How a Leading Cancer Center Uses AI Agents to Drive $3.5M in New Patient Revenue

The Takeaway

The Invoca AI Messaging Agent reaches out the moment a patient submits a web form, confirms interest, and books a specialist callback, to stop lead form abandonment and capture missed phone leads.

Challenge

For a cancer center, a missed connection isn’t just a lost lead, it’s lost time a patient doesn’t have. The organization’s own data showed how often that gap was opening up: over 80% of inbound calls hit a leakage point before a patient ever got scheduled. Roughly 53% never made it past the IVR. Another 15% ended in drops, holds, or failed transfers. And patients who did the right thing, filling out a web form to ask for help, were still waiting on a callback queue while their sense of urgency faded. As the team put it internally, “We can’t treat the patients we can’t reach.”

Solution

The cancer center deployed Invoca’s AI SMS Agent to re-engage patients the moment they submitted a web lead form, closing the gap between interest and contact instead of leaving it to a callback queue. The agent was built to:

• Reach out immediately after a patient submits a web form, before that intent has a chance to cool
• Confirm interest and gather the details the scheduling team needs
• Offer and book a callback with a specialist at a day and time that works for the patient
• Handle high volumes of conversation on its own, without adding headcount
• Feed engagement signals back into paid search campaigns, flagging which form submissions were real intent

“The problem that we were trying to solve with the AI agent was to create a connection with the patient as soon as possible.The agent enabled us to do that at all hours of the day and at any time that the patient was trying to get in contact with us,” said the Director of Digital Strategy.

She also saw the shift in lead quality right away:

“Because we could pass the Signals to Google, it gave us another data point for our paid search campaigns to say, ‘Hey, this lead form submission was now a better quality lead.’”

The scale of engagement surprised the team too: “I think 30% of the people who fill out the lead form actually interact with the agent. And then of those 30%, about half will actually schedule a callback.”

Results:

• 714 patients scheduled a specialist callback in 5-week period
• 97% of patients offered the SMS agent chose it over waiting in a phone queue
• Up to $3.5M in potential new patient revenue from recovered intakes

What matters most: this started as a 5-week pilot, just 402 patients, a 27% engagement rate, and roughly $312K in trial value, and the results were convincing enough that the cancer center scaled it fast. What began as a test of whether patients would even respond to an AI text is now a channel patients actively prefer, closing a gap that used to mean the difference between someone finding care and someone falling through the cracks. The organization is now looking at a voice agent to close the next gap: the roughly 53% of calls that still end at the IVR before scheduling is even possible.

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