Steve Smith is currently the AVP of Enterprise Contact Center & Clinical Access at Inova Health, but in a previous life, he worked for Disney. First, he was a security supervisor on a movie set and later, he was the entertainment program project manager at Disney’s Boardwalk. During this time, he learned how Disney handles things when they go wrong.

“If something goes wrong at Disney, they are quickly able to recover from that and still provide a really holistic, wonderful experience,” Smith told Brennan Stratton, VP of Enterprise Sales at Hyro at an #HCCT26 session. “To me, that mindset of a fast recovery transitions to the healthcare world because in many instances, either an AI agent or a live agent is the first interaction a patient will have with your health system. And it’s incumbent on us to cultivate that kind of thinking: welcoming, problem-solving, getting their experience off on the right foot.”

At Inova Health, the contact center functions as the front door of the patient experience. It’s a five-hospital integrated system serving more than a million patients a year with 26,000 team members across the greater Washington, DC area. Before the partnership with Hyro in 2024, patients were caught in what Smith described as “a death loop.” Patients were transferred from department to department, relying on a live agent to guess where they wanted to go, and were bounced to phone numbers that weren’t staffed.

Well, here’s something shocking: Patients want something better! Stratton mentioned a recent Accenture study that found that 78% of patients named “a lack of consistent support experience” as their primary reason for switching providers. Providers are feeling it: 30% now point to patient retention and preventing leakage to competitors as a top reason for adopting AI agents, according to Hyro’s 2026 AI Agent Benchmark Report. 

Inova Health partnered with Hyro for an AI agent that could help patients navigate scheduling, rescheduling, cancellations, medication refills and routing to the right destination. 

Since their partnership began, the system handles approximately 350,000 calls a month across the enterprise, gets patients to their preferred destination more than 80% of the time and has freed up 4,000 hours of capacity per month for live agents. And after-hours care, once limited to MyChart, is now fully covered. Patients can schedule, reschedule, request medication refills and get the help they need, 24/7.  

Because of the partnership, Inova is preparing to sunset Saturday primary care call hours entirely, with Hyro handling new and follow-up scheduling on its own. 

Next up, Hyro is expanding into Inova Health’s orthopedics department. The new workflow will allow Hyro to interact with patients who aren’t in the system, collect demographic and insurance information via chat and then, schedule an appointment. It’s also launching an outbound proactive outreach AI agent to manage referral follow-through in orthopedics. 

Inova Health built KPIs from the start. Then, it let those KPIs evolve as the program matured. Early priorities were call routing accuracy, capacity gain and abandon rate reduction. Then, as Hyro expanded into self-service scheduling, appointment conversion showed up as an important metric. For example, when they launched scheduling in primary care, conversion started around 4%. Now, it’s around 15%. 

They’re also tracking the derailment rate. A derailment happens when the digital assistant and a patient fall out of sync. The assistant can’t understand the request, can’t route the call or can’t complete a self-service task, and the interaction hands off to a live agent. 

“Derailments aren’t failures, but they represent friction and that’s what we’re trying to eliminate,” Smith says. “So, we started looking at the data and found that ER staff calling after hours to reach on-call providers were saying phrases like, ‘on-call provider’ or ‘provider,’ rather than the phrase ‘after hours’ that the system had been trained to recognize. Once we identified the pattern by listening directly to the recorded interactions using Hyro’s Care Intelligence, we expanded the catalog of terms the assistant understood.” 

4 tips for implementing a voice AI agent 

Smith shared four reasons why the partnership has been successful: 

• Centralized and repeatable processes. If a department wants to join the Hyro ecosystem, they have to demonstrate the kind of clean, consistent process infrastructure that makes automation work. 
• Continuous data monitoring. The team reviews patient interactions, tracks sentiment through Press Ganey data and stays tuned to what frontline staff are hearing on calls.
• Change management. Inova Health’s CEO Dr. Stephen Jones and CIO Matthew Kull were early champions of automation, but it was still important to get department-level buy-in. 
• Vendor collaboration. Inova runs Hyro alongside Epic, Epic CRM and NICE CXone. Smith says it’s important to make sure that each partner is engaged to what changes are happening now and in the future. 

“Inova can get patients to the right place more than 80% of the time,” Stratton says. “What makes that possible isn’t just the technology, but how committed the team is to improving every interaction. They treat every call as an essential part of a patient’s experience, and they refuse to let anyone get lost along the way or not get quick access to whatever care or assistance they need.”