The real cost of patient outreach: staff vs AI

The cost of a staff patient outreach call is the loaded hourly cost of the person calling, divided by the conversations they complete per hour. Using May 2025 BLS medians plus benefits, a medical assistant costs about $31 an hour and an RN about $66. At four completed conversations an hour, an MA call costs about $7.78 before overhead.

Step 1: The loaded hourly cost

Most cost estimates skip benefits. That understates the real cost of a staff hour by nearly 30%.

Here's how to build a loaded rate from public data. Start with the median hourly wage from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), May 2025. Then account for benefits. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) survey for June 2026 shows that in health care and social assistance, wages are 70.6% of total compensation and benefits are 29.4%. So we divide the wage by 0.706 to get total compensation per hour.

Two caveats. First, the division by 0.706 is our math using BLS inputs, not a figure BLS publishes for these jobs. Second, it excludes overhead: supervision, training, phones, software, space, and turnover. Your real cost per hour is higher. If you know your own wages and benefit load, use those.

Step 2: Divide by completed conversations

A staff hour on outreach isn't an hour of talking. It includes dialing, waiting, voicemails, wrong numbers, looking up the chart, and writing the note. What you're buying is the completed conversation, where the patient actually got the message and responded.

The only number you need to measure is the denominator. Pull a week of call logs. Count the conversations that reached the right patient and finished. Divide by the staff hours spent on outreach.

An illustrative example

These numbers are for illustration only. Use your own.

Say an MA spends an hour on refill outreach. She dials 20 patients. Five answer. Four of those conversations finish with a clear outcome. The rest of the hour goes to voicemails and notes.

• Cost per completed conversation: $31.12 ÷ 4 = about $7.78
• At three completed conversations an hour: about $10.37
• At six: about $5.19
• The same work by an RN at four an hour: $66.43 ÷ 4 = about $16.61

What the formula leaves out

The formula is a floor, not the full cost. It doesn't count:

• Overhead. Supervisors, training, phone systems, software and space.
• Second and third attempts. Most lists need more than one pass to reach the people who matter.
• Interruptions. In most practices, outreach happens between walk-ins and inbound calls. An hour on the schedule is rarely an hour on the phone.
• The patients nobody reached. A patient who never got the call costs nothing on this sheet, but may cost you a quality measure or a visit.

Then multiply by your list. A 2,000-patient adherence list at four completed calls an hour is 500 staff hours to reach every patient once. That's before second attempts, and before the patients who never pick up.

Why the denominator is so small

The hard part of outreach isn't the conversation. It's getting someone to answer.

Hiya's State of the Call 2026 report, a survey of more than 12,000 consumers in six countries, found that "86% of unknown calls go unanswered." It's a global vendor survey, not a US clinical study, so treat it as directional. But it matches what every scheduler sees. A clinic or pharmacy number that patients haven't saved looks like spam.

That's why manual outreach stalls. Staff time is spent on the calls that don't connect. Callbacks then land when the staffer is on another call, and the loop starts over. For what happens after a missed call, see Warm Transfer vs Voicemail.

The cost isn't only the wasted hours. It's the patients nobody reaches. On an adherence list, a patient who isn't reached before their fail date is a miss for the year. See PDC Fail Date: How to Calculate It.

What changes with AI

AI phone calls don't make patients answer more often in the first place. What they change is who absorbs the misses. The AI dials, waits, retries and handles routine conversations. Staff only see the calls that need a person.

Rivvi is a HIPAA-compliant AI workspace. Staff use it to analyze patient lists and build work product. On the Team plan the same workspace places calls and texts. Rivvi's own operating figures:

Southeast Medical Group reported these results in August 2026:

Southeast reached more than 104,000 patients, with a 0.45% opt-out rate.

Read the 86 FTE-equivalents figure as capacity, not layoffs. It describes how much outreach the AI handled, measured in the full-time staff it would take to do the same work by hand.

The short call lengths matter too. Compare a 47-second AI check-in with the minutes your own staff spend per completed call once dialing, waiting and the note are counted. Your call logs from Step 2 give you that number.

For Rivvi's pricing, see the pricing page. Plug that into the same formula as your staff cost, using completed conversations as the denominator, so you compare like with like.

The hybrid model

The goal isn't zero staff on the phones. It's staff on the right calls.

One thing to be clear on: when the schedule lives in your EHR, Rivvi doesn't book into it. It transfers the patient to the person who books, or leaves a task. No EHR integration is needed to start.

How to run the comparison yourself

1. Pick one outreach program: refills, care gaps, or annual wellness visits.
2. Pull one week of staff call logs and hours spent on it.
3. Count completed conversations. Compute cost per completed conversation with the formula above.
4. Multiply by the size of your full list to see what reaching everyone once would cost.
5. Compare with AI outreach on the same list, using the same denominator.

For where this fits, see medication adherence or care gap closure. If your outreach includes automated calls or texts, review our TCPA compliance guide first.

Sources

• BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Medical Assistants
• BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Pharmacy Technicians
• BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Registered Nurses
• BLS, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026
• BLS, ECEC Table 4, private industry by industry group
• Hiya, State of the Call 2026