Healthcare AI, decoded in plain English.
Agentic AI, revenue cycle, and contact center terms — defined the way healthcare leaders actually use them.
A
Abandonment Rate
The percentage of callers who hang up before reaching an agent — a direct measure of how much patience your queue demands.
ACD (Automatic Call Distribution)
An inbound contact center system that automatically receives incoming calls and routes them to the best available agent.
After-Call Work (ACW)
The tasks an agent completes after a conversation ends — notes, tagging, follow-ups — counted as part of Average Handle Time.
Agent Assist
AI that supports a live human agent in real time, surfacing answers, next steps, and context while the conversation happens.
Agentic AI
AI that pursues a goal and completes multi-step work autonomously — booking an appointment or resolving a balance end to end — rather than only answering questions about it.
Agentic Workflow
A framework in which AI agents coordinate with each other, and with existing systems, to complete a task from start to finish.
AI Agent
An AI system that perceives its environment and independently takes action to complete a task, rather than waiting for step-by-step instructions.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
Technology that converts spoken audio into text — the listening half of a voice AI system, paired with Text to Speech.
Average Handle Time (AHT)
A contact center KPI measuring how long it takes to complete a customer interaction, from pickup through resolution and wrap-up.
B
Bulk Message
An SMS sent to a large group of recipients at once through a bulk messaging provider, typically for reminders, alerts, or campaigns.
Business Associate Agreement (BAA)
The contract HIPAA requires between a healthcare organization and any vendor that touches patient data — no BAA, no deal.
C
Care Gap
The difference between the care a clinical guideline recommends — a screening, a follow-up, a refill — and the care a patient actually received.
Chatbot
A text-based program that answers questions along scripted or AI-driven paths — narrower than a Virtual Agent, which can act, not just chat.
Containment Rate
The percentage of interactions an AI agent resolves completely, without transferring to a human — the clearest measure of whether automation is actually working.
Conversational AI
Technology that enables natural, human-like conversation between a person and a system, typically over voice or chat.
Conversational IVR
An IVR system upgraded with AI so callers can speak naturally instead of navigating a keypad menu.
Cost Per Outcome
The total cost of an initiative divided by the number of successful outcomes it produces — per resolved ticket or reconciled invoice — a more honest unit than cost per build.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
A survey metric — typically "How satisfied were you?" on a 1–5 scale — measuring how a specific interaction went, where NPS measures the overall relationship.
Customer Experience (CX)
The sum of every interaction a customer has with a brand, across every channel and touchpoint.
Customer Service Representative (CSR)
The frontline employee responsible for resolving customer inquiries across phone, chat, email, and other channels.
D
Denial Management
The process of identifying, appealing, and preventing insurance claim denials within a healthcare revenue cycle.
Dental Service Organization (DSO)
A company that provides administrative and business support — scheduling, payroll, billing — to dental practices, so dentists can focus on clinical care.
Detractor
A customer who had a negative experience and is unlikely to recommend the brand — the low end of the Net Promoter Score scale.
Digital Front Door
The digital entry points — scheduling, messaging, virtual agents — through which a patient first reaches a healthcare organization, before ever speaking to a person.
E
Electronic Health Record (EHR)
The digital version of a patient's chart — history, medications, results — and the system of record most healthcare AI must integrate with.
Eligibility Verification
Confirming a patient's insurance coverage and benefits before a visit, to prevent denied claims and billing surprises.
Escalation Management
A structured process for identifying and resolving customer or patient issues that couldn't be handled at the first point of contact.
F
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
The percentage of customer or patient interactions fully resolved on the first attempt, without a follow-up or transfer.
G
Generative AI
AI that creates new content — text, images, code — rather than acting on it, distinct from Agentic AI, which completes tasks.
Guardrails
The constraints placed on an AI agent — what it can say, access, and do — so autonomy never outruns policy.
H
Hallucination
When generative AI states something false with full confidence. Guardrails and grounding in a knowledge base exist to prevent it.
HIPAA
The U.S. law that sets national standards for protecting patient health information.
Hold Time
The amount of time a caller waits on hold before reaching an agent.
Human-in-the-Loop (HITL)
A design pattern where a person reviews or approves an AI agent's work at defined checkpoints, rather than after something goes wrong.
I
Inbound Contact Center
A facility or platform dedicated to handling incoming customer or patient calls and requests.
Intent Recognition
How a conversational AI system determines what a person is trying to accomplish from what they said — the meaning behind the utterance.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
An automated phone system that routes or resolves calls using keypad or voice input.
J
Journey Mapping
Visualizing every step a patient or customer takes across their experience, to find gaps and friction points.
K
Knowledge Base
A centralized library of information — FAQs, policies, procedures — used to answer questions or train an AI agent.
L
Large Language Model (LLM)
The AI model type behind modern conversational and agentic AI, trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate language.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
The total revenue a single customer or patient relationship is expected to generate over time.
Live Agent Handoff
The moment an AI agent transfers a conversation to a human — ideally with full context, so the customer never repeats themselves.
M
Multichannel Contact Center
A support model with separate channels — phone, email, chat — that don't share context with each other.
N
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
The field of AI that lets machines understand and generate human language — the foundation under every conversational AI system.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A single-question metric — "How likely are you to recommend us?" — used to gauge customer loyalty.
No-Show Rate
The percentage of scheduled appointments a patient misses without canceling in advance — a major source of lost revenue for healthcare practices.
O
Occupancy Rate
The percentage of an agent's logged-in time spent actively handling interactions, as opposed to waiting for one.
Omnichannel Contact Center
A connected support model where every channel shares the same context, so a conversation can move between them without repetition.
Outbound Contact Center
A platform or team dedicated to initiating contact — reminders, follow-ups, collections — rather than receiving it.
P
Patient Access
The set of processes — scheduling, intake, eligibility, registration — that determine how easily a patient can get care.
Patient Engagement
The ongoing effort to keep patients informed, involved, and acting on their care — showing up, following through, staying in touch.
Patient Experience (PX)
The healthcare-specific version of customer experience, covering every touchpoint across a patient's care journey.
Population Health
An approach to care that looks at outcomes across a group of patients, not just individual encounters, to identify risk and close gaps at scale.
Prior Authorization
Insurer approval required before a treatment, test, or medication is covered.
Promoter
A customer who had a great experience and is likely to recommend the brand — the high end of the Net Promoter Score scale.
Protected Health Information (PHI)
Any health data that can identify a patient — the specific information HIPAA exists to protect.
Q
Queue Management
The practice of managing and optimizing wait times for people waiting to reach an agent.
R
Real-Time Adherence (RTA)
A system that tracks whether contact center agents are following their scheduled shifts and breaks in real time.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
A technique that grounds an AI's answers in a trusted knowledge base at the moment of the question, rather than relying on what the model memorized in training.
Revenue Cycle Management (RCM)
The end-to-end financial process of a healthcare visit, from scheduling and eligibility through billing and collections.
S
Scheduling Agent
A person or AI agent responsible for booking and confirming appointments.
Self-Service
Any channel — IVR, virtual agent, portal — that lets a customer or patient resolve their own request without waiting for a human.
Sentiment Analysis
AI that reads the emotional tone of a conversation — frustrated, satisfied, confused — in real time or after the fact.
Service-as-Software
A model where an organization buys a completed outcome — a resolved patient interaction — rather than software a human must operate to produce it.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
A committed performance standard — such as answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds — that a contact center is measured against.
T
TCPA
The U.S. law governing calls and texts to consumers, including consent requirements for automated outreach — the compliance backbone of any messaging program.
10DLC
The carrier-sanctioned system for sending business SMS over standard 10-digit numbers, with registration requirements that determine deliverability.
Text to Speech (TTS)
Technology that converts written text into natural-sounding spoken audio.
U
Utterance
A single thing a user says or types when interacting with a conversational AI system.
V
Virtual Agent
An AI-powered agent that simulates a live representative's interactions using machine learning and natural language processing.
W
Workforce Management (WFM)
Forecasting demand and scheduling agents to meet it — the discipline that tools like Real-Time Adherence belong to.
Wrap-Up Time
The time an agent spends finishing an interaction after the customer disconnects — see After-Call Work.
No terms match your search.