Why a Dedicated Amazon Connect Instance Boosted Oncology Patient Enrollment by 54 Percent

New York Cancer and Blood Specialists (NYCBS) achieved a 54 percent improvement in patient enrollment by migrating from manual call handling to a dedicated Amazon Connect instance. Managing over 250,000 annual patient calls across 100 specialized queues, the organization required a scalable, HIPAA-compliant architecture to replace inefficient legacy processes.

Moving from Multi-Tenant to Dedicated Architecture

A critical engineering decision involved shifting from a shared multi-tenant environment to a dedicated Amazon Connect Customer instance. This architectural change unlocked capabilities that were previously unavailable to the oncology provider, most notably automated multi-language routing in English, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin. By implementing language-detection flows, NYCBS ensured patients could immediately connect with appropriate care teams.

Beyond language support, the dedicated instance allowed for specialty-based queue prioritization. This ensures that urgent oncology cases are routed with higher priority than standard inquiries. The system also incorporates after-hours coverage logic with automated callback options, maintaining continuous patient access without increasing manual administrative overhead.

Building a HIPAA-Compliant AI and ML Pipeline

The solution architecture integrates several AWS services to automate patient communication and data processing. At the core, Amazon Connect manages agent flows and call routing, while AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Key Management Service (KMS) ensure all sensitive configurations and data remain encrypted and secure.

To handle asynchronous patient communication, the architecture employs a dedicated Lambda function for voicemail processing. Amazon Transcribe converts these voicemails to text, and a subsequent Lambda function automatically creates clinical cases from the transcriptions. This pipeline is supported by Amazon Lex for conversational chatbots and Amazon Polly for text-to-speech automated voice responses.

Data integrity is maintained through a Contact Trace Record (CTR) management microservice. Using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda, the service retrieves and processes call disposition codes, storing the results in Amazon DynamoDB for rapid retrieval. This structured approach to data allows for real-time agent monitoring and performance dashboards, providing NYCBS with immediate visibility into call quality and operational efficiency.

This modernization demonstrates that moving contact center operations to a dedicated, IaC-driven cloud environment delivers measurable clinical and business outcomes by reducing operational costs and improving patient access to care.

Source: Scaling oncology patient support: How New York Cancer and Blood Specialists transformed customer experience with AWS and Pronetx, now part of Caylent
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