MUSC Health says its AI phone agent handles 25% of patient calls
MUSC Health's voice agent began with confirming and cancelling appointments in 2024 and now answers all 92 patient lines. No cost or error rate is published.
At a glance
- Company
- MUSC Health (Medical University of South Carolina) · Healthcare · Size not stated
- Team and use case
- Customer support · Voice agents
- Tools
- Emily (MUSC Health's name for the agent), SoundHound AI, Epic
- Stage
- Scaled across teams, since Deployed 2024; pharmacy lines added July 2026
- Results
- Share of patient calls handled by the agent: 25% (June 2026)
- Patient access phone lines answered: All 92
- Calls supported since 2024 (SoundHound's count): More than 2.2 million (July 2026)
- Phone cover: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. → 24 hours was the aim; hours now not stated
- Cost
- Not disclosed. No licence fee, price per call or build effort.
- People
- Staff answer the calls the agent does not handle, and a caller can still ask for a person. Headcount before and after, retraining and who reviews the agent's errors: Not disclosed.
- Evidence
- Company claim, no method
The company states a result without saying how it was measured.
What this leaves out: The 25% is an executive's statement in a trade interview and the 2.2 million is the seller's count, both relayed by PYMNTS, with no method. No baseline for hold time or abandoned calls, no error rate for bookings, payments or refills, and no cost. The 25% predates the pharmacy lines.
The patient call centre at MUSC Health, the Medical University of South Carolina's health system, now sends callers first to an AI voice agent it calls Emily. Emily handles 25% of the system's patient calls, Crystal Broj, MUSC Health's chief digital transformation officer, told Chief Healthcare Executive in June 2026, according to a PYMNTS report published on 13 November 2026. Staff answer the rest faster and fewer callers hang up, she said; PYMNTS gives no figure for either.
Emily is built on SoundHound AI's platform and was deployed in 2024. SoundHound said in a July 2026 announcement that it had supported more than 2.2 million patient calls since then, PYMNTS reports. "Supported" is the seller's count of calls the agent touched; it is not the same measure as the 25% Broj says it handles.
How the job grew
- Two tasks first. Emily began by confirming and cancelling appointments, Broj said in a March 2026 interview at the HIMSS conference, as PYMNTS relays it.
- Then rescheduling, then Spanish-language calls.
- Now all 92 of MUSC Health's patient access phone lines, plus billing questions and taking a bill payment.
- In July 2026, the retail and specialty pharmacy lines: a caller can request a prescription refill, check its status or ask for pharmacy hours and locations, and Emily routes the call to a pharmacy team when needed.
The agent is connected to MUSC Health's Epic electronic health record, the system that holds patient appointments and charts, so a changed appointment updates the record without a person re-keying it, PYMNTS says, citing HealthTech magazine. It can carry two requests in one call, finishing a booking before raising a bill.
She can switch that mode and remember what you wanted to talk about.
Crystal Broj, chief digital transformation officer at MUSC Health, to HealthTech HotSpot, as quoted by PYMNTS
The people side
Before Emily, the call centre was open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and the health system wanted 24-hour cover; Broj cited "patient frustration, workforce pressure" as the reasons, PYMNTS reports. Patients who want a live person can still reach one. The report does not say how many people work the lines, whether that number changed, how staff were retrained, or who reviews the calls Emily gets wrong.
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The catch
Every result is MUSC Health's or SoundHound's own, with no method. There is no baseline for hold time or abandoned calls, no rate of wrong bookings or refill errors, no share of callers who ask for a person, and no price. The 25% figure is from June 2026, before the pharmacy lines were added, and no newer one is given. Billing and refills are riskier work than confirming an appointment, and the report has no error data for them.
What to do if you run a phone-based support or patient access queue
- This week, pull last month's calls by reason and find the two highest-volume requests that end in a single record change, as confirm and cancel did for MUSC. Those are the first candidates for a voice agent.
- Before a pilot, write down hold time, abandoned-call rate and cost per staffed call for those two reasons. MUSC published none of the three, so a vendor citing this deployment cannot show you a before and after.
- Ask any voice-agent vendor for the price per call or per minute at your volume, and for the wrong-action rate on tasks that move money or medication, before you extend past scheduling.
Take this to work
Forward this
MUSC Health says an AI voice agent handles 25% of its patient calls and answers all 92 of its patient access phone lines, after starting in 2024 with only appointment confirmations and cancellations, according to PYMNTS. It published no cost, error rate or staffing change, so the part to copy is the sequence: start on our two simplest call reasons and measure hold time and abandoned calls before adding more.
Questions to ask
- What is the price per call or per minute at our monthly call volume, and is there a minimum commitment?
- How often does the agent book, cancel or charge the wrong thing, and who finds and fixes it?
- What share of callers ask for a person, and how long do they wait once they do?
- Which of our systems must it write to, and who on our side owns that connection when it breaks?
- What happened to call-centre headcount and hours at a customer of our size after a year?
The arithmetic
Monthly saving = calls per month × share handled end to end by the agent × cost per staffed call, minus the agent's monthly cost and the staff time spent fixing its mistakes.
MUSC Health gives one input: a 25% share of patient calls handled. It does not give calls per month (SoundHound's 2.2 million is a running total since 2024 of calls 'supported', a different measure), the cost of a staffed call, the agent's price or the correction time, so the saving cannot be worked out from what is published.
Questions this article answers
What share of MUSC Health's patient calls does its AI agent handle?
25%, according to Crystal Broj, MUSC Health's chief digital transformation officer, in a June 2026 interview relayed by PYMNTS. The agent, called Emily, answers all 92 of the health system's patient access phone lines.
What can MUSC Health's AI agent Emily do?
PYMNTS reports that Emily confirms, cancels and reschedules appointments, takes calls in Spanish, answers billing questions, takes bill payments and, since July 2026, takes prescription refill requests and status checks for MUSC Health's retail and specialty pharmacies.
Who built MUSC Health's AI phone agent?
It runs on SoundHound AI's platform and is connected to MUSC Health's Epic electronic health record. SoundHound said in July 2026 that the agent had supported more than 2.2 million patient calls since 2024, PYMNTS reports.
What does MUSC Health's AI phone agent cost?
Not disclosed. The PYMNTS report gives no licence fee, price per call or staffing change.
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