The New Front Door: How Agentic AI Powers Patient Access at Clear Medical Imaging
May 5, 2026
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Every confirmed appointment came at a cost: staff time, repeated call attempts and a process that couldn’t keep pace with growing imaging volume.
For Mackenzie Health, optimizing the patient journey starts well before a patient comes through the door. The team had already deployed PocketHealth Appointment Reminders: automated SMS and voice notifications that alert patients to their upcoming appointment details, prep instructions and location. That deployment avoided $110K in operating costs and reduced wrong-site arrivals by 80%, prompting the team to turn its attention to an earlier gap in the patient journey: confirming that an appointment had been booked at all.
At the time, the Patient Scheduling Department was placing up to three phone calls per patient to do just that. 50% of landline calls went unanswered, urgent procedures couldn’t be left as voicemails and after three failed attempts, the appointment request was cancelled and sent back to the referring physician. As imaging volume grew, the model was no longer sustainable.
Automated booking confirmations shifted the outbound call workflow, ensuring staff only reached out to patients who genuinely needed a call.
In November 2025, Mackenzie Health went live with automated booking confirmations with PocketHealth. Now, as soon as an appointment is booked, patients receive an SMS with their appointment details, arrival time and a prompt to confirm their appointment. The same message directs patients to MyChart for rescheduling, cancellations and questions, reducing front desk call volume while making every booking confirmation a touchpoint for driving better MyChart adoption. Patients can now reschedule appointments 24/7 through MyChart instead of calling the front desk, helping Mackenzie Health maximize its existing MyChart investment by surfacing a patient feature that had previously gone underutilized. PocketHealth’s admin dashboard gives Mackenzie Health’s Patient Scheduling Department a clear view of exactly which patients haven’t engaged with the SMS, so callbacks are targeted and meaningful rather than blanket outbound calls.
Working closely with PocketHealth, the team co-designed the confirmation workflow, working through the scenarios unique to diagnostic imaging, from urgent procedures to prep instructions, to make sure quality was maintained throughout.
The impact was felt across call volume, staff capacity, turnaround time and MyChart adoption.
Patient feedback reinforced the data. Patients at Mackenzie Health described how fast and effortless the new process felt: a booking, then a text, with no phone tag on either side. All of this was achieved with 10% fewer hours worked across diagnostic imaging, with reclaimed capacity absorbed into appointment volume growth rather than added headcount.
PocketHealth automates the operational complexity of healthcare: the manual, non-clinical work that surrounds every patient visit. For more than a decade, the company has automated this work from both the provider and patient sides, building a distinct understanding of how providers operate and how patients engage in their care. Its agentic operations platform extends that expertise across the enterprise, automating non-clinical workflows end-to-end while working inside existing systems and adapting to each site’s SOPs. The result for providers: improved capacity, financial performance and patient outcomes. PocketHealth is SOC 2 and HIPAA and PHIPA compliant, and trusted by 900+ health systems. Request a demo today.
