96% deflection on tier-1 patient inquiries.
An 8-week pilot replaced 14 FTE in front-desk routing with Bridge Workspace. Clinician escalations dropped 41%; CSAT held flat.
Aultman Health Foundation operates a regional health system serving northeast Ohio. Patient inquiries had grown 38% year over year, and front-desk routing was absorbing 22 full-time roles across three locations.
The system needed to route tier-1 inquiries (appointment scheduling, prescription refills, basic clinical questions) without expanding headcount, and without exposing the clinical AI to unaudited prompts.
Bridge Workspace was scoped as a 90-day pilot in one location, with a clear failure criterion: any unsanctioned model output to a patient would terminate the pilot.
Replacing routing FTEs without breaking clinical trust.
Aultman's clinical operations team had three constraints. First: no patient-facing AI output without a credentialed-clinician escalation path. Second: every tier-1 routing decision had to be replayable from inputs alone, for compliance review. Third: the pilot had to scale to all three locations within 8 weeks if successful, with no degradation in CSAT. Bridge Workspace shipped with all three primitives in the default deployment.
Eight weeks from scope to scale.
Week 1-2 covered scoping, integration with the existing patient-portal stack, and audit-policy configuration to match Aultman's HIPAA posture. Week 3 was a single-location pilot. Week 4-5 saw 96% tier-1 deflection in the pilot location with zero unsanctioned outputs. Week 6-8 rolled deployment to all three locations. The 14 FTEs were redeployed to higher-complexity patient operations, not eliminated.
Eight-week measured outcomes.
“The audit trail is what made this possible inside a regulated health system. We could not have deployed any AI without it. Bridge gave us the trail by default.”