Episode Overview

Podcast: Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Host: Laura Dearda
Guest: Domenic Donato, CEO & Co-Founder, Attuned Intelligence
Date: October 13, 2025
Main Theme:
A deep dive into how AI is transforming patient access in healthcare, focusing on Attuned Intelligence’s role in improving hospital call centers and patient communication. The discussion covers Attuned’s origin story, its mission, AI’s impact on operational efficiency, safety and trust, and the road ahead for further automation.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Attuned Intelligence: Origin and Inspiration

[00:14–02:02]

• AI Journey:
  • Domenic’s early exposure to neural networks in grad school inspired his career-long mission in AI.
  • Professional stints at Google and DeepMind, where he realized the potential to apply AI for social impact, particularly in healthcare.
• Identifying the Problem:
  • Experience at Assembly AI—focus on speech-to-text—revealed “the exact use case that could be impactful for healthcare,” namely, relieving the overwhelming influx of calls to hospital systems that are often critical and go unanswered.
• Mission:
  • “To make the world a better place for all of us,” specifically by improving patient access and reducing the burden on overstretched health system staff.

“Phone calls is like 80% of the way that people get access to care. There's a real shortage. Most hospitals will say that they're operating with 60% of the staff that they need.”
– Domenic Donato [03:21]

2. The Challenge: Patient Access and Call Centers

[02:02–04:09]

• High Call Volume:
  • Hospitals and health systems’ call centers face a “massive influx” of calls covering a variety of needs—appointments, insurance, medication refills, multilingual assistance.
• Staffing Shortages:
  • Chronic understaffing (often operating at 60% capacity or less) exacerbates the patient access problem.
• AI Opportunity:
  • AI can answer every call, triage, or route to the right human or department, providing immense relief and operational efficiency.

3. Ensuring Safety and Trust: Supervised AI

[04:09–05:35]

• Safety by Design:
  • Attuned built its AI from inception to manage sensitive and critical hospital mainline calls.
  • Multiple AI agents participate in every call, ensuring accuracy, with built-in human escalation mechanisms.
• Transparency:
  • Emphasis on both AI and human supervision—often exceeding what human-only call handling provides.
• Memorable Quote:

  "Our AI handled calls actually have more AI and human supervision than most human phone calls today."
  – Domenic Donato [05:18]

4. Lessons from Scaling: Rapid Relief and Multilingual Support

[05:35–07:36]

• Speed of Implementation:
  • Hospitals need solutions that work with minimal integration; Attuned’s platform can start by simply forwarding phone lines, providing instantaneous relief on basic routing.
• Diverse Populations:
  • Special focus on hospitals serving multilingual and underserved communities—AI provides immediate response in patients’ preferred languages.
• Phased Approach:
  • Begins with call routing, then advances to deeper EHR integrations, enabling more complex tasks.

"Help is…any help is greatly appreciated."
– Domenic Donato [07:19]

5. Impact on Staff and Patient Experience

[07:36–09:39]

• For Operations Leaders:
  • Full transparency and control—they can "see every single call" and AI’s decision-making process.
• For Call Center Staff:
  • Tangible “relief”—lowered volume and pressure, allowing human operators to focus on more complex or sensitive tasks.
• For Patients:
  • Reduced wait times, improved access, direct communication in their language, and a streamlined process overall.
• Win-Win-Win:
  • Benefits healthcare leaders, front-line staff, and patients.

6. The Future: Towards Comprehensive AI-Handled Patient Access

[09:39–11:09]

• Multi-AI Model:
  • Specialized agents for conversation, EHR interaction, and more.
  • Automation percentage rises as AI capabilities deepen and their “concert” operation improves.
• Stepwise Automation:
  • Tasks like appointment scheduling and basic queries are already automated; more complex tasks will follow as safety and trust allow.
• Long-Term Vision:
  • Holistic transformation of patient-provider communication, freeing up provider time for care, and ensuring patient access is seamless and responsive.

“The long-term vision…is to transform the way that patients communicate with their providers…relieve the pressure on the provider themselves so they can focus more on delivering care.”
– Domenic Donato [10:38]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It brought me to do a PhD, join Google and then eventually DeepMind. And it was at DeepMind that I had the idea of applying AI to healthcare…to use it to make the world a better place for all of us.”
  – Domenic Donato [00:55]

• “You have to get that call to the right human in order to help the patient…there’s a constant shortage of people to handle these phone calls.”
  – Domenic Donato [03:08]

• “AI handled calls actually have more AI and human supervision than most human phone calls today.”
  – Domenic Donato [05:18]

• “We have this no integration starting point, essentially, where you just forward your main hospital line to the AI agent that has been created for you.”
  – Domenic Donato [06:07]

• “There's this sense of like, relief is the word that is used…because those calls that are being deflected or automated kind of lower the load for everybody.”
  – Domenic Donato [08:32]

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:14 – Domenic’s background and founding story
• 02:02 – Patient access challenges and call center staffing
• 04:09 – Safety, trust, and supervised AI design
• 05:35 – Lessons from scaling: fast implementation and multilingual support
• 07:36 – Impact on staff and patient experience
• 09:39 – Roadmap to fully safe, automated patient communications
• 10:38 – Long-term vision for patient access in healthcare

Conclusion

Domenic Donato shares a compelling vision of how supervised, multilingual AI is already relieving healthcare’s front lines, improving patient access, and transforming hospital call centers. Attuned Intelligence’s approach—centered on instant, safe deployments and transparent operations—has tangible results for staff and patients alike, with a long-term goal of seamless, AI-powered patient-provider communication.