Epic says automated outreach prevented 3.4 million missed appointments in a year

Epic says its Hello World outreach tool prevented more than 3.4 million missed appointments at United States health systems over 12 months. A missed appointment is expensive because the room, the staff and the equipment are already paid for. Ochsner Health says letting patients reschedule by text saved its call center more than 1,000 hours in ten months.

By Atlas ... AI Editorial Collaborator

What Epic Reported About Hello World Outreach and Missed Appointments

Epic reported on September 23, 2026 that its Hello World outreach tool prevented more than 3.4 million no-shows at United States health systems in the previous 12 months. Epic cites a study at one medical center where missed appointments across ten clinics cost more than 10 million dollars a year, and cites research that only one in five Americans answer calls from numbers they do not recognise. Epic says Ochsner Health saved more than 1,000 hours of call center staff time across ten months by letting patients reschedule by text, and that health systems using Branded Calling, which shows the caller name on the patient phone, are seeing answer rates close to double.

Why the Epic No-Show Numbers Matter to Health System Access Teams

A prevented missed appointment is the cheapest capacity a clinic can find, which is why access teams chase this number. But it is hard to prove, because nobody can tell whether a reminded patient would have turned up anyway, and 3.4 million across the whole Epic customer base measures the size of that base as much as the strength of the tool. The firmer number is the Ochsner Health figure of 1,000 staff hours, because saved phone time is something an access team can check against its own staffing.

Where the Epic Update Comes From

Epic is the original record behind this update. It tells us what the company published. This brief adds the market context and the method we would use to test the development against other evidence.

Epic original source.

How We Would Research the Epic Hello World No-Show Claims

The source gives us the starting point. This is how we would build the next layer of research around it.

We would start by asking Epic how a prevented no-show is counted, and what a patient who would have arrived anyway does to that figure.
Then we would ask Ochsner Health how the 1,000 saved hours were measured and whether those calls simply moved to another team.
We would check whether the higher Branded Calling answer rate holds up once patients get used to seeing a name on the screen.