Medical Call Centers: Top Features & Key Trends in Telehealth 

Medical practices often rely on healthcare call center services to meet their patients’ needs, including answering patient phone calls, booking appointments, managing insurance verification processes, assisting with medical billing, and running physician referral services.

For this reason, it’s essential to choose a robust call center, especially as telehealth services are surging and patient-centered approaches are becoming increasingly common. Specialized contact centers can provide crucial inbound and outbound services, deliver customer support with empathy, and ensure that you’re compliant with federal regulations like HIPAA.

Here, we’re going to discuss the telehealth and medical call center trends coming in 2025, how to set up a healthcare call center, and the top features to look for.

Top Telehealth Trends for 2025

As telehealth becomes more popular — 76% of providers and hospitals currently offer at least some telehealth services — we can expect the following trends to become prevalent in 2025:

• Increased virtual visits. While telemedicine usage varies by factors like age, education levels, and geography, we can expect that telehealth visits will continue to become more popular and emerge as the standard option for nonemergent and nonsurgical patient care.
• Electronic health record (EHR) integrations. Most providers already use digital systems like MyChart to store, access, and transfer patient health records electronically. These systems make it easier for a patient’s entire care team to share information, which helps improve patient outcomes. Right now, 78% of office-based physicians and 96% of non-federal acute care hospitals have a certified EHR.
• AI-assisted patient care and decision support. Artificial intelligence can help doctors diagnose patients, create personalized patient care recommendations, and assist clinicians with basic decision-making.
• Patient-centered outcomes and incentives. Telehealth itself is part of the growing focus on prioritizing patient needs and improving outcomes by providing accessible, convenient, and skilled care with features like virtual consultations or remote patient monitoring.

What Medical Call Center Trends Are Taking Shape?

Just as new trends are emerging in telehealth, they are also shaping best practices and strategies for medical call centers.

Telehealth integration

Many medical call center services now support telehealth appointments, enabling patients to consult with providers remotely through patient portal messaging systems, virtual consultations, and digital prescription refill requests.

As telehealth continues to increase in popularity, medical call centers will need to keep up, offering telehealth services to patients.

AI-powered assistance

Just as clinicians are increasingly finding new ways to improve the patient experience with AI, call centers are, too. According to recent research, 46% of healthcare call center leaders are planning to deploy — or are already deploying — large language model solutions like ChatGPT within the coming year.

Healthcare contact centers can use AI tools to triage patient inquiries, automate FAQs, and provide initial intake for symptom assessments. This can be cost-effective, provide better support to agents, and enable accurate and efficient patient support.

Patient-centric CX

Medical call center offices have increased their focus on delivering empathetic and personalized care — though there’s still a long way to go.

Studies show that patient satisfaction with healthcare provider call centers hovers around 51%, indicating significant room for growth in patient satisfaction rates.

Patient-centric CX will likely involve:

• Educating team members to deliver empathetic support through sensitive conversations.
• Knowing when to escalate situations to specialized teams or medical providers.
• Teaching agents how to personalize customer care.
• Offering multiple communication options with unified omnichannel platforms.

Proactive outreach

Medical offices are adopting proactive outreach strategies with outbound calls, including post-care follow-ups and medication refill reminders.

This outreach is designed to enhance overall patient outcomes and patient satisfaction at the same time by:

• Ensuring that patients have what they need from the medical office.
• Checking in to ask about progress and evaluating whether the course of treatment is working or if the patient needs to schedule a follow-up appointment.
• Offering an opportunity for patients to ask any questions they may not have wanted to “bother the doctor” with, providing improved care.
• Increasing patient compliance with healthcare plans.

Self-service options

Healthcare contact centers are increasingly offering self-service options, allowing patients to resolve their concerns independently.

Advancement and increased adoption of patient portals and interactive voice response (IVR) systems have allowed patients to increasingly manage their own appointments, access or request lab results, and handle billing inquiries independently.

While self-service options are preferred by many patients, it’s important that patients can easily get in touch with live support agents whenever they need to.

Setting Up and Maintaining a Medical Call Center

When setting up medical call center services and operations, there are a few must-have components that leaders and admins should look for.

HIPAA compliance

Whether you’re a healthcare organization managing a large volume of calls in-house or outsourcing them to a BPO, to protect patient data, your call center software must be HIPAA-compliant.

HIPAA compliance should include the following features:

• Encrypted communication channels.
• Secure storage for patient information.
• Customizable call recording features to protect patient data.
• Access control features and audit logs to restrict and monitor data accessibility and usage.

Data security

Data security is a crucial part of HIPAA compliance for healthcare organizations, but it’s also essential to protect nonsensitive customer data and your organization’s data, too.

To maintain the highest level of data security, you should:

• Deploy robust cybersecurity measures, including firewalls, antivirus software, and intrusion detection systems.
• Develop careful quality assurance processes for development teams that assess for increased security risks.
• Regularly update your software.
• Train staff on how to manage sensitive data, practice security measures like using complex passwords, and recognize security threats like phishing attempts.

Scalable technology

Many healthcare organizations grow over time or find that their call volume scales. Choose cloud-based contact software that can scale easily as your patient base grows.

When assessing tools for scalability, consider the following:

• Growth potential for call volume.
• Ability to integrate with other call centers or BPOs.
• Flexibility to add new communication channels, like SMS or video for telehealth.

Trained medical staff

Medical staff and all call center agents must receive dedicated training — even if they have customer support experience from other industries. Medical answering services that address outbound and inbound patient calls should do the following:

• Train agents on medical terminology, including any specialty-specific symptoms or red flags (e.g., chest pain) that may indicate callers should go to urgent or emergent care.
• Teach patient empathy, as callers may be sick, worried, or in pain.
• Discuss how to handle sensitive conversations and how to know when to escalate critical issues appropriately.
• Provide detailed guidelines on data security protocols.

Top Features and Functions to Look For

When choosing contact center software, healthcare call center companies should look for the following critical features.

1. Escalation workflows

Escalation workflows make it easy for call center agents to escalate calls to medical professionals or specialized departments quickly, securely, and efficiently. This may include facilitating calls to a doctor’s nurse on staff or to an on-call physician.

The software should also offer priority-based routing to address urgent patient needs first, such as critical lab results or emergency care.

2. After-hours call routing

Implement automated after-hours systems to route emergency calls to on-call providers while handling non-urgent inquiries via voicemail or self-service options. This can increase efficiency and ensure that patients can receive timely care for all their concerns.

3. Unified patient experience

Healthcare contact centers aren’t limited to handling incoming calls; today’s patients have high expectations, and many prefer to use digital communication channels for some services.

Use omnichannel platforms to provide seamless communication across phone, email, chat, patient portals, and SMS messaging. To facilitate consistent information access and faster resolutions, contact center software can help you maintain a centralized database for all patient interactions.

4. Appointment scheduling and reminders

One of the most common services medical call centers provide is appointment booking and reminders. Use healthcare call center best practices to streamline appointment scheduling for patients by doing the following:

• Scheduling, rescheduling, and confirming appointments through self-service tools or live agents.
• Creating automated reminders through outbound calls and text messages to reduce no-shows.
• Allowing patients to sign up for wait lists in case an earlier appointment opens up.

5. Multilingual support

According to recent census data, around 8.3% of the U.S. population speaks English “less than very well,” and nuance matters a great deal with sensitive calls to a medical provider. To support all patients, you can do the following:

• Offer services in multiple languages, catering to diverse patient populations.
• Use language translation tools or multilingual agents to ensure clear communication.
• Include language selection options at the beginning of your IVR menu.

6. Call recording and analytics

Call recording and analytics can help you better understand patient needs, improve healthcare center staffing, predict call volume, and find ways to improve patient satisfaction by doing the following:

• Recording calls (in compliance with HIPAA) for training and quality assurance, using HIPAA-compliant VoIP tools or contact center software.
• Using analytics to identify call trends and improve patient satisfaction.
• Leveraging analytic data to identify staffing needs, optimize workflows, and develop agent training.

Maximizing Patient Care With Nextiva

Nextiva is an omnichannel, AI-powered contact center platform offering dedicated solutions for the healthcare industry. Medical practices and call centers can leverage Nextiva’s advanced features to improve the patient experience with around-the-clock self-service features, multichannel options, multilanguage support, and detailed insights.

Let’s look at some of the key features Nextiva offers to help you deliver a new standard of patient care.

HIPAA-compliant platform

Nextiva is a HIPAA-compliant platform, meaning that all of its communication tools are adjusted to maintain HIPAA compliance for your entire organization. It ensures that patient data is secure and accessible only by authorized personnel.

Concordia Care chose Nextiva for its HIPAA-compliant contact center solutions. This specialty risk transfer care coordination company works to reduce the overall cost of quality healthcare by putting the patient first and developing personalized recovery plans. Ensuring HIPAA compliance alongside scalability was one of its key priorities.

Omnichannel integration

Nextiva can seamlessly unify all patient communications, including phone, email, chat, and SMS contact, providing patients with a consistent and efficient experience. Through its single dashboard and CRM integrations, you can offer personalized service no matter which channel (or channels) patients use to get in touch.

After-hours automation

Nextiva’s IVR and call routing features allow you to efficiently manage after-hours patient inquiries and emergencies without burdening your staff. Urgent calls can be delivered to on-call practitioners, while non-urgent calls can be sent to the office’s voicemail system.

Scalable cloud solutions

Nextiva’s cloud-based platform grows with your practice, supporting new locations, telehealth integration, and additional patient services. You can scale up and down as needed, knowing that Nextiva’s team is always looking toward the next CX trends.

Mountains Community Hospital, for example, wanted to ensure that each patient had access to a phone line during their stay. It used Nextiva to boost its total available phone lines, increasing the quality of patient care while knowing it could count on the platform’s high uptime reliability.

AI-powered features

Nextiva is an AI-powered platform offering diverse features that can support patients and call center agents alike. Agents can use AI-suggested dynamic scripting to better deliver patient care, for example, and leaders can use AI suggestions and sentiment analysis to improve patient CX.

Analytics and insights

Advanced analytics help identify bottlenecks, measure patient satisfaction, and optimize call center workflows for better outcomes. Nextiva’s analytics offer advanced features ranging from agent performance metrics to patient satisfaction metrics and call sentiment analytics.

Ease of use for medical staff

Nextiva’s platform is easy for staff to use, reducing onboarding time and improving productivity. This can ultimately improve CX as your staff is able to serve the practice’s patients better.

For example, Ontrak Health is a publicly traded healthcare BPO that provides health insurers with advanced analytics around members who may benefit from behavioral health coaching to manage chronic diseases.

It also uses a contact center to recruit, enroll, and retain health plan members in coaching programs. The company had been underperforming but used Nextiva to streamline processes and scale up outreach, exceeding its recruiting goals on 93% of business days.

Ready to get started? Check out Nextiva’s healthcare contact center solution today. 👇