Women's health practices face a scheduling challenge that most other specialties don't fully appreciate. The sheer variety of visit types — annual exams, mammograms, OB appointments, gynecology visits, ultrasounds, birth control, pre-op, postpartum — creates a workflow complexity that overwhelms even well-staffed teams. Layer on insurance-driven timing rules, provider-specific scheduling preferences, and multi-location coordination, and you've got a front office problem that hiring alone can't solve.
Heartland Women's Healthcare of Advantia knows this firsthand.
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When OB/GYN Growth Outpaces Your Scheduling Infrastructure
Heartland delivers comprehensive obstetric and gynecological services across 9 locations with 30 providers serving communities throughout Illinois and Missouri. As an early adopter of AI technology, the practice wasn't struggling because of indifference to innovation. They were struggling because growth had outpaced their operational infrastructure.
Call volumes surged as the practice expanded. Complex scheduling workflows created bottlenecks across locations. Patients faced long hold times. Calls went unanswered. And the scheduling team — already stretched thin — was spending the bulk of their day on routine calls that could have been handled without human intervention.
It's a pattern women's health groups across the country know well. One leading OB/GYN network had offices dropping 3,000 calls a week even with 10-person call centers. Another saw patients physically walking into offices because they couldn't get through on the phone. The phone problem isn't unique to Heartland. What's notable is how quickly they moved to fix it.
Why OB/GYN Scheduling Breaks Most Automation Tools
Before getting into what changed, it's worth understanding why women's health scheduling breaks most automation tools.
In OB/GYN, the rules shift constantly. You can't book an annual exam if it's been fewer than 365 days since the last one. Mammograms and ultrasounds have insurance-driven timing requirements. Some providers allow double-booking for certain visit types; others don't. New pregnancies follow entirely different scheduling protocols than routine gynecological care. And in multi-location practices like Heartland, those rules vary by site and provider.
This is why traditional booking portals have struggled in women's health. Without the intelligence to enforce provider-specific rules in real time, staff end up correcting booking errors — wrong appointment types, insurance mismatches, providers scheduled incorrectly. As one practice manager put it: "90% of self-scheduled patients make mistakes." The problem was never the concept of online scheduling. It was the lack of clinical logic behind it.
Any automation solution that doesn't understand this level of complexity isn't going to work for OB/GYN. The scheduling has to follow each provider's preferences exactly, every time, across every location.
How EliseAI Integrates with Athena EHR for Women's Health Scheduling
EliseAI integrated directly with Heartland's Athena EHR, immediately handling appointment scheduling, rescheduling, and patient inquiries across all 9 locations. There's no separate scheduling layer. Elise reads provider templates, appointment types, time blocks, insurance rules, and location assignments from the same source of truth the staff uses — and applies them in real time during every patient interaction.
When a provider updates their template in Athena, Elise picks up the change automatically. No ticket to file. No configuration update to request. The scheduling logic stays current because it's pulling directly from the EHR. That level of provider-preference compliance is what separates a tool that works in OB/GYN from one that doesn't.
For Heartland, this meant Elise could manage the full complexity of obstetric and gynecological scheduling workflows while the call team shifted their attention to the patient interactions that actually required a human touch — complex clinical questions, sensitive conversations, and in-office support.
The results showed up fast.
AI Scheduling Results: 88% Fewer Abandoned Calls
Within weeks of going live, Heartland saw:
88% reduction in call abandonment rate. Patients who previously hung up after waiting on hold were now getting through immediately. Every call answered on the first ring, every time.
83% reduction in average wait time. The hold queues that were driving patients away essentially disappeared.
1,200+ appointments scheduled monthly. Elise handles the volume that was previously bottlenecking the team.
300+ appointments rescheduled monthly. Rescheduling — one of the most time-consuming and disruptive call types — runs on autopilot.
85+ hours reclaimed per week. That's the equivalent of two full-time staff members redirected from phone work to higher-value patient support.
These aren't projections. They're measured results from a live deployment across all locations. And they mirror what other women's health practices have seen — Women's Health Connecticut cut abandonment rates from 50-60% to 5% and saved 10 hours per day across their call center operations.
The Patient Experience Impact No One Expected
Marcel van Vierssen, Systems Manager at Heartland Women's Healthcare of Advantia, expected the staff efficiency gains. What caught his attention was the patient experience improvement.
"When I first looked at the numbers, I was focused on the impressive staff efficiency. But the huge decreases in wait times and abandoned calls show a much better quality of service for our patients. I'm excited to see the impact Elise will have across all our locations."
This reaction comes up repeatedly across practices. Leaders come in expecting operational relief and discover that the patient experience improvements are just as significant — sometimes more so. When patients can reach their practice immediately, schedule accurately, and get answers without sitting on hold, it changes their perception of the entire care experience. The operational metrics and patient satisfaction gains tend to move together.
AI Scheduling for Multi-Location OB/GYN Practices: What Heartland Proves
Heartland's story is particularly relevant for multi-location OB/GYN groups navigating growth. The pattern is consistent: as practices add providers and locations, call complexity compounds faster than headcount can keep up. Hiring more schedulers introduces training bottlenecks, turnover risk, and inconsistency in how provider preferences are applied.
EliseAI doesn't replace the scheduling team. It removes the ceiling on how many patients the practice can serve without proportionally scaling headcount. That's what Heartland needed — and it went live in weeks, not months.
For practices evaluating whether AI can handle the nuance of women's health workflows, Heartland offers a clear proof point. Complex scheduling rules, provider-specific preferences, multi-location coordination, Athena integration — all running, all accurate, and all producing measurable results within the first month.
If your OB/GYN practice is outgrowing its phone infrastructure, the conversation is worth having.