Bring intelligence to your phone lines
An intuitive interactive voice response (IVR) system for healthcare allows callers to speak freely and resolve their issues successfully, just as if they were speaking with a human. Power your patient access center or organization telephony with automated inbound call resolution that boosts patient satisfaction, achieves efficiencies, and contains staffing costs.
Let patients use their words
With Nuance Conversational IVR, patient callers verbalize their need and are quickly routed to self‑service options or live assistance. Intelligent automation helps organizations address high call volumes and make smart use of staff.
The best experiences rely on world‑class IVR
See how Nuance is uniquely able to deliver an exceptional experience to patients over voice.

Benefits
Easy, effective conversational experiences
Greet callers with “How can I help you today” and let them answer naturally. Intelligent, automated responses quickly give them what they need. By eliminating the use of tedious or confusing menu prompts, organizations achieve shorter, satisfying interactions.
With IVR in healthcare, patients can verbalize their needs rather than listen to strings of menu prompts or hold music. Patients can complete self‑service tasks 24x7x365 over voice or receive links via SMS for quick access to online information. Meanwhile, live agents are available for escalated assistance.
Deploying IVR in the patient access center—or across organization telephony—standardizes workflows and simplifies the caller experience. Patients interact naturally with familiar voices and successfully connect to requested assistance within shorter timeframes.
Sophisticated IVR technology systems for healthcare help route patients to requested destinations, deflecting calls from live agents. Call center staff no longer answer calls, transfer calls, or assist with common tasks that can be completed with self-service. By containing calls with IVR, organizations can increase call volume capacity, reassign staff, or reduce headcount.
increase in IVR Net Promoter Score
automated first call resolution (FCR)
increase in handle volume
customer interactions per year
Features
Powerful technology for simple, satisfying experiences
Nuance IVR and voice solutions reduce friction and frustration with AI‑powered intelligence that delivers superior results.
As leaders in voice and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) backed by a large, vertical‑specific data repository, our IVR technology offers superior accuracy, interpretation, and performance. Unified NLU on both voice and digital channels accepts input from a patient using natural language, understands intent, responds effectively, and learns.
Intelligent engagement solutions make it possible to automate more and more interactions and meet patient demands. IVR directs callers to the right place the first time. Automatic number identification (ANI) combines with patient data and identifies callers, anticipates their needs, and proactively addresses their issues with self-service capabilities—reducing the need for a live agent. When only a human will do, live agents with caller activity history and information can resolve patient issues faster.
By deploying IVR on phone lines, organizations can gain incredible insight on why patients call. Use the IVR data collection and analytics to define routing destination needs, predict caller behavior, and identify opportunities to optimize the caller experience. Meanwhile, an automated, AI‑based, scalable feedback cycle uses data from conversations to continuously improve IVR accuracy and scope. Nuance Insights is a powerful way to measure how solutions are performing, ensure they support patients effectively, and validate ROI.
Nuance dialog technology and IVR applications power superior contact center experiences through our partners Genesys, Cisco, and Ayaya. The proven technology delivers conversational interactions and maintains context by integrating with organization systems—EHRs (Epic, Cerner, MEDITECH, Allscripts, etc.) and CRMs (SFDC, Dynamics and others)—and using native agent desktops for escalated issues. With our omni‑channel capabilities, organizations further enhance the patient experience by sending SMS notifications with helpful links or reminders.
Complementary solutions
On average, 13% of patients are appointment no‑shows. Patients who come to their appointments without the necessary preparations—fasting, completed lab tests, etc.—further impact patient care and organization revenue. Automate voice and SMS appointment reminders or field inbound voice appointment inquiries and offer real‑time rescheduling capabilities on the channel of contact. Enable native messaging from any application and manage proactive outreach to improve appointment adherence, promote wellness, impact revenue, and boost satisfaction.
Provide interactive bilingual 24x7x365 assistance powered by industry‑leading NLU. IVR and virtual assistant capabilities help patients self‑serve account access and activation issues or receive automated answers to frequently asked questions over voice or online chat. Similarly, patients seeking assistance preparing for their virtual visit receive instructions and help with testing and troubleshooting, with the option to transfer to a live agent. Organizations conduct proactive outreach and share useful information that lead to greater patient portal access and telehealth success.
With Nuance Mix tooling platform, organizations can harness the power of best‑in‑class conversational AI services and APIs to design a natural, conversational patient engagement experience. Use IVR and Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Text to Speech (TTS), and Speech to Text (STT) to power interactive dialogs and virtual assistants on voice and digital channels. Once an application exists, quick adjustments allow deployment in multiple languages across multiple channels. Patients experience consistent, intuitive conversational AI—no matter how they get in touch.