AI permission to resolve routine requests

AI can contain demand when it can complete low-risk, well-defined tasks within approved boundaries. Examples include confirming an appointment, offering eligible rescheduling options, repeating preparation instructions, checking a documented status, or sending a secure link to the correct form.

The workflow needs identity verification, permission controls, auditability, and escalation rules. An AI-generated response that sounds helpful while leaving the task unfinished will usually create another contact.

4. Preserve human escalation for complexity and urgency

Regardless of the situation, patients must have a clear path to a person at any point in the process.  Should that scenario arise, the system should understand how to route those requests with the relevant history attached, so staff don’t ask patients to start over.

This approach also supports employee capacity. The AMA’s guidance for reducing clinicians’ inbox burden recommends eliminating low-value work, automating routine tasks, and routing requests to the appropriate team member. Healthcare organizations can apply the same principles to patient calls and digital requests, reducing avoidable work before it reaches staff.

5. Measure resolution and patient progress

Average handle time and call abandonment remain useful operational measures. Leaders should pair them with measures such as repeat contacts, first-contact resolution, appointment attendance, and referral closure. These metrics provide a clearer picture of whether an interaction met the patient’s needs and advanced their care.

Equity measures also matter. Organizations should review whether patients who use different languages, have disabilities, lack portal access, or prefer the phone receive comparable resolution and follow-through.

A practical example: imaging preparation

Consider a patient scheduled for a diagnostic scan. The organization knows the appointment time, scan type, and prep requirements—as well as authorization status, location, and the patient’s language and channel preferences. An orchestrated workflow can use that context to send the right instructions at the right time and offer a direct path for common changes.

If authorization remains incomplete, the system can avoid sending a generic confirmation that creates false certainty. It can provide an accurate status, notify the responsible team, and tell the patient when to expect an update—and if the patient reports a clinical concern, escalate the interaction immediately.

This kind of coordinated journey can prevent calls, reduce failed appointments, free up staff time, and help patients arrive prepared. It also illustrates the value of orchestration: communication, data, workflow, and human support work together to complete a care step.

Access improves when the tool owns the next step

Healthcare organizations will continue to receive inbound calls, and many of those conversations will remain essential. The opportunity lies in removing the routine uncertainty that crowds the queue and asks patients to coordinate their own care.