NICE: Putting Patients and Providers at the Heart of Care

It’s riveting that provider-patient engagements are no longer confined to traditional doctor-patient interaction in a clinical setting. However, delivering seamless digital experience across the healthcare value chain is incomplete without a profound understanding of patient expectations, their journeys, and a host of interactions between them and the provider. CXone Mpower, a CX-focused unified open cloud platform offered by NICE, is leading the way for healthcare organizations to incorporate patient-centricity. The company leads in empowering its healthcare customers with advanced AI, enabling them to deliver proactive patient engagements throughout the care journey, automate processes, and enhance interactions requiring human involvement.

We had the opportunity to discuss the value impact of CX-focused tools in healthcare with Marcus Garcia, the Regional VP of healthcare at NICE. Marcus’ insights led us into the intricacies of patient-provider interactions and the need for AI-led automation that does not leave out human intuition and touch in NICE CXone.

Achieving PX is a Subtle Balancing Act!

Patient experience (PX) is a relatively new dimension in healthcare, driven by rising patient expectations. Marcus explains, “Patients now expect the same ease, convenience, consistency, and transparency they experience when booking a flight or ordering a product.” While digital interactions are becoming the norm in patient-provider communication, optimizing voice interactions remains critical.

“Patients also expect a seamless experience across digital, contact center, and mobile touchpoints, even though these systems are often managed separately,” Marcus adds. This complexity creates a need for a cohesive digital interaction strategy that balances automated and personal interactions to meet patient expectations.

“For tasks like booking, rescheduling, or canceling appointments, patients want fast and easy communication options,” Marcus continues. However, when the issue is more complex, patients often prefer speaking with a human agent to have a detailed conversation. “By automating repetitive tasks like appointment scheduling, contact centers can save valuable time, allowing agents to focus on meaningful, personalized interactions with patients,” he concludes.

CXone Mpower, NICE’s flagship platform, ensures all patient interactions, whether through voice, digital messaging, chatbots or live agents, are integrated in a single unified and scalable platform. When all interactions are handled from a single place, there is no need to manage multiple tools or platforms, there are no more silos between front and back office operations so customer queries move seamlessly across departments, and the system is continuously self-optimized – learning from past interactions to fine-tune future ones with maximum effectiveness and efficiency. CXone Mpower empowers healthcare organizations to deliver personalized self-service experiences, orchestrate human and AI agents in one place with bi-directional learning, and enhance the day-to-day performance of contact center.

CXone is built on the vision of helping hospitals and healthcare providers elevate patient centricity by transforming the way healthcare services are delivered.

In summary, CXone Mpower automates straightforward, repetitive patient interactions and enhances those requiring human involvement. This approach significantly improves patient engagement and experience, reduces friction, improves agent satisfaction, and ultimately leads to better patient outcomes.

Platforms Built for Positive Healthcare Outcomes

CXone is built on the vision of helping hospitals and healthcare providers elevate patient centricity by transforming the way healthcare services are delivered. By leveraging technologies and understanding the role of stakeholder challenges, NICE helps augment experiences that translate to positive healthcare outcomes through its platforms. Marcus helped us delve into each of these facets:

1. Self-Service Tools: In today’s digital-first world, consumers expect the convenience of managing various aspects of their lives through their personal devices. This includes making or rescheduling appointments and accessing test results at their convenience. The strategic use of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can significantly reduce administrative burdens and streamline processes both before and after care. This involves offering self-service options for routine tasks such as scheduling and managing appointments, requesting referrals, refilling prescriptions, reviewing bills, and making payments. Studies suggest that 30 to 50% of interactions involve simple queries about scheduling, rescheduling, or canceling appointments—tasks that can be easily automated. By deflecting these to self-service, healthcare providers can focus on more complex interactions without the need for additional staff.
2. Proactive Customer Care: NICE’s proactive outbound AI communication engages patients early, automating their journey while addressing potential issues before they escalate into larger problems. Rather than reacting to patient calls or emails, our tools take the initiative to start conversations, anticipate questions, resolve concerns, and ensure patients enjoy a smooth and seamless experience throughout their care journey.
3. Analytics and AI: Leveraging insights from phone calls and digital interactions across all touchpoints is invaluable for any organization. It enables providers to apply analytics to understand the entire patient journey and identify areas for improvement. Combining this with post-care survey data provides a clearer picture. A comprehensive understanding of the patient journey requires a unified solution to measure and analyze customer experience and feedback data. This holistic approach helps identify opportunities for automation and self-service, further enhancing the patient experience.
4. Augmenting the Agent Experience: The agent experience is central to the patient experience. As routine tasks become automated, the skillset required for agents will evolve, emphasizing human intuition and empathy. We provide tools to augment agents’ capabilities, including real-time guidance, insights, and instant access to up-to-date knowledge articles, ensuring they always provide accurate and effective answers. Our tools also automate interaction summaries, allowing key points to be documented quickly and accurately, enabling agents to move seamlessly to the next interaction. With these tools, agents can assist patients efficiently without placing them on hold or transferring them. These insights are continuously refined as the system learns from prior interactions, driving ongoing improvements in agent efficiency and effectiveness.

One Medical’s AI and Human-led Experiences

To explain how NICE’s CXone platform addresses the challenges faced by most primary care providers, Marcus recounted One Medical, which bought the CXone platform. The customer aimed to improve the workforce, quality, performance, and after-call feedback management.

CXone tracked their inbound call volumes and call intervals. Using an IVR system, they observed trends and challenges in patient interactions. By leveraging interaction analytics, they were able to unlock insights to make their contact center services available 24/7 with the current staff and to expand their business. One Medical plans to expand with CXone and enable NICE’s GenAI capabilities with Copilot, Autopilot, and AutoSummary, all under a unified platform.

HOMELINK’s Efficient, Error-free Patient and Provider Experience

“There’s also another case study with HOMELINK. They were exploring ways to improve efficiencies to serve their customers better. They adopted NICE’s AI-driven proactive customer engagement technology,” Marcus adds. It helped their patients stay on top of their health plans with a multi-channel outreach campaign including text, calls, and email between patients and care providers for seamless communication. Previously, it involved many manual touch points with a high scope for errors, leading to no-shows and failure to follow up on patient appointments.

NICE’s proactive journey automation allowed HOMELINK to listen, identify, and start conversations while understanding when to bring in a human agent and update the data/feedback back to the systems. This resulted in improvement in efficiency and productivity for their patient engagements. “Nearly 9 in 10 users reported being able to report their updates in real time. HOMELINK also recorded a 30% increase in productivity per hour per employee,” Marcus shares.

Paving the Way Forward with PX

NICE’s platforms’ success is attributable to underlying technologies such as cloud, advanced analytics, digital tools, and AI. “It is a balancing act. NICE’s cutting-edge tools are also well-aligned with providers’ needs and recent regulatory standards.”

Behind NICE’s new product launch and product enhancement lies the company’s R&D teams’ effort, where they invested nearly $346 million and hold more than 529 patents. It proves NICE’s strong foundation in IP for leading breakthroughs across AI-driven healthcare tools, patient-centric workflows, and secure and compliant digital engagements.

Marcus also spoke about NICE’s most awaited developments in 2025, which include the latest enhancements to the AI-driven features for proactive patient outreach with reminder notifications. NICE’s strategic partnership with EPIC helps deliver seamless workflows and a centralized view of patient interactions to providers. This will help achieve the company’s goal of pushing the boundaries of what healthcare organizations can do to enhance patient experiences and outcomes.