When a community health network serves 89 offices across rural and semi-rural New York, patient communication isn't just an operational challenge — it's a mission-critical function. Hudson Headwaters Health Network provides primary and preventive care to communities across the Adirondack region, many of which have limited healthcare options. If a patient can't reach their provider's office, they may drive an hour to the nearest emergency room or simply go without care.
Hudson Headwaters needed a communication system that could scale across 89 locations, handle thousands of monthly calls without adding headcount, free nursing staff from phone duties so they could return to bedside care, and provide consistent after-hours coverage across a geographically dispersed network. Here is how CallMyDoc delivered on every requirement.
Hudson Headwaters Health Network operates as a federally qualified health center (FQHC), serving patients across a vast service area in upstate New York. The network's scale creates unique communication challenges that smaller practices never encounter:
The network evaluated traditional answering services, additional administrative hires, and centralized call centers. None addressed the full scope of the problem. An answering service couldn't integrate with the EHR. Hiring more staff across 89 locations wasn't financially sustainable. A centralized call center would have required massive capital investment and ongoing staffing costs.
Hudson Headwaters deployed CallMyDoc across all 89 offices. The implementation connected CallMyDoc to the network's EHR, configured location-specific on-call schedules, set up custom voice prompts for each office, and established routing rules that reflected the network's multi-site operational structure.
The scale of this deployment is worth emphasizing. This wasn't a pilot program at a handful of offices. It was a network-wide rollout that required every location's phone workflow to transition to the new platform — a process that CallMyDoc managed with zero disruption to patient care during the transition.
Across the 89-office network, CallMyDoc now processes 7,532 patient calls per month. Every one of those calls is answered immediately — no hold times, no busy signals, no voicemail overflow. The non-blocking architecture handles simultaneous calls across all locations without degradation, whether it's a quiet Tuesday afternoon or a Monday morning when every office's phones light up at 8 AM.
For context, handling 7,532 monthly calls with a traditional staffing model would require a dedicated team of administrative staff focused solely on phone operations. Instead, Hudson Headwaters' existing staff manages the workload with the AI handling the front-line call processing.
This is the metric that fundamentally changed Hudson Headwaters' operations: 68.1% of all business-hour calls are handled automatically by CallMyDoc's AI. That means more than two-thirds of daytime calls — appointment confirmations, prescription refill requests, scheduling inquiries, status checks — are processed without any staff member picking up the phone.
The AI identifies the patient, understands the request, categorizes it, and either resolves it directly or routes it to the appropriate person with full context. Routine requests that follow predictable patterns are resolved entirely within the system. Complex requests that require clinical judgment are passed to staff with a complete summary of what the patient needs.
Beyond just answering calls, 41.6% of routine requests are resolved entirely within CallMyDoc without requiring any staff intervention at all. These are requests where the AI can complete the patient's need from start to finish — confirming an appointment, acknowledging a refill request and routing it to the pharmacy queue, or providing office hours and location information.
This distinction matters because it represents true automation, not just call answering. The patient's need is met. The interaction is documented. No staff member needs to do anything. For a network processing thousands of calls monthly, that level of autonomous resolution translates directly into recovered staff capacity.
Before CallMyDoc, after-hours calls at Hudson Headwaters followed a circuitous path: patient calls, answering service operator takes a message, operator pages the on-call provider, provider calls the operator back, operator relays the message, provider calls the patient. Each handoff introduced delay, and the operator had no chart access, so the information relayed was whatever the patient could articulate and the operator could capture.
With CallMyDoc's after-hours platform, the path is direct: patient calls, AI identifies them and matches to their chart, transcribes and categorizes the call, and delivers the summary with chart context to the on-call provider's mobile device. The provider sees the patient's name, recent visits, medications, allergies, and the verbatim transcription of their concern.
The result: after-hours calls are now handled 3x faster than under the previous system. Providers respond more quickly because they have the information they need immediately, without playing phone tag with an answering service operator or trying to piece together an incomplete message.
This outcome is harder to quantify than call volumes or response times, but it may be the most important result for a community health network. With 68.1% of business-hour calls handled automatically, nursing staff were freed from phone duties and returned to direct patient care.
Before CallMyDoc, registered nurses were spending substantial time each shift answering phones, triaging call-in requests, and playing phone tag with patients and pharmacies. These are tasks that don't require a nursing license — but the phone system didn't discriminate. When the phone rang, whoever was available answered it, regardless of their clinical training or what they should have been doing instead.
With AI handling the initial call processing and routing, nurses now receive only the calls that genuinely require clinical judgment. Routine calls never reach them. And when a clinical call does arrive, it comes with the patient's chart context and a clear summary of the concern — allowing the nurse to provide informed guidance immediately rather than spending the first few minutes of every call gathering basic information.
One of the most underappreciated benefits of CallMyDoc for a multi-site network like Hudson Headwaters is operational consistency. Before the platform, each of the 89 offices had its own phone workflow, its own approach to after-hours coverage, and its own documentation standards for phone interactions. Some offices were excellent. Others had significant gaps. The patient experience varied depending on which location they called.
With CallMyDoc, every office follows the same process:
This consistency isn't enforced through training manuals or compliance audits — it's built into the infrastructure. The system can't forget to document a call. It can't miscategorize a request because of fatigue. It can't skip the patient identification step because the office is busy. The process is the same at 8 AM on a Monday at the busiest location and at 10 PM on a Saturday at the smallest rural office.
For network leadership, this consistency provides something equally valuable: visibility. CallMyDoc's KPI dashboard shows call volume, request types, resolution times, and staff efficiency across all 89 locations in real time. Leadership can identify which locations are handling calls most efficiently, which request types are consuming the most time, and where additional resources or training might be needed — all from a single dashboard.
Hudson Headwaters' status as a federally qualified health center adds another dimension to this case study. FQHCs serve medically underserved populations — patients who often face barriers to care including limited transportation, language differences, lower health literacy, and fewer provider options in their area.
For these patients, the ability to reach their provider by phone is not optional. A patient in a rural Adirondack community who can't get through to their primary care office doesn't have the luxury of trying another practice down the street. They either drive to a distant ER, attempt to manage their concern without guidance, or simply go without care.
CallMyDoc's non-blocking architecture — which ensures every call gets through, every time — directly serves this population's needs. And the platform's 43-language real-time translation ensures that language barriers don't prevent patients from communicating their needs effectively.
For FQHCs nationwide, the Hudson Headwaters deployment demonstrates that enterprise-scale AI communication infrastructure isn't limited to large urban health systems. It works in rural settings, across dispersed geographies, and at the scale that community health networks require.
The transformation at Hudson Headwaters Health Network illustrates what happens when a large, mission-driven healthcare organization replaces its legacy phone workflows with purpose-built clinical communication infrastructure. The phones didn't get quieter — 7,532 calls still come in every month. But the way those calls are handled changed completely.
Patients get through immediately. Routine requests are resolved automatically. Clinical calls reach nurses and providers with full chart context. After-hours coverage matches daytime quality. Documentation happens without manual effort. And across all 89 offices, the process is identical — consistent, reliable, and auditable.
CallMyDoc provides this same clinical communication platform to healthcare organizations across 38 states, from 2-office family practices to 200+ location physician groups. The platform processes approximately 390,000-400,000 patient calls per month with zero lost calls and zero data breaches across 26 million+ patient interactions.
Schedule a live demo to see how CallMyDoc can deliver the same results for your health network — with no setup fees, no contracts, and a 30-day trial.