Altera is dedicated to bringing next-level healthcare within reach, and that often looks different across the many healthcare organizations we support. In this story, a leading behavioral health provider experienced the power of a tool that works quietly behind the scenes. With more than three decades of service, the organization’s expert teams deliver therapy, psychiatry, addiction treatment and family support services, helping people become the best version of themselves.
This provider serves more than 100,000 patients through approximately one million patient encounters annually across multiple sites. It has a team with more than 2,000 members, including more than 1,600 clinical staff members with expertise and specialties that span the gamut of behavioral health services and other supports.
When response time really matters
In any clinic, timely and efficient responses to patient calls are critical. In behavioral health, the stakes are higher still—any voicemail could be a patient in crisis. Across the provider’s clinics, voicemail handling had become a significant challenge. Messages were taking 48–72 hours to process and respond to, even with the clinical team working as quickly as possible. What looked like an operational bottleneck was, for patients, something much bigger: up to three days of waiting for a response when time truly mattered.
The Managed Services advantage
At a high level, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is about removing obstacles that keep staff from doing the work that matters most. Sifting through hours of voicemail recordings is neither practical nor efficient, and it pulls valuable time away from patient care. Managed Services RPA alleviates this burden by automating manual, repetitive tasks. Using custom and pre-built virtual bots, RPA increases productivity, reduces errors and enables clinical teams to stay focused on delivering patient care. For health providers managing high patient volumes, that shift makes a meaningful difference.
RPA in real time
With the Altera Managed Services team at their side, both leadership and clinical teams began experiencing firsthand the power of a tool that works for them behind the scenes. We expertly deployed a voicemail triage bot, and here’s a quick dive into what it does:
- Logs into Outlook, retrieves voicemails, transcribes messages, and triages them in TouchWorks EHR using keyword recognition (such as “suicide” or medication names).
- Matches the voicemail to the correct patient record in TouchWorks EHR.
- Enters the information into TouchWorks EHR, creating actionable tasks tied directly to the patient.
- Prioritizes urgent messages within the EHR, significantly reducing critical care response times to patients most in need.
More hours in a day
The impact was immediate and measurable. The manual voicemail processing time was reduced from 12–13 hours per week to just two, reallocating valuable time back to clinical care. Response times improved dramatically, and overall operational efficiency increased by more than 80%—far exceeding the initial goal of a 10% improvement. Faster throughput and increased capacity created a noticeable shift, one felt not only by the clinical staff, but by patients as well.
The bigger picture
For this provider, RPA isn’t just a back-office efficiency play—it’s a direct line to better patient care. A voicemail that once waited days for a response can now reach the right clinician in a fraction of the time, freeing staff to spend fewer hours sorting messages and more hours with patients. That’s the shift that matters most: a tool working quietly in the background so that when someone reaches out during a hard moment, they don’t have to wait to be heard.
