Is Your Patient Access Center Ready for What's Next? A Guide for Healthcare Leaders at Epic XGM

 If you’re attending Epic XGM this year, you know it’s where the real conversations happen: what's working in health systems, what isn't, and what we all need to do better for patients and care teams. 

At Five9, we’re focused on one part of that conversation: the growing gap in patient access. If your teams are struggling with long hold times, fragmented systems, and reactive workflows, let’s talk. 

Here's what I know from interacting with over 100+ healthcare systems’ patient access center and revenue cycle management (RCM) teams and visiting their contact centers:  

Health systems are looking for long-term and trusted partnerships in taking their patient engagement and contact center optimization initiatives

The Inbound Problem: What the Research Says 

• Long Waits: The average hold time in U.S. healthcare contact centers is 4.4 minutes — more than five times the HFMA's recommended benchmark of 50 seconds.  

• Lost Context: Only 1% of healthcare contact centers achieve a First Call Resolution rate above 80%. The industry average is 52%.  

• Access Concerns: Phone access ranked among the four top unresolved patient access priorities heading into 2026 - cited by 22% of practice leaders as their primary focus area.  

• Revenue at Risk: Patients who have a poor phone experience are 4× more likely to switch providers. They don't write complaints. They simply leave. Source: HFMA patient retention research 

Your agents — the people on the front lines—are toggling between four to six disconnected systems just to answer a single patient question. Epic is one screen. The phone system is another. The billing portal is a third. 

Sound familiar? That’s the “swivel chair” problem, and it’s costing you more than just time. It’s burning out your agents and frustrating your patients. 

The Bigger, Invisible Problem: Healthcare Is Too Reactive 

Most healthcare contact centers are entirely reactive. They wait for patients to call. And patients often don't call — they fall through the cracks quietly.

That silence is not just a patient satisfaction problem. It is a care continuity problem, a clinical safety concern, and in nearly every case, a significant revenue problem. 

The research is unambiguous about what that silence costs. 

• Referral Revenue Leakage: The Advisory Board's 2024 analysis of employed PCP referral patterns found that only 55% of total referral revenue attributed to employed PCPs is realized in-network. Health systems lose 45% of referral revenue to competitors — costing an estimated $388 million in annual revenue per system. 

• No-Show Revenue Drain: MGMA's December 2025 analysis found that no-shows and last-minute cancellations consume roughly 14% of a medical group's daily revenue, with industry models estimating losses of approximately $150,000 annually per physician. By August 2025, more than a quarter of practices still reported their no-show rates were higher than the year before — even with automated reminder systems in place. 

• The Evidence on Reminders: A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 10 randomized controlled trials published in the Journal of Hospital Management and Health Policy found that reminders significantly improve outpatient attendance, with pooled results showing an 11% increase in attendance across both SMS and telephone reminder interventions. Critically, AI model-driven live outreach targeted at high-risk patients produced statistically significant reductions in no-show rates, with the largest gains reducing health equity disparities in appointment completion.  

Your challenges are exactly why we built Five9 Fusion for Epic — an integration designed hand-in-hand with health systems to solve these very problems. As an approved solution in Epic's Showroom Toolbox category, it seamlessly connects your communication channels with your Epic workflows.