Athenahealth Adds AI Agents for Patient Texting, Calls and Scheduling to athenaOne
Four front-office tools, from waitlist backfill to a multilingual voice assistant, are due to reach the ambulatory EHR vendor's practices during 2026.
.jpg){kind=link}
Key points
- athenahealth announced four AI-agent features for its athenaOne patient engagement suite: Waitlist Scheduling, Patient Conversations, an Intelligent Patient Assistant and enhanced self-scheduling.
- Waitlist Scheduling and the texting part of Patient Conversations are due in the first half of 2026; the voice assistant, patient assistant and self-scheduling are due in the second half.
- The tools handle administrative requests such as office hours, insurance questions, rescheduling and payment balances, with hand-offs to staff when needed.
athenahealth has announced a set of AI agent tools for the patient engagement suite in athenaOne, its cloud-based system that combines an electronic health record, billing, practice management and patient engagement, TechTarget reported. The company, whose network serves roughly one in five Americans, is building the text and voice tools into existing clinical and administrative workflows, HLTH reported.
All four features use an AI agent to handle routine patient contact with a doctor's office and are due to be available by the end of 2026, according to TechTarget.
The four tools
- Waitlist Scheduling identifies slots opened by cancellations and texts patients to fill them. It is due in the first half of 2026.
- Patient Conversations adds two-way texting and secure web chat for questions about office hours, insurance and other administrative matters, with hand-off to staff for follow-up. The texting component was in alpha testing and due for wider release in the first half of the year; a voice version, acting as a multilingual virtual front-desk assistant for inbound calls, is due in the second half.
- Intelligent Patient Assistant, in the patient portal and athenaPatient mobile app, helps patients reschedule appointments and answers questions about payment balances. It is due in the second half of 2026.
- Enhanced Patient Self-Scheduling lets patients describe their needs in plain language and matches them to an appointment type, provider and time slot, also in the second half of the year.
Once the text and voice features are in place, athenahealth plans to add real-time language translation and intelligent task automation, TechTarget reported.
What the company and a test site said
“Patient–provider communication still operates much like it did decades ago, and that model can't scale in today's environment as practices get busier,” said Paul Brient, athenahealth's chief product and operations officer. “Our AI assistants can handle these routine interactions reliably, reducing unnecessary work and making the system more dependable for both patients and care teams.”
Lesley Terry, practice manager at Red River Family Practice in Austin, Texas, which has been beta-testing the capabilities, said in the company's release, as quoted by TechTarget, that the tools “will reduce phone call volume and backlog by allowing us to handle conversations promptly without putting patients on hold.”
The company had previously added AI-powered capabilities to revenue cycle and practice management in athenaOne, TechTarget noted. HLTH said the rollout is part of a broader investment in AI-native features spanning clinical documentation, revenue cycle management and patient engagement. The announcement did not include pricing or performance data.
Sources
- Athenahealth expands AI-driven patient engagement capabilities, TechTarget, February 18, 2026
- athenahealth Introduces Agentic AI Tools to Modernize Patient Communication Across Its Network, HLTH, February 20, 2026