What You Should Know
- MUSC Health expanded “Emily,” its conversational AI agent built on SoundHound AI’s platform, into retail and specialty pharmacy operations following 2.2+ million successful patient calls since its 2024 initial deployment.
- The expanded platform represents one of the first agentic voice implementations integrated directly into an Epic EHR environment for real-time transactional workflows.
- Patients can process prescription refills, receive real-time status updates, check operating hours across 13 health system locations, and route to clinical teams using natural language.
- The system uses dynamic, clarifying prompts during live calls to resolve historical automation friction, such as helping patients identify their specific dispensing pharmacy.
- Deployed across South Carolina’s $8.9B academic health system, the voice agent mitigates call center staffing shortages and reduces non-clinical administrative workload at scale.
How MUSC Health Scales SoundHound’s Voice AI to Pharmacy Operations
The hospital operations, health system access, and clinical informatics sectors face an escalating call-center bottleneck. Rising call volumes, chronic staffing shortages, and complex phone-tree navigation frequently leave patients waiting on hold to complete routine administrative tasks.
Traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems rely on rigid touch-tone menus or keyword scripts that frequently fail when handling nuanced requests. This issue is particularly pronounced in retail and specialty pharmacy operations, where patients struggle to identify their specific dispensing facility among multi-site health system networks, resulting in widespread call abandonments and administrative friction for clinical staff.
To eliminate inbound phone queues and establish a self-service digital front door, MUSC Health has expanded its deployment of “Emily,” an AI voice agent built on SoundHound AI’s agentic platform.
Having already processed over 2.2 million calls for appointment management and patient access since 2024, MUSC Health is extending the system natively into its retail and specialty pharmacy lines with direct integration into its Epic EHR. With Emily handling routine traffic 24/7 across both voice and chat, MUSC quickly stabilized its internal service level agreements (SLAs).
Agentic AI Orchestration and Epic EHR Interoperability
The expansion of Emily moves conversational voice technology from basic call routing to autonomous workflow execution:
- Epic-Integrated Transactional Processing: Connects directly into Epic’s pharmacy and scheduling modules, allowing the AI agent to verify patient identity, query prescription status, and log refill requests in real time.
- Contextual Disambiguation Engine: Uses adaptive conversational prompts to determine a patient’s primary dispensing pharmacy across MUSC Health’s 13 retail locations without requiring exact site names or store numbers.
- Automated Prescription Management: Enables natural-language execution of refill requests, real-time status updates, and location/operating hour queries.
- Intelligent Escalation Triage: Automatically routes complex, high-acuity, or sensitive clinical inquiries directly to appropriate pharmacy personnel alongside verified patient context.
“From patient access to pharmacy operations, we are thoughtfully deploying AI to enhance the human experience in health care,” stated Crystal Broj, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at MUSC Health. “Our collaboration with SoundHound AI has enabled us to scale agentic AI in a way that delivers measurable efficiencies while maintaining the high level of service our patients expect.”
As SoundHound AI and MUSC Health continue to scale Emily across additional non-clinical and specialty workflows, they provide a clear operational blueprint for how agentic voice technology will modernize patient access and health system operations nationwide
