Getting Smart With Virtual Assistants in Healthcare
•February 10, 2026
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Why It Matters
By cutting manual data‑search time for clinicians and improving patient‑facing interactions, AI assistants boost operational efficiency and patient satisfaction, giving health systems a competitive edge.
Key Takeaways
- •Mayo built in‑house Nurse Virtual Assistant for nurses.
- •Tool curates EHR and policy summaries instantly.
- •IVAs enhance consumer experience across calls and web.
- •Faster, context‑rich AI reduces wait times.
- •Agentic AI can resolve issues without human agents.
Pulse Analysis
The Nurse Virtual Assistant illustrates how health systems can leverage generative AI to solve concrete clinical problems. By pulling relevant data from electronic health records and policy libraries into a single, concise summary, nurses spend less time navigating disparate systems and more time delivering care. This internal development also provides a sandbox for iterative improvement, allowing feedback loops that refine accuracy and usability—an advantage over off‑the‑shelf solutions that may not align with nursing workflows.
Beyond the bedside, patient‑centric virtual assistants are rapidly becoming essential for modern consumer experience. As patients grow accustomed to seamless digital interactions in retail and finance, they expect similar ease when contacting a health provider. Integrations like Amazon Connect paired with Epic’s EHR enable smarter call routing and real‑time data access, reducing hold times and misdirected inquiries. Such infrastructure lays the groundwork for deploying intelligent virtual assistants that can answer FAQs, schedule appointments, and guide users through complex navigation without human intervention.
The next wave of intelligent virtual assistants hinges on three technological advances: large‑language‑model‑driven natural language understanding, ultra‑low latency processing, and agentic AI capable of autonomous task completion. These capabilities allow IVAs to handle nuanced queries, maintain conversational flow, and even resolve issues end‑to‑end. For healthcare organizations, adopting these tools translates into higher patient satisfaction scores, lower operational costs, and a scalable platform for future AI‑driven services. Partnering with experienced vendors can accelerate implementation while ensuring compliance and security, positioning AI as a strategic differentiator in an increasingly competitive market.
Getting Smart With Virtual Assistants in Healthcare
Mayo Clinic’s Nurse Virtual Assistant and the Future of Consumer Experience in Healthcare
Last year, Mayo Clinic launched Nurse Virtual Assistant, a generative artificial intelligence tool designed by and for nurses to ease access to patient care, institutional and industry information. Instead of spending hours sifting through the electronic health record system or a clinical policy library, Nurse Virtual Assistant curates a summary in one place.
As a large healthcare organization, Mayo Clinic built its solution in‑house and will continue to refine it with direct feedback from nurses. Such a tool may feel out of reach for many healthcare providers, but the lesson here is that Mayo Clinic leaders are addressing a specific pain point rather than slotting in new technology and rationalizing its existence later.
Organizations interested in incorporating a smart assistant into their workflow need to solve a concrete problem. It may be difficult to start directly in the clinical space — that’s OK, because there are still many areas that impact patient care that would benefit from automation.
One area is the consumer experience (CX), how community members first interact with a provider organization. Are callers waiting too long to be transferred to the right department? When people visit a health system’s website, can they find the information they’re looking for or are they having to call in to ask about hours or location? Can patients make appointments?
These may seem like small interactions for a healthcare organization, but they make a huge difference for consumers when they decide where they want to receive care. And since most consumers are familiar with an accessible, digitally driven experience in other industries — such as retail, finance and food service — the lack of those capabilities in healthcare can be frustrating.
This is where intelligent virtual assistants can help. These aren’t basic chatbots; IVAs have improved interpretation abilities, can manage complex queries and offer more personalization. And with better language and voice, faster responses and agentic AI, IVAs can transform an organization’s customer service to benefit not just the customer but the staff too.
Building a Strong Patient Experience Base
Consumers are becoming more familiar and reliant on smart assistants. A 2025 Zendesk survey found that 52 % of users are comfortable with using an AI assistant for everyday tasks, mainly for managing to‑do lists or calendars, or for helping with professional correspondence. While more than half of respondents believe in the positive impact of AI assistants in customer service, 84 % still want human interaction as an option.
Many healthcare organizations have been modernizing their contact‑center strategies to build a stronger foundation for future automated solutions. The shift toward adopting more cloud‑platform solutions is helping move organizations closer to seamless, context‑rich interactions.
For Jupiter Medical Center in Jupiter, Fla., the move to Amazon Connect coincided with the decision to go with Epic as its electronic health record solution.
“We knew that after putting in a transformational product like Epic, we needed something equally as powerful on the communication side to complete the solution,” said Shane Faullin, director of analytics and automation at Jupiter Medical Center, during the 2025 Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington, D.C.
Now, with callers routed appropriately and with better data about interactions, the overall experience for consumers and staff members has improved. This sets the building blocks for the organization to adopt newer processes with IVAs.
Change Is Coming for the Consumer Experience in Healthcare
Joel Suarez, principal CX architect at CDW, and TJ Paulson, principal consultant of digital experience at CDW, highlight the three major advancements in IVAs and why they’re becoming the cornerstone of modern contact centers.
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Better language and voice: Powered by large language models, IVAs now understand context and intent with remarkable accuracy, delivering more human‑like conversations. Expect them to tackle more complex tasks.
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Speed: A low‑latency approach helps maintain customer attention, especially in real‑time voice interactions, where even minor delays can lead to frustration.
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Agentic AI: With minimal human intervention, agentic IVAs can eventually resolve issues and manage the entire consumer journey.
Organizations don’t have to go on this IVA journey alone. Working with a trusted partner can help explore solutions and tailor them to each organization’s needs.
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