UnityAI launches agentic AI platform to tackle outpatient scheduling and no-shows

When patients miss appointments, the costs ripple across the health system. Clinics lose revenue, staff scramble to fill gaps, and patients may face longer waits to get care. In an August 2024 Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) poll, 27 percent of practices reported rising no-show rates. Behavioral health practices continue to face the greatest challenges, with rates reaching as high as 50 percent.

UnityAI, a Nashville-based startup led by veterans of hospital operations, believes AI can fix this problem. On Tuesday, the company unveiled its agentic AI platform, a suite of four specialized agents designed to handle patient scheduling, confirmations, intake, and follow-up. The company says the platform already supports 200,000 patient interactions each month across clinics nationwide.

“Operations, especially scheduling, are the heartbeat of outpatient care,” Dr. Edmund Jackson, UnityAI’s CEO, told DHI. “Missed or mishandled appointments cost providers millions and leave patients waiting. We chose scheduling as our first focus because it’s where AI can have the biggest immediate impact.”

No-shows, empty slots waste billions of dollars each year

No-shows are not just an inconvenience. Research consistently shows that missed outpatient appointments lead to worsened patient outcomes, strained staff capacity, and billions of dollars in waste each year. Studies estimate that no-shows cost the U.S. health system approximately $150 billion annually, with individual physicians losing as much as $200 for every missed slot.

The complexity of outpatient scheduling makes the problem even harder. A single MRI appointment can involve coordinating equipment availability, scan duration, and technician schedules. “Managing that level of complexity individually and at scale takes up a considerable amount of time and resources,” Dr. Jackson said. “But it’s something AI can handle nearly instantaneously.”

Four AI agents on one platform

Plenty of clinics already use chatbots or call-center tools to interact with patients. But Dr. Jackson argues that UnityAI’s agents go further. “Chatbots answer simple questions. Our AI agents actually perform tasks from start to finish,” he said. “They hold natural conversations, understand nuance, and complete actions inside of a provider’s existing workflows—like booking a scan or rescheduling an appointment. Think of them as skilled teammates, available 24/7.”

The UnityAI platform is comprised of four distinct agents:

• The Scheduling Agent integrates with electronic medical records to book and reschedule appointments. The company says providers using it have seen a 25 percent increase in referral scheduling and a 9 percent rise in completed appointments.
• The Confirmation Agent manages reminders and prep instructions, reducing no-shows by 16 percent through personalized, multi-touch communication in a patient’s preferred language.
• The Intake Agent collects demographics, medical history, and insurance information before arrival, verifying benefits and populating the EMR in advance.
• The Follow-up Agent supports post-visit outreach, collects feedback, and schedules next appointments to encourage continuity of care.

The system runs continuously across phone, SMS, email, and chat in more than 90 languages. UnityAI says it can be deployed in under 30 days without new infrastructure, thanks to deep EMR integration.

Consistency matters as much as intelligence

Dr. Jackson attributes the company’s reported gains in completed appointments to what he calls “intelligent persistence.” “Our agents never miss a follow-up, adapt to each patient’s response, and communicate in a way that feels natural, in the patient’s language at the moment they want to talk,” he said. “That combination of consistency and empathy is what keeps schedules full and patients showing up.”

According to studies, text message reminders improve attendance, with a large-scale pragmatic study finding attendance rates improved from 66.1 percent to 72.8 percent among patients who opted into SMS appointment reminders in an integrated safety net health care system. By layering AI-powered persistence on top of proven reminder strategies, UnityAI is betting it can achieve even greater returns.

A playbook drafted in the trenches

UnityAI’s leadership team traces its roots to HCA Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest hospital systems. Dr. Jackson credits that experience with shaping the company’s focus. “Working at HCA is a huge privilege. We learned, by doing, how healthcare is actually delivered: the bottlenecks, the staff pressures, the patient frustrations,” he said.

This experience helped the company design agentic AI that is centered on the patient experience. “It doesn’t just respond to questions, it makes decisions and takes actions by itself,” Dr. Jackson explained. “For a patient-scheduling agent, that might mean having a natural back-and-forth about the patient’s availability, checking multiple clinic schedules in real time, checking benefits, and booking the right appointment on the spot.”

That insider perspective matters in a market where many technology solutions fail due to poor integration with existing workflows. Health IT experts note that systems built without regard for clinical context often create more work rather than less. A Nuffield Trust report on digital technology in the UK healthcare system found that many failures stemmed from layering new tools on top of existing structures and work patterns, which often increased the workload for healthcare professionals instead of reducing it.

A crowded field chases operational gains

The launch comes amid a surge of investment in AI for healthcare operations. According to McKinsey analysis, automation represents an estimated $150 billion opportunity for operational improvement in healthcare, including reduction in administrative costs, improvement in quality control, and strengthened strategic insights. Scheduling and patient engagement represent some of the most immediate areas for return on investment.

UnityAI is positioning its platform as a cost-saving and revenue-recovering tool rather than a patient-facing add-on. The company says early deployments have cut administrative costs by up to 60 percent while generating millions in recovered revenue. Whether it can scale its approach across diverse outpatient settings will be the key test. But if the early numbers hold, the company could carve out a significant niche in one of the least glamorous but most financially consequential parts of healthcare.

“Agentic AI is perfectly suited for scheduling because of the complexity involved,” Dr. Jackson said. “The more complex the need, the more valuable the agent becomes.”