AWS re:Invent 2025 - UC San Diego Health modernizes patient engagement with Amazon Connect (BIZ218)

Modernizing Patient Engagement with Amazon Connect at UC San Diego Health

Overview

• UC San Diego Health, an academic health system in Southern California, has partnered with AWS to transform their patient engagement capabilities using Amazon Connect.
• The presentation covers the key challenges faced by healthcare organizations in delivering seamless patient experiences, and how UC San Diego Health is addressing these with Amazon Connect.
• Katrina Bidwell, Operations Director at UC San Diego Health, and John Appeas, Senior Solution Architect at AWS, discuss the implementation, benefits, and future plans for the solution.

Challenges in Healthcare Patient Engagement

• High volume of patient interactions (over 3.2 million calls per year at UC San Diego Health)
• Fragmented data and systems, leading to repetitive data entry and inconsistent experiences
• Proliferation of point solutions that add complexity instead of solving problems

Why Amazon Connect?

• Reliable, scalable, and cost-effective cloud-based contact center service
• Enables a unified engagement layer across the patient journey
• Integrates with electronic health record (EHR) systems like Epic

UC San Diego Health's Journey with Amazon Connect

• Replaced legacy on-premises phone system with Amazon Connect for 99.9% reliability
• Gained real-time analytics and visibility into patient interactions
• Implemented self-service patient verification, saving over 300,000 staff hours

Key Outcomes and Benefits

• 82% of patients and caregivers are now self-verifying, saving over a minute per call
• Significant improvements in service level and reduction in abandonment rate
• Ability to quickly scale up and down contact centers as needed
• Unified, orchestrated, and scalable contact center solution integrated with Epic

Future Plans: Expanding AI-Powered Capabilities

• Developing purpose-built AI voice agents for healthcare, starting with appointment management
• Automating routine tasks, unifying patient interactions, and giving patients more control
• Leveraging real-time Epic integration to provide seamless, context-aware experiences

Conclusion

• UC San Diego Health is leading the way in modernizing patient engagement with Amazon Connect
• The solution has delivered significant operational efficiencies and improved patient experiences
• Continued investment in AI-powered capabilities will further enhance the patient journey and enable healthcare providers to focus on delivering high-quality care.