Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Hadi Chaudhry, Co-CEO of CareCloud. It's great to have you with us today. I'm also joined today by two key leaders from our team: Aman Haq, who heads over AI initiatives here at CareCloud, and Maaz Siddiqui, who leads product adoption, growth, and innovation for Stratus AI.
Aman brings deep experience in AI-driven product development, including more than five years at Microsoft as a Senior Product Manager working on AI products. He works closely with our customers and product teams to ensure Stratus AI delivers real-world impact at a scale. Together, we will walk you through Stratus AI Desk Agent, our AI-powered front desk solution designed specifically to modernize patient phone access in health care.
Over the next 30 minutes, I will share why the traditional front desk model is no longer sustainable, how AI voice agents address that challenge, and what this means in very practical, measurable terms for your organization. Now, before we dive into the front desk challenges themselves, I would like to get a quick pulse check from the audience by conducting a quick two-question poll. It will pop up in your chat window.
This will help frame the rest of the conversation and also give you a sense of how your experience compares with others on the call. The first question is about where you are today with AI. When we say AI, we mean anything from documentation and analytics to patient engagement or operational workflows. Go ahead and select the option that best reflects your current situation. So this is exactly the mix we typically see.
Some organizations are already using AI in meaningful ways, and others are piloting, and many are still in the exploration phase. Let's go to the next question, please. The second question gets to the heart of today's discussion: what's the biggest challenge you are facing when it comes to inbound phone calls? So let's wait for the results.
OK, perfect. This is, again, very consistent with what we hear across the industry. So with that context in mind and based on what you just shared, let's take a closer look at what's actually happening at the front desk today and why these challenges continue to surface across practices and health systems. On this slide, let's talk about the reality facing the front desk today. Phone calls still remain the number one access channel for patients, even as portals, mobile apps, and digital tools continue to expand.
But when a patient needs something important, such as appointments, refills, test results, reassurances, they still pick up the phone. So at the same time, staffing shortages, burnout, and turnover at the front desk continue to rise. Training is constant. Experience levels vary, and coverage gaps are common. The outcome is predictable, just long hold times, missed calls, frustrated patients, and very real revenue leakage. And I'm sure many of you have experienced this firsthand, and the same was reflected by the results of this recent poll.
So why hasn't the traditional model been able to keep up? So on this next slide, this slide explains why the traditional front desk model is no longer sustainable. Historically, the response was simple: hire more staff or add IVR systems. But human-only front desk can't absorb unpredictable spikes in call volume, and IVR often frustrates patients without resolving the issue.
Patients don't want to press buttons or repeat themselves. They want to be heard, understood, and helped quickly. Every missed call, as we know, represents more than just an inconvenience. It's a missed appointment or a delayed care or a patient choosing another provider. So this is no longer a staffing problem. It's a structural one, and solving it requires intelligent automation, not just incremental fixes.
So that brings us directly to the solution. So with that context, let me introduce Stratus AI Desk Agent. Stratus AI Desk Agent is an AI voice agent that answers, understands, and resolves patient calls through natural, human-like conversations. It is available 24/7. There is no hold music, no call queues, and no rigid menus. Patients simply speak normally, just they would with a staff member, and the AI handles the interaction at the end. From the patient perspective, this feels immediate and human.
From the organization's perspective, it introduces a new level of scalability and consistency at the front desk. So now let's talk about what really makes this different. So on this slide, Stratus AI was built for health care from day one. This isn't an IVR. It's not even a generic chatbot. It supports unlimited simultaneous calls. It detects intent and sentiment in real time and speaks with an empathetic conversational tone that patients are comfortable with.
And because Stratus AI integrates natively with CareCloud's practice management and EHR platform, it pulls information in real time and writes back instantly. Appointments are booked, refills are routed, and patient records stay continuously accurate. Beyond CareCloud, Stratus AI can integrate with other EHR and practice management systems through secure APIs, which enables real-time actions and updates without disrupting your existing workflows.
For larger organizations, this means consistent patient access across departments and locations. And for smaller practices, it means enterprise-grade access without enterprise-level staffing cost.
Now let's look at the next slide. To understand how Stratus AI works, it's important to understand that we use AI agents, not bots. So under the hood, Stratus AI uses specialized AI agents, each trained for a specific front desk workflow: scheduling, prescription refills, referrals, each handled by an agent that understands the rules and context of that workflow.
Multiple agents can collaborate during a single call while preserving context. So instead of transfers or repetition, the patient experiences one continuous intelligent conversation, and the result is true end-to-end resolution. Let's look at what that means for a practice. This slide walks us through what Stratus AI can actually handle day to day. Stratus AI provides front desk coverage. It schedules, reschedules, and cancels appointments across providers and locations.
It handles prescription refill requests, referral authorization inquiries, general questions, and intelligent routing when escalation is needed. And all of this happens instantly, around the clock, without increasing staff workload. This is about giving patient access when they need it, not just during the office hours. Even if the lunch hours in one of the percent in the poll was there during the lunch hours, the break hours, you face a lot of issues of handling the patient calls.
So Stratus AI keeps working even when you are the front desk staff is not there, which naturally raises the question: what does AI handle versus humans? So let's look at this next slide. This clarifies how responsibilities are divided between AI and humans. This is about augmentation, not replacement, first of all. So AI handles high-volume, repeatable interactions, such as the data collection, scheduling, refills, FAQs, and et cetera.
Humans focus on clinical judgment, sensitive conversations, and complex exceptions. Stratus AI continuously evaluates each interaction and automatically detects when a human agent is needed, routing the call seamlessly to the human at that time. That balances what drives adoption and trust. This point is especially important for our front desk teams here. Now let's shift to the patient experience. I want to talk about what this feels like from a patient's perspective. Patients don't experience this as an AI.
They experience empathy, natural pacing, and context-aware responses without waiting. Zero hold time alone has a measurable impact on satisfaction, loyalty, and overall perception of care. That experience also has a very real financial impact. Let's look at the next slide. So Stratus AI confirms appointments, sends reminders, and enables instant cancellations and rescheduling. That leads to fewer no-shows, better schedule utilization, and stronger revenue flow without adding staff members.
Of course, in health care, none of this matters without security and compliance. So on the next slide, we talk about this health care. This Stratus AI is primarily designed in a way that it is completely HIPAA compliant with the end-to-end encryption, access controls. It has full audit trails and secure EHR synchronization. Patient data remains protected at every single step. So what does this deliver in the real world? So let's look at the impact we are seeing in production.
We are seeing a 97% AI call resolution success rate, with nearly 80% of inbound calls handled autonomously. That translates into, as we know, the reduced staff workload and significantly improved patient access. And that's also reflected directly in one of the customers' feedback, and we are sharing one of the client testimonials on this next slide.
So one of the customers, our customer with Dr. Holden at Lung Care Center, he shared that Stratus AI is managing nearly 80% of inbound calls, allowing their staff to focus on complex patient needs while maintaining a higher standard of service. Now, the next question, which probably many of you must have been thinking, our pricing and implementation. So let's talk briefly about pricing and how easy it is to get started. Our pricing model is intentionally simple and aligned with the outcomes.
We charge based on successful calls handled by the AI, meaning the calls that are fully resolved without a staff, a human staff involvement. Pricing varies depending on the size of your organization, the complexity of your workflows, and the average length of calls. That flexibility allows us to offer pricing that's both competitive and practical from different types of practices and health systems. The most important part is that it's risk-free.
We offer a 30-day risk-free trial, and if you decide it is not the right fit and cancel within those 30 days, you will not be charged. If you're interested, our team will be happy to work with you to design a pricing model that makes sense for your organization. On the next slide, just from the financial term, let's talk about the economics and the ROI behind Stratus AI.
One of the most common questions we get is, does it actually make financial sense? So on this slide, we are showing a simple illustrative example based on real-world usage patterns we see across practices. In this example, our practices receive about 2,000 inbound calls per month, which is roughly 80% of those calls, about 1,600, are handled autonomously by AI.
When you compare the cost of an AI-handled call versus the fully loaded cost of a staff-handled call, the saving adds up very quickly. In this scenario, that translates into approximately $7,200 in monthly savings or over $86,000 annually with a projected ROI north of 200%. And what's important to note is that this does not even account for the secondary benefit, like reduced no-shows, better patient satisfaction, and 24/7 availability. The takeaway here is simple.
As call volume grows, the ROI compounds because AI scales instantly while staffing does not. On this next slide, many organizations pair with this desk agent with Stratus AI Voice Audit software, the platform that we have. Desk agent answers calls. Voice Audit tells you how well they were handled through sentiment analysis, quality scoring, summaries, and dashboards. This will also perform for your human-based calls that were handled.
If the front desk has taken certain calls, it can evaluate the call handled by a human being against the predefined KPIs. So you can even keep an eye on not only the calls handled by the AI agent, but also by your front desk staff members. So together, automation plus intelligence gives leaders full visibility. Before we go to the sample calls and the live demo, let me address a few common questions that come in. So can a patient still reach a staff member? Yes. Stratus AI escalates complex or urgent calls instantly.
Can it handle multiple calls? Yes. That's one of the advantages of using the AI-based agents. It's an unlimited simultaneous calls, and it scales instantly during peak hours. Does it integrate with your EHR? It's natively integrated with CareCloud Charts, talkEHR, and the CareCloud platforms.
At the same time, through an API, it can integrate with any other system, any other EHR and practice management available in the market today. It can speak 32+ languages, including English and Spanish, with an auto-detection. The moment the patient starts speaking, it automatically detects the language and quickly converts itself into that language.
The go-live time, typically, what we have seen with the existing initial clients, between two to four weeks after we get started, we can make a client live, and in case if you are using any other system other than the CareCloud Charts or talkEHR, it may take a little longer, but it's a matter of weeks, not a matter of months, from start to finish to make any customer live.
On this next slide, before getting into the actual demo, I want to show you what an actual Stratus AI calls look like in a practice. This is a single real-world-style interaction where the AI handles multiple workflows in one continuous conversation. So the patient calls in to schedule an appointment with their physician. The AI immediately answers, no hold time, and naturally gathers the information it needs to complete the request.
During the same call, the AI identifies an outstanding balance, offers to send a secure payment link, and the patient agrees. Then proactively, AI notices that the patient is due for an annual physical and offers to schedule that as well, all without transferring the call or repeating information. In one conversation, the AI completes appointment scheduling, balance collection, and preventive care outreach. From the patient's perspective, this feels seamless and helpful.
From the practice's perspective, this is multiple front desk tasks completed without staff involvement. So this is the power of AI agents working together: context preserved, workflows completed, and the call fully resolved at the end of the day. Scripts are powerful, but sometimes the best way to understand the value is to actually see how this works in real time. So with that, I will switch to a quick, very small demo of the product. This is available on our website.
Anytime, you guys can go there and test it out by yourself. With that said, let me connect you with our website, and let's do a demo.
Welcome to CareCloud Healthcare. This is Sarah, and we're doing a demo call today. How may I help you? Hi. I'm calling to book an appointment. I'd be happy to help you schedule an appointment.
May I please have your first and last name and the best phone number to reach you? Sure. My name is John Miller, and my number is 732-873-5133. Thank you, John. We have availability today with Dr. Sarah Chen. Would you prefer a morning or afternoon appointment? Afternoon works better for me. How about 2:00 P.M.? 2:00 P.M. doesn't work for me. Do you have 4:00 P.M. available? Yes, 4:00 P.M. works perfectly. I have you down for 4:00 P.M. today with Dr. Sarah Chen. Is that correct? Yes, that works. You're all set.
Just a reminder, you have $20 copay balance due. You are also due for a physical. The last physical is November 22nd, 2022, so it's been over a year. Is there anything else I can help you with? Yes, actually, I need a refill for my blood pressure medicine. I'd be happy to help with that. Which medication do you need refilled? It is lisinopril. Thank you. What is the dosage? Five milligrams. And which pharmacy should we send it to? You can send it to the pharmacy on my record.
Just to confirm, you're looking to refill lisinopril five milligrams and have it sent to the pharmacy on file. Is that correct? That is correct. I've passed this along to our clinical team. Someone will follow up with you shortly to process your lisinopril five milligram refill. Is there anything else I can help you with? Yeah, just one last question. What are your hours on Fridays? I'd be happy to help with that. Our office hours on Fridays are typically 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., but I'll make sure our team confirms the exact hours when they follow up with you.
Is there anything else I can help you with? That's all for today. Thank you. You're very welcome, John. We'll see you at 4:00 P.M. today with Dr. Sarah Chen. Have a great day. Thank you.
So this is just a very simple example, but it shows how quickly the AI can resolve routine requests without staff involvement, and when Stratus AI is in production, it can speak and understand, as I mentioned earlier, 30+ languages. You can even choose between various voices and regional accents, and much more can be configured. It was very rudimentary because this is a test environment, and just as a disclaimer, it's for demonstration purposes only. Do not use any personal information or PHI, but you can test it out at your convenience.
Now, let's jump back to the slides, please, so to wrap up, I just want to bring this back to the big picture. The future of the front desk is here. Stratus AI Desk Agent delivers immediate patient access, scalable operations, happier staff, and a better patient experience without adding operational burdens. Let AI handle the calls so your team can focus on care. At this point, I would like to hand things over to Aman Haq, who leads our AI initiatives here at CareCloud. Aman, over to you.
Hi, everyone. Yes, thank you for that great introduction, Hadi. I just wanted to take some time to talk through the development process and what it's like for us when we've been deploying this all along now. The agent has handled thousands of calls between the voice agent and the auditing. We're handling thousands of calls today.
And many times when providers come to us, it's similar concerns where they're not sure if their staff or their patients are maybe they might be on the older side or they may not be familiar with this technology. And what we see is that we go, we deploy the product. And so often, patients come and say, "Oh, you've helped me save a lot of time, actually, through this when it comes to booking appointments," or, "It's such an upgrade from your previous IVR system." So that is really good news for us to share.
And whenever we really have a conversation, what happens typically is that you express interest, and then we sit down and we plan out every day we meet for 10-15 minutes because we need to understand your practice. So generally, what happens is the agent has some nomenclature that's specific to you. For example, maybe one doctor sees one type of patient on Tuesdays and another one on Wednesdays. Maybe the doctor wants three patients booked at the same time.
We sit with you. We understand how your practice runs. We incorporate that into the agent. And what happens is the agent's success rate starts shooting through the roof. And usually, people come to us and they ask, "Can you just do appointments for now?" Right? Let's just start with appointments. Let's start in a demo environment. And then when we go to the demo environment, we put it as part of their IVR. It's one option for people to use.
And when they see the results and when they see the appointments being booked into their calendar really seamlessly, what happens is they want it for labs. They want it for patient refills. They want it for everything.
I'm happy to say that the success rate of these agents continuously goes up. The cost also continuously goes down because compute is becoming cheaper. We have never had a provider actually either reduce the number of agents that they have deployed with AI or not want to use us. Every single time, they're really, "Okay, let's start with one small thing," but then it becomes they end up trusting us with a lot of their workflow because then they know this agent can really help save their staff time.
If there's ever any need for human intervention, any patient can just ask that, and it immediately gets operated to the human. Like many people mentioned today when they were talking about staff time being potentially used up by these more typical calls, we see that being resolved.
And then I think the cherry on top is the audit platform. Any doctor can go to it. You will see each and every call that is made into your office. You'll have it graded across criteria that you give us. You can say, "I want it to be the agent to say A, B, C. I want them to ask this information from any new patient." You will see that. It'll be graded. It'll have a score. And you can actually listen to the call and to the entire transcript of every single call that comes into your practice.
So I think in terms of the end-to-end flow when it comes to healthcare, when it comes to being integrated into our EHR, and finally, when it's the amount of information that we give you, the business and actionable intelligence that we provide, it's a world-class product. And I'm happy to share it with whoever's interested in trying it out with us.
Thanks, Aman. And with that, I think let's open the floor for questions.
Yeah. So it's a great question. What happens is if someone says, and this is something that we can custom fit for you as well, whichever languages you want support for, if someone calls an office and says, "Hola, hablo español," then the agent will automatically start speaking in Spanish. Additionally, if someone says in English, "I can't speak English, Spanish, please," it'll start speaking Spanish. And it's going to be the same way for French, Hindi, Telugu, I mean, German, Swedish, Finnish, almost every those 32+ languages that we spoke about, that's how the agent handles it. Yes. So that's a really, really good question.
What we have built, for example, we actually have workflows created today that are live for individuals. If they say, "I want a weight loss appointment," we want it to ask these five questions. If it's a new patient, then you need to ask for it. It's a name, insurance information, look up the insurance. Potentially, if it's an operation, you can even get it to pre-authorize. Right? Those are all workflows that we have built in.
And that's part of those first, like I said, the first two weeks that we really sit with you and we understand how your practice works. That's really what we're doing there is customizing that agent to make sure that it has the right voice that you want, and it talks to patients the right way, and it seamlessly fits into your flow as a provider.
Right. Just let me add one more thing, Aman. If they're using the practice management platform, the CareCloud practice management platform, and if there are templates and rules created, it does follow those templates and the rules by default. So if you're checking in, if a human staff member is checking in availability of an appointment based on the location, based on the provider, based on the day of the week, based on the type of appointment, the same rules the AI agent will also follow.
So when it's checking for the eligibility or, I'm sorry, the availability or an appointment booking or rescheduling, it will follow the same rules. Same case if it's a different platform. And if that platform provides us the APIs to be able to pull that information, it will be deployed in the same way.
Thank you. And this is a really good question.
So if a practice schedules home visits on geographic locations, does the AI allow that kind of scheduling? Yes, it does allow for that type of scheduling. The key question I would have for you is, if you tell us how does this differ in your calendar so we can create the appointment type based off of that, we will be able to. And we actually, in the next few days, are hoping to release an outbound calling agent too. Some providers have told us that, "Hey, I want to preemptively call some people when it's, for example, time for their physical."
What we also can do is have an outbound call go for these patients that haven't been contacted in quite some time. And whatever information that you want to share with that patient, you would be able to through this outbound calling.
So it's a pretty feature-rich system all in all. We have an ability to check how sensitive the patient that the AI is to someone talking. And you can set it such that if they start speaking again, then the agent will ignore it initially, or the agent immediately stops anytime a person says anything. So the customization option is in your hands in terms of, do you want to allow this to be interrupted or not?
Generally, we find that there is a bit of if a patient does start speaking too soon after, the default is that it would stop speaking and let the patient speak. But we haven't seen that be a deal breaker. And we've seen a lot of calls. I know there's been times when people are on the road with a bunch of wind and stuff that I couldn't even comprehend what was being said. The AI was able to.
Right. And I think, Aman, one of the maybe because you may have noticed some of those delays in this demonstration. And again, this was not the phone call made. It was over a VoIP through the website. So most part of the delay disappears in the real implementation because that's the phone call that's coming in. And the way this demonstration is happening, this is just for test or demonstration purposes. It uses a different technology, which sometimes shows some delays.
So if it can, and if that's something you're interested in, I personally speaking would always prefer it gather the information, send a task like we mentioned, and we can even show the website after where it shows the appointment being created, create a task for your staff to just process the payment. The reason I say so is obviously I'm the head of AI. I worked on Copilot for quite some time. I understand its power.
I would never want it to, because of an error or something, any sort of glitch, have someone's payment be processed once or too many times or not enough time. So it definitely has the ability to. I would recommend caution, at least for now, in terms of it can send everything to someone on your staff and make it easy for them just to click, "Okay, accept payment." But I wouldn't have it click that button yet, to be candid.
And just to elaborate what Aman had said, even though on the AI, while patients speaking, saying, "This is my credit card number or something," and processing the payment, if we already have your merchant account set up and connected, and as an example, if you're a CareCloud customer and you already have signed up for Breeze, at this moment, a system AI generates a text to the patient's cell, and the patient can click on that and can make the payment.
So yes, it needs some integration if it's not already there. So it is doable in this text fashion. So it just at the same moment sends the link for the payment due, and the user can click on it and make the payment.
Maaz, do you want to take this question?
Sure. Yeah. So if you have multiple departments, we could definitely integrate that for your practice as well. And yeah, we basically roll out a form initially where we ask for some of your context memory you want that to be set up. And we configure call routing rules based during the onboarding. The AI listens to the patient request, identifies which department or service they need, and then route it to or transfer the call to the correct team. If the request is something AI can fully handle on its own, it completes it.
If it needs a specific department or a live staff member, it routes the call accurately instead of sending the patient to the wrong place. The goal is fewer misrouted calls and a smoother experience for both patients and staff.
Yes. It can update patient demographics and insurance. And when it comes to verification, if you just let us know which tool you use for that, we'd be able to integrate with it and do it as well.
Okay. And just to summarize this for everyone, you can think about it as the virtual AI staff members. So the way you set up everything in your practice today, whether it's a small practice or whether it's an enterprise practice, you could have a different either group of people or a single people who have been trained to perform certain tasks, whether it's the question with respect to the different departments, or it's a question with respect to the specific role.
The AI can be trained. Those agents can be trained for those specific functions and roles, and they work together collaboratively so seamlessly that at the same time, they deliver the results. So it's highly, highly configurable. It's very flexible. And as Aman has mentioned, during those first two weeks, that's where we sit with you. We go through your needs and understanding. We share with you what we have seen and come up with the right implementation for your organization.
Thank you very much, everyone, for joining today. If you want to schedule a demo with us, just you can follow this link on the screen. Just click on it and fill out the form, and our team will reach out to you. We will work with you to schedule a further demonstration, like a one-on-one, the discussion and presentation, and we'll make it work for you.
Yeah. I'd like to say one last thing that I would really encourage anyone. I know whenever we speak with providers, again, there's always some nervousness about enabling this and how people will respond. We enable this. We keep it shut so that it's only you who gets to test it out. Only when you're fully comfortable do we let it go into a portion of your call process. Usually, it's just, let's say, appointments.
And then once it's really strong in appointments, then we can go and branch out into other labs, refills, etc. And again, I'm very convinced that within two weeks, you'll start seeing just how powerful it is, and you'll begin to enjoy some of the value here because, again, everyone else that we've worked with so far has reported this. And I really just encourage you all to. You don't want to continue with Stratus.
Thank you, Aman.