How Southdale OBGYN Tamed Volume Surges & MetroPartners OBGYN Unlocked Multilingual Access With EliseAI

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Southdale OBGYN and MetroPartners OBGYN are two OB/GYN practices in the Twin Cities, both part of the Premier Women's Health of Minnesota consortium. Together they have 18 physicians serving patients across the full scope of women's health, from annual exams and pregnancy care to specialty consults and procedures. Both practices run on Athenahealth and are affiliated with Unified Women's Healthcare.

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They implemented EliseAI at different times, for different reasons, and arrived at remarkably similar results. For any multi-location women's health organization weighing AI adoption, the question is usually whether it works at one site under ideal conditions or whether it holds up across different teams, different workflows, and different patient populations. Southdale and MetroPartners answered that question.

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Both Southdale OBGYN and MetroPartners OBGYN are busy, well-established practices with strong clinical reputations. The challenge wasn't care quality. It was connecting patients to that care.

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At MetroPartners, the call volume had outgrown the team's capacity. Scheduling Supervisor Courtney Hawthorne described it plainly: "A typical morning before we took on Elise would look very chaotic for our staff with long patient wait times and back-to-back calls." Business Manager Kristi Ide estimated the practice was missing 25 to 30% of its daily calls, with the phone system dropping patients after 15 minutes on hold. "That gave us the impression that if they had to wait that long, they were going to go somewhere else," she said.

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At Southdale, the pressure showed up differently. The front desk was managing a high volume of appointment types, from ultrasounds and lab visits to provider appointments, while simultaneously checking patients in and collecting insurance information. Mornings after weekends and holidays were especially demanding. Dr. Swigert described the moment that crystallized the need: "When we started taking a deep dive looking at the analytics around our phone calls and we realized how many of our patients were hanging up because they were waiting such a long time, or when I started getting texts from my friends who are patients saying, 'I can't get through to your office. Can you help me get an appointment?'"

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Both practices were also navigating the same staffing reality facing women's health across the country. Scheduling and front desk positions are among the hardest to fill and retain. MetroPartners had lost three team members to natural attrition. Southdale needed to make better use of the team they had. Neither practice wanted to be in a constant cycle of recruiting and training for the same roles.

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Dr. Swigert put it simply: "We were looking for a solution that was going to help all of us."

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Southdale OBGYN came to EliseAI through the Unified Women's Healthcare network. Dr. Swigert had a direct connection to the physicians at Women's Health Connecticut, one of the first large OB/GYN groups to go live with EliseAI. "As a part of Unified Women's Health, we have access to other medical groups," she said. "I'm friends with a physician who was using EliseAI and piloting it in a large group in Connecticut. So it really helped to hear such positive experiences from other doctors and practices."

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MetroPartners came through a separate vendor evaluation. Kristi Ide and her team looked at multiple AI platforms and chose EliseAI for its Athenahealth integration depth and multilingual capabilities. "When someone called through Elise, no matter what language they spoke in a range of 20-some languages, our patients could speak in their native tongue," Kristi said. "That was really important to us."

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Both practices launched with EliseAI handling inbound calls, scheduling appointments, creating new patient charts, and routing clinical questions as patient cases, all integrated directly into Athenahealth. The integration was clean at both sites. "The EHR integration of Elise into Athena has been essentially seamless, especially from my perspective as a practicing doctor," said Dr. Swigert. Payton Oberg, Clinic Manager at Southdale, confirmed: "With direct integration into patients' charts, we're able to add patient cases. We're able to make sure that patients are called back appropriately and it has been successful."

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What impressed both teams was how well Elise handled OB/GYN scheduling logic. Women's health scheduling involves coordinating multiple appointment types, provider preferences, gestational timing, and visit sequences that have to happen in a specific order. Most AI tools can book a standard appointment. Booking a pregnancy confirmation, pairing it with the correct ultrasound at the right gestational week, and assigning both to the right provider in the right sequence is a different problem entirely.

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At Southdale, Payton Oberg described the progression: "We initially began with certain appointment types such as annuals or new patient consults and eventually expanded to different OB appointments. So this includes your first OB ultrasound, your pregnancy confirmation along with a 20-week anatomy scan. And Elise is developed enough to understand that the ultrasound is scheduled first and the appointment follows and it knows to schedule them appropriately with the correct time and the correct provider."

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At MetroPartners, Rachel Escobedo, Lead Sonographer, validated the same thing from the clinical side: "What surprised me most about Elise was that she was able to pair OB visits with ultrasounds during the correct gestational week. We were worried that an AI tool wouldn't know women's health workflows and Elise nailed it."

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Across both locations combined since launch, here's what EliseAI delivered.

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Over 3,000 appointments scheduled across both sites. Patients who would have been on hold or routed to voicemail got booked during the call. MetroPartners accounted for over 2,000 of those. Southdale contributed over 1,000.

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450 new patient charts created combined New patient registration is one of the most time-consuming scheduling tasks. At MetroPartners, Elise saved 42 hours per month on chart creation alone. "New patients tend to take a very long time to get into our system. Elise has scheduled over 100 new patients and saved our staff over 42 hours of work," said Courtney Hawthorne, Scheduling Supervisor.

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1,900 patient cases routed to clinical teams combined Medical questions that would have ended up in a voicemail inbox were documented with full patient context and sent to the right person immediately.

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50-62% of eligible inbound calls handled by Elise at both locations, consistently month over month. Southdale averaged around 50%, MetroPartners around 62%. Eligible calls are scheduling, rescheduling, cancellation, and general inquiry calls that make up the bulk of phone volume. Clinical triage, lab results, and other calls that require a human are routed to staff immediately.

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24/7 scheduling access. "Previously, we would have a whole bunch of messages left for our scheduling team in the morning because patients called when it was convenient for them, but we weren't here," said Kristi Ide. "Now they can actually get scheduled and have their issues taken care of 24/7."

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The voicemail reduction at Southdale was one of the most visible changes. The practice went from hundreds of voicemails to roughly 20 on a typical Friday. And when the Monday after Thanksgiving arrived, a day that historically overwhelmed the scheduling team, Elise handled the surge and staff stayed composed throughout.

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Both practices saw staffing pressure ease. MetroPartners didn't need to backfill three open scheduling positions. Southdale redeployed staff time toward patient-facing work. "It has made it much easier for our leadership team administratively to look at where we need to use our current staff, not have to backfill staff and allow our current employees to have other opportunities within our practice," said Dr. Swigert.

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The patient response was consistent across both locations. At MetroPartners, patients called the business manager to compliment the scheduling experience without realizing it was AI. "This is so important to us because in the women's health field, we can be dealing with very sensitive or concerning issues and we want to make sure our patients feel supported," said Courtney Hawthorne. At Southdale, Dr. Swigert heard the same thing: "Most of the feedback I've heard is that it's hard to tell that it's AI, that they haven't had any issues regarding feeling understood or getting what they needed in terms of appointments."

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Staff at both locations described relief. "What our call center and front desk staff say is they feel relief and they feel like they can do a better job, that they can give the time that they need to give to our patients that need it," said Dr. Swigert. At Southdale, Payton Oberg's front desk team shifted their focus toward individual patient concerns, detailed appointments, and clinical operations. At MetroPartners, Courtney Hawthorne's team is spending more time preparing for patient visits and ensuring records and paperwork are ready before patients walk in.

Both practices meet with EliseAI weekly to refine workflows and build out new capabilities.

MetroPartners is working on surgery scheduling through patient case collection, fertility consult triaging, and phone tree restructuring to route all inbound calls through Elise.

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Southdale is building out postpartum appointment logic, telehealth scheduling, and specialty workflows like mammography notes for patients with implants.

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Both locations are exploring outbound calling for appointment reminders and overdue patient outreach, as well as billing integration for collecting outstanding balances during scheduling calls.

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The bigger picture is what happens across the consortium. Dr. Swigert sees EliseAI as the foundation for a broader operational shift: "One of the benefits of being part of a larger consortium here in the Twin Cities is that now we can share our experience with our colleagues. So, we're hoping to launch Elise with our partner practices soon. That's going to be a great win for us. Once we're able to accomplish that, we can then look at consolidating amongst our practices our call center team, possibly our triage team. So the way we see it, the possibilities are endless."

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That's the trajectory that matters most for multi-location women's health organizations. Southdale and MetroPartners didn't just solve a phone problem at two offices. They proved that a single AI platform can scale across different sites, with different teams and different workflows, and deliver consistent results. For any MSO, PE-backed group, or growing women's health network evaluating AI, that's the question worth asking. And these two practices have an answer.

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Payton Oberg, Clinic Manager at Southdale, put the partnership in practical terms: "We appreciate their continued desire to move toward the future and see evolution of their product. We're also very pleased with the responsiveness that the staff has had in addressing issues, addressing patient concerns, and continuing to improve their product as well as their relationship with us as a clinic."

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Kristi Ide, Business Manager at MetroPartners, said it this way: "Elise is constantly building, constantly looking at new ways to strive and we've already talked about some of the things that we would like to see. I can see it taking on some of those menial tasks that aren't what people got into healthcare for. We want to take that off of the plate so that our staff can actually care for people and be present for our patients."