Northbridge Health Network
Northbridge Health Network reduced appointment scheduling errors by 41% and lifted patient satisfaction 9 points
Northbridge Health Network's patient access center handles 180,000 calls a month for scheduling, billing, and referrals — and had no systematic way to find where calls went wrong. Homayar's issue detection identified scheduling-error patterns within the first month, helping the team cut booking errors by 41% and raise patient satisfaction scores by 9 points.
Results
- -41%
- Scheduling errors
- +9 pts
- Patient satisfaction (access center)
- -23%
- Repeat calls within 7 days
- 0.4% → 100%
- QA coverage
The starting point
The challenge
Northbridge's 14-hospital network centralized its patient access operations, but quality oversight did not scale with it. Scheduling errors — wrong location, wrong provider, missed prep instructions — generated costly downstream rework: no-shows, same-day cancellations, and repeat calls from frustrated patients. The team suspected the errors clustered around specific call types and specialty workflows, but with supervisors reviewing fewer than 50 calls a week, no one could prove it. Patient satisfaction scores for the access center had been flat for six quarters, and clinical departments were escalating complaints about referral handoffs the access team could not trace back to specific conversations.
The deployment
The solution
Northbridge deployed Homayar in its private cloud environment to meet HIPAA requirements, with PHI redaction applied at the transcription layer. The Issue Detection Agent classified every call by intent and outcome, and within four weeks it isolated the two workflows responsible for 63% of scheduling errors: multi-provider referral bookings and imaging appointments with prep instructions. The QA Scoring Agent measured whether prep instructions were actually delivered and confirmed — not just whether the call ended politely. The Insights Agent gave operations leaders a weekly view of error drivers by clinic, call type, and shift, while the Coaching Agent gave team leads specific call moments to review with each scheduler. The access team rewrote two booking workflows based on the evidence and tracked the improvement call by call.
“For years we knew errors were happening somewhere in 180,000 monthly calls — we just couldn't see where. Homayar showed us the two workflows causing most of the damage in the first month. Our schedulers weren't the problem. The process was, and now we could finally fix it.”