Automating the Contact Center with Lynn Simon of Community Health Systems

This is part of our weekly executive insights series where Elion CEO Bobby Guelich speaks with healthcare leaders about their tech priorities and learnings. For more, become a member and sign up for our email here.

Role: President, Healthcare Innovation & Chief Medical Officer

Organization: Community Health Systems

Can you give me some context on your role and what you’re responsible for?

My role focuses on innovation, and looking for products or solutions that align with our business priorities. I focus on everything from clinical and operational solutions to patient-facing and administrative technologies. If something aligns with our goals, I’ll take it to the relevant business owner, and we decide whether it’s worth piloting or moving forward.

Can you tell me about any recent projects you’ve been working on?

One exciting project we’ve worked on is with Denim Health. We’ve been their development partner for the last year, using AI to enhance our physician call center, which supports roughly 1000 primary care physicians. The goal was to improve patient access and experience while reducing administrative burden and costs.

Leveraging our call center recordings, we worked with Denim to help them train their AI models, and that also allowed us to identify the problems we wanted to tackle first. Our first use case was automating patient identification and intent. Now, when a patient calls, the AI identifies them, pulls up their chart, and determines the intent of the call before handing it off to an agent.

Once we were able to refine the model and iterate a little bit, we were able to scale pretty quickly, and that use case is now scaled across our whole infrastructure, and the operational savings will be impactful.

How has the AI rollout been received by patients and agents?

We were initially concerned about patient acceptance, but the transition went smoothly—our first patient to interact with the AI during the pilot was nearly 90 years old, and it worked perfectly. People are used to interacting with automated systems these days and know how to switch to a live agent if needed.

We also expected some pushback from agents, but they’ve embraced the technology. The AI simplifies their workflow by giving them the patient’s details and the reason for the call upfront, which enhances their experience.

What’s next on your roadmap with this project?

Next is expanding the AI’s capabilities to handle tasks like canceling, confirming, and rescheduling appointments. We’re also planning to use it for outreach, such as filling gaps in care. The goal is to move beyond the typical 9-to-5 model and improve access for patients by allowing the system to take calls instantly—especially on Mondays when call volumes are high.

Switching gears, is there anything you’re seeing at the moment that’s feeling overhyped?

I don’t know that I would say it’s overhyped, but the AI scribe space is definitely crowded, and that makes decision-making challenging. We’ve been cautious about jumping in, which is why we’ll likely be evaluating the AI scribe space more intentionally in 2025. There are so many vendors, and we’re still figuring out whether we should go with a single vendor across all systems or use different ones depending on the specialty or platform. It’s a lot to sort through, and we decided to take a more thoughtful approach before committing.

Do you see any particular white space or unmet needs in healthcare technology?

One big challenge is that almost every solution is built on top of existing EMRs. At some point, we may need to rethink the EMR model altogether and develop a platform that better supports modern care delivery. Integrating innovations like ambient listening, virtual nursing, and smart sensors will require a different approach, including a reimagined user interface and updated workflows.

That said, I’ve seen promise with platforms like athenahealth in the outpatient space because they make integration easier. You can quickly add new tools through their marketplace or APIs, and that flexibility allows us to innovate faster. So if it’s not fully disrupting the existing market, then we need to make these platforms more open, not just technically but also economically.