Moving Toward a More Seamless Patient Experience With AI

Hartford HealthCare Launches PatientGPT

Connecticut-based Hartford HealthCare is a network with more than 500 locations and 48,000 employees serving most of the state. Earlier this year, in partnership with K Health, the health system launched HHC PatientGPT, developed with a clinical AI company to provide a digital touchpoint for patients.

According to Dr. Padmanabhan Premkumar, president of Hartford HealthCare Medical Group, the primary driver behind making HHC PatientGPT available was a commitment to expanding patient access and deepening digital engagement.  

“The healthcare journey can be incredibly fragmented and overwhelming for patients,” says Premkumar, who is an internal medicine physician. “When patients leave a phone message or portal inquiry, that waiting period creates an information vacuum, and many turn to open search engines for immediate answers.”

To bridge this gap, patients can authorize HHC PatientGPT, which runs on Google Cloud, to access their medical records within the organization’s Epic EHR system.

“Our patients can seamlessly log in and consult HHC PatientGPT in real time. Whether they have general health queries, daily wellness questions or basic scheduling needs, they receive immediate, reliable education,” he adds.

HHC PatientGPT is trained to understand what the patient is asking and triage it appropriately. It can set up an appointment or assist in navigating to the next point in Hartford HealthCare’s ecosystem, such as 24/7 virtual care, and it can help patients clarify concerns.

“A patient might interact with HHC PatientGPT simply to ask a routine medication question,” Premkumar says. “HHC PatientGPT can ask follow-up questions to identify underlying symptoms that the patient might not realize are critical, escalating them to the appropriate level of care. That is what sets this apart.”

All interactions with HHC PatientGPT can be shared with a patient’s care team, as a precaution. In addition, another AI agent sits atop HHC PatientGPT to review the quality and safety of conversations, making sure that they have been escalated to the right place or sent to a clinician for review if necessary.

Hartford HealthCare is on track to reach out to more than 1 million adult patients across Connecticut, inviting them to try HHC PatientGPT by the end of 2026.

“In order to be a healthcare system that's truly consumer-centric, we wanted a solution that draws a connection between a patient’s questions, their medical records and their care team,” Premkumar says. “We know who you are, we have your EHR and we understand how to connect our patients to the care they need.”

MUSC Health Deploys Emily in the Contact Center

Down south, at the Medical University of South Carolina Health, an AI agent named Emily serves as a digital touchpoint for patients to manage appointments and get answers to nonclinical questions.  

MUSC Health uses AI in several clinical and administrative capacities, but Chief Digital Transformation Officer Crystal Broj says that developing Emily served an operational need.

“Our call center was open for patient access from 9 to 5, but we wanted 24-hour support,” Broj says. “We had patient frustration, workforce pressure and, really, we just wanted to modernize.”

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Broj and her team developed Emily using a conversational AI solution. It greets patients with natural language responses when they call by phone, where it can handle the majority of nonmedical requests, from scheduling appointments to routing patients to the correct department.

The AI agent can help answer questions about billing or help a patient pay their bill. It can also answer questions about pharmacy refills.

Emily is integrated with Epic, so when appointments are changed, it automatically updates the patient’s EHR, even if the patient isn’t logged in to their record during the call.

MUSC Health tested Emily for over a year before it went live. Today, the agent handles more than 624,000 calls annually.

“Emily will play an increasingly important role at MUSC,” Broj says. “It’s scalable, it increases patient access and it reduces the burden on our staff. Overall, it’s a wonderful thing to have.”