January 26, 2026 — In a recent EverXchange webinar, Everise partnered with Healthcare Contact Center Times (HCCT) to explore how healthcare access centers are evolving from transactional call hubs into strategic extensions of care. The session featured Malik Bahar, Assistant Vice President of Access Center & Loyalty at Virtua Health, alongside Glen Hall, Vice President of Healthcare at Everise, and was moderated by Jessica Levco, Editor at HCCT.
Together, they examined a challenge healthcare leaders face today: as access demand rises and self-service expands, how can organizations scale efficiently without sacrificing empathy, trust, or continuity of care? Across health systems, access teams are being asked to absorb higher volumes and support increasingly complex patient journeys while operating across fragmented systems. Bahar shared how Virtua Health’s answer was not to replace human connection with technology, but to deliberately redesign where and how access teams create value across the patient journey. Hall, meanwhile, outlined how thoughtfully implemented AI can strengthen human performance, protect patient experience, and enable sustainable scale.
At Virtua Health, access transformation began with a clear operational gap: patients were frequently leaving emergency departments and inpatient units without follow-up carefully arranged. This created friction for patients and introduced risk across continuity of care and network integrity.
Virtua’s response was the Patient Experience Navigator (PEN) program, which embedded non-clinical access professionals directly into emergency departments and inpatient settings. PENs operate with a singular objective: arrange all follow-up care before discharge.
Beyond scheduling, PENs provide what Virtua defines as 360 support for all patients, helping simplify the care journey, remove barriers to follow-up, prioritize Virtua and Virtua Integrated Network providers, and connect patients to relevant resources before they leave the hospital. The program is anchored in Virtua’s definition of Experience Excellence, which combines connection, accuracy, and network integrity.
By engaging patients at the point of discharge, PENs help ensure patients leave with clarity, confidence, and concrete next steps, thereby reducing fragmentation at one of the most vulnerable moments in the care journey.
The impact has been measurable:
What began as an emergency department pilot has since scaled across multiple acute and inpatient settings. Today, Patient Experience Navigators represent the largest subgroup within Virtua Health’s access organization, demonstrating how embedding access closer to care can materially improve continuity and outcomes.
While PENs addressed access gaps at discharge, Virtua Health identified a similar challenge earlier in the care journey—particularly in outpatient and primary care settings, where referrals and follow-ups were frequently delayed or lost.
To address this, Virtua launched a Virtual Navigation pilot designed to connect patients with navigators immediately after their provider visit. Using smart devices in exam rooms or checkout areas, navigators review referrals, schedule appointments in real time when possible, and confirm patient communication preferences while instructions are still fresh.
When same-day scheduling cannot be completed, patients leave with a clear and reliable follow-up path—reducing reliance on callbacks and minimizing drop-off.
Compared to traditional workflows, the pilot delivered significant improvements:
Importantly, practices retained flexibility in how and where Virtual Navigation was implemented, ensuring adoption without disrupting clinical throughput.
Together, PENs and Virtual Navigation repositioned access as a real-time extension of care, supporting patients at moments when engagement and follow-through are most likely.
As access models become more proactive and embedded across the patient journey, healthcare contact centers are facing growing complexity—manual workflows, disconnected systems, rising demand, and workforce strain. Scaling in this environment requires more than introducing AI tools. It requires a structured, phased approach that aligns people, process, and systems before automation is introduced at scale.
To that end, Hall outlined a six-phase roadmap for scaling compassionate care with AI, designed to strengthen human performance, protect patient experience, and support sustainable growth.
Organizations assess current workflows, clarify ownership between people and technology, and define core KPIs—such as speed to answer, access completion, and no-show prevention—to establish a strong operational foundation.
Systems such as EHRs, scheduling platforms, and CRMs are integrated alongside safeguards that protect data accuracy, compliance, and patient experience, ensuring a single source of truth across interactions.
AI is introduced through controlled, low-risk use cases such as after-hours calls, appointment inquiries, and no-show prediction, allowing teams to validate impact and refine performance before scaling.
Agents receive training on AI tools alongside empathy, de-escalation, privacy, and bias awareness, while patients are supported as digital workflows evolve.
Successful use cases are expanded across service lines and channels, supported by standardized SOPs, updated QA frameworks, and demand-driven staffing models.
Organizations use real-time insights and continuous learning to refine both AI and human workflows, improving outcomes over time without increasing workload or burnout.
The future of healthcare access is not about automating people out of the process. It is about freeing people to focus on the work technology cannot replace.
In high-performing access centers, AI supports speed and scale—handling intake, triage, scheduling, reminders, eligibility checks, and agent assist—while humans focus on trust-defining moments such as empathy, reassurance, complex coordination, and exceptions.
When AI surfaces risk and agents intervene with judgment and compassion, organizations see fewer no-shows, stronger network integrity, higher satisfaction, and healthier teams.
In healthcare, AI is not about doing more with less. It is about doing the right work with the right support—starting at the very first patient interaction.