How a Healthcare Provider Achieved 54% More Patient Enrollments Through Automated Outreach in 8 Weeks
Before automation, much of our outreach effort went toward manual calling. Today, that time goes toward live patient conversations, and CCM enrollments increased by more than 50% within eight weeks. We move quickly and expect the same from our partners. Pronetx and Amazon Connect met those expectations through consistent availability, flexibility as requirements changed, and clear communication throughout the engagement. That made all the difference. And we're just getting started."
— Paul Kazemier, Senior Vice President of Patient Communications, New York Cancer & Blood Specialists
Executive Summary
In modern healthcare, patient engagement at scale remains a persistent challenge. The dial tone has become the sound of lost time and resources, as dedicated staff spend hours on outbound calls that go unanswered.
This was the reality for New York Cancer & Blood Specialists (NYCBS). Its Chronic Care Management (CCM) program supported more than 25,000 enrolled patients, yet a small team of clinic assistants managed the entire outreach process, from enrollment consent to ongoing care coordination.
As enrollment grew, manual processes placed additional strain on the team. Despite best efforts, traditional approaches were no longer sufficient to support meaningful scale.
To address this, NYCBS partnered with Pronetx to modernize its outreach. In just eight weeks, a cloud-native outreach automation powered by Amazon Connect transformed how the organization engaged patients.
The Challenge: The Hard Ceiling of Manual Outreach
As patient volume increased, manual outreach failed to keep pace and placed clear limits on growth:
Low Contact Rate
The team placed approximately 30,000 to 35,000 manual calls each month, with each staff member completing 60 to 70 dials per day. However, more than half of those calls went to voicemail, and time intended for meaningful patient conversations was lost to unanswered lines.
Manual and Duplicative Workflows
Each call required updates across two separate systems: an operational task tracking system and a clinical documentation system. The lack of integration required duplicate data entry, increased the risk of errors, and introduced inconsistencies that affected billing accuracy and report quality.
Limited Hiring Effectiveness
Despite continued hiring, consistent outreach across more than 25,000 enrolled patients proved difficult to sustain. Each new hire encountered the same 50% voicemail rate from day one, which limited productivity gains. Open roles and unplanned absences further disrupted coverage and reduced the ability to plan reliably.
Underutilized Clinical Capacity
Clinical staff trained to deliver patient care spent a significant share of their time on basic outreach tasks. Manual call placement, voicemail follow-ups, and system updates pulled focus away from higher-value patient interactions and limited the effective use of clinical expertise.
The Solution: A Cloud-Native Approach to Patient Engagement
Manual outreach was replaced with a cloud-native architecture designed to remove operational limits and support scalable patient engagement:
Self-Service Configuration for Operational Agility
Amazon Connect gave the team direct control over routing rules, queue priorities, and agent profiles. With approximately 11,000 calls per day, teams adjusted configurations in real time to respond to shifts in volume and priority without reliance on external support.
Seamless Data Integration for Outreach Readiness
Patient records flowed directly from the existing clinical care management platform into the cloud, where defined processes standardized and synchronized data with Amazon Connect Customer Profiles. After each call, outcomes were written back to the source clinical system automatically, which eliminated duplicate entry and reduced operational risk.
Intelligent Call Handling for Efficient Outreach
An automated outbound dialing capability handled call placement and routing in real time. When a patient answered, the system connected the call immediately to an available agent. When voicemail occurred, the system delivered a pre-recorded message automatically. Staff no longer spent time waiting on unanswered calls and focused exclusively on live patient conversations.
A Unified Agent Experience for Faster, More Personal Interactions
The Amazon Connect agent workspace surfaced the patient’s clinical care record from their Customer Profile within a single embedded view at the moment of connection. Agents gained immediate context, referenced relevant details, and recorded outcomes without switching systems. The unified experience supported faster, more personalized conversations while reducing cognitive load.
The Results
After implementation, monthly CCM enrollments increased from 995 to 1,528 within eight weeks. The program removed the capacity constraint and enabled sustained growth.
Operationally, staff shifted away from manual dialing and focused on live patient conversations. Care teams reached patients earlier between visits, which allowed issues to surface sooner and escalate only when needed.
At the same time, automated outbound outreach increased patient awareness of the CCM program and established a consistent communication channel. As patients became familiar with this channel, more began to initiate inbound contact, which extended engagement beyond scheduled outreach and supported more continuous care interactions.
Look Forward
What began as a CCM initiative has evolved into a broader transformation across NYCBS. The initial implementation showed what scalable, automated outreach could enable. Building on that foundation, the organization is now re-evaluating patient engagement across the care journey, from prescription refills and appointment reminders to ongoing follow-up outreach.
Each interaction represents an opportunity to reduce friction and improve access to care, allowing patients to spend more time engaging with their care teams rather than navigating administrative barriers. Throughout this process, Pronetx remained responsive and adapted quickly as requirements evolved.
The partnership continues to expand as NYCBS applies the same approach to additional patient engagement workflows, including plans to introduce AI voice agents for automated self-service through Amazon Connect, further enabling their lean CCM team to focus more of their time on serving patients.
Core Technology Stack
The solution relied on a focused set of AWS services; each selected for a specific role within the overall architecture.
