Domenic Donato, CEO and Co-Founder of Attuned Intelligence

Summary

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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.

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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]

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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.

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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]

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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]

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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.

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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]

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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]

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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

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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.

Transcript

[A]

This is Laura Dearda with the Beckers Healthcare podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dominic Donato, co founder and CEO of Attuned Intelligence. Dominic, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

[B]

Yeah, thank you, Laura, for having me.

[A]

Absolutely. Now I'm really excited to speak with you because you've had some exciting news with Attuned recently. You've announced raising the seed funding of $13 million led by radical Ventures and Threshold Ventures, which is a really exciting milestone for the company. So I'm looking forward to talking through that and what's ahead. But first and foremost, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and the idea behind Attune?

[B]

Yeah, I'd be happy to try and keep this short. It did start about 15 years ago. So I was introduced to AI way back when in grad school, neural networks in particular. And when I saw them, I just felt like they would change the world and so really made it my mission to just be a part of that. 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 because they had an applied healthcare arm there. And so the idea was to learn about this foundational AI technology and then use it to make the world a better place for all of us. That was part of their mission and I shared that vision with them and, and so that planted the seed. But it wasn't until after leaving there, going to assembly AI to really lead the speech to text kind of revolution in AI that I saw the exact use case that could be impactful for healthcare, which was really taking the burden off of these influx of calls that hospitals and healthcare systems get every single day that go unanswered but are critical for providing care to those who need it. And that's really what inspired me to found tuned.

[A]

That's amazing to hear. What a great story and mission behind the company to really support better healthcare. That's amazing to hear. I'm curious, could you talk a little bit more about what's inspiring you to focus on solving some of the patient access issues in hospital call centers with iai, especially today? I know so many conversations we have with healthcare executive and leaders are talking about throughput and patient access as being critical challenges that they're trying to solve for. So we'd love to hear just what continues to be top of mind for you around those issues.

[B]

Yeah. Thank you. So the main issue here is that with these large health systems, you usually end up with a call center, either centralized or sometimes decentralized, and you get just a massive influx of calls for all sorts of reasons. And so you have a real issue with staffing because as you can imagine, hospitals are very intricate. There's a lot of departments, a lot of specialties. There's insurance questions, there's schedule questions, refills, there's all a massive variety of things that someone could be calling about. And you have to get that call to the right human in order to help the patient with their specific need or question. And you may not have someone trained in that specific area. And so there's a constant essentially shortage of people to handle these phone calls. And given that this is the way that, you know, all of us communicate with hospitals, 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. And that continues to go down. So having an AI that is able to answer every single one of those calls and have the skills necessary to handle many of them or to route them to the appropriate person who does have those skills is immensely helpful in relieving this issue.

[A]

Absolutely. I can imagine it makes life easier for so many and it really improves the efficiency of a call center and, and makes patients happier as well. How does attunes supervised AI ensure that safety and accuracy in these urgent, high stakes calls? What's really helps hospitals feel they can trust them in some of these high pressure situations?

[B]

Yeah, so we specifically built our company around hospital and health system mainlines. So from the very beginning we knew we wanted to handle all the calls coming into a large health system. And we knew that we would be getting some very critical and sensitive calls mixed in with the normal calls that you would get from the very beginning. Just built in safety and supervision into the platform. Also having a pretty deep background in AI. I also knew that these AIs would make mistakes. That is just a fact. But you can mitigate that risk by having multiple AIs in the same conversation and also having great escalation to actual humans when something does need their attention. And that's basically what we built from the beginning. And I kind of joke, but our AI handled calls actually have more AI and human supervision than most human phone calls today.

[A]

Wow, that's amazing to hear. And you know, really a fascinating look at how the technology is already making a big difference within the field. What have you learned from scaling this platform across some of the community health Centers as well as large health systems. Can you tell us a little bit about that over time?

[B]

Yeah. So we really learned that you need to be able to help them quickly. So it's not just the call centers that are short of staff. Right. It's the entire hospital systems today, unfortunately, in the US and we're trying to help out the specific area of patient access. But the IT departments are also not staffed as much as they would like them to be. We needed a way to get started quickly. 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, and it will take care of some of the basic things that patient access struggles with, which is like routing to departments. Large hospital systems might have a dedicated team just to route calls. Then it gets even more difficult because we focus on all hospitals, both private health systems, as well as federally qualified community hospitals. And there you have a large, diverse, multilingual population. And so even for routing calls, you may need to call in an interpreter. So what we've learned is just by being able to get started quickly with this low integration starting point and handle the call in the language of the patient, can offer immediate release relief. And then we continue on to go deeper with EHR integrations to take more of these calls end to end for scheduling and refills, et cetera. But that was, I would say, the biggest lesson early on was you needed to be able to provide relief immediately because the help is any help is greatly appreciated.

[A]

Absolutely. I can imagine, you know, being able to have that type of integration within the EHR in other spaces. You know, space speeds up the time, as you mentioned, for whatever additional assistance that's needed on the call and to get patients the care they needed quickly. From your experience, how has the technology impacted both patient experience as well as the frontline call center staff? What can you share with us about the feedback you've heard there?

[B]

Yeah, so we built a platform specifically for operations leaders. So essentially it's an entire holistic platform that lets them create, test, deploy, monitor, and optimize their AI agents. And the response has been really positive because they love the transparency and control. Like, they get to see every single call. Right. They get to see why the AI said what it did, what it did, what it thought about before doing so. And everything is kind of transparent. This is where that oversight comes from. So that would be the operations leaders feedback, and then the staff themselves. I said they're. They're overworked in many cases because the need is so great. And so usually we get feedback that there's this sense of like, relief is the word that is used. Less pressure on the call center because those calls that are being deflected or automated kind of lower the load for everybody. And so that's like the next thing we get when we go live. And then the patients, they get faster handling times, which is appreciated, especially those who are speaking, say, Spanish or Portuguese or another language. Usually they would have to wait for an interpreter to be brought in on that conversation with a person who didn't speak that language. Instead, they get to speak directly in their language and get help much faster. So it's kind of a win, win, win situation. And we're really grateful that the technology makes this possible.

[A]

Absolutely. That's fantastic to hear. Before we wrap up, I'm curious, what's the next path forward towards safely handling 100% of patient communications? Where do you see the technology evolving?

[B]

Yeah, so we have a multi multiple AIs in every conversation. We have ones that are dedicated to speaking and understanding. We also have ones that are dedicated to interacting with the electronic health system records, basically. So like EPIC, etc. We see that the automation percentage increases as the AIs get more intelligent and as we get better at using them in concert together. And so right now, you know, you can handle scheduling and refills and routing. Specialty scheduling, for example, is still something that we would have a human handle, but that eventually also could be handled by AI. So there's a very like, I would say, multi year approach here where as it is safe to do so, we'll continue to automate more and more. And you know, the long term vision really is to transform the way that patients communicate with their providers. We want it to be very smooth and customized and also relieve the pressure on the provider themselves so they can focus more on delivering care. So that the vision is to transform the way that patient access is done in the US.

[A]

I love it. Dominic, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been a really fun conversation and I look forward to connecting with you again soon.

[B]

Thank you, Laura. Likewise.