How Riverside Medical Group Reduced Patient Email Response Time by 75%
Challenge
Riverside Medical Group is a multi-physician primary carepractice based in Chicago, with three locations and a patient panel of over4,000 active patients. Like most medical practices, their administrative staffmanaged a high volume of patient communications every day – appointmentrequests, prescription refill inquiries, insurance questions, test resultfollow-ups, and general health questions.
By late 2025, the practice’s shared patient inbox was receiving between 80 and 120 emails per day. Two front desk coordinators were responsible for managing all incoming patient email alongside their other duties: checking patients in, answering phones, and handling in-person inquiries. Email frequently fell behind, with patients sometimes waiting several hours for responses to time-sensitive questions.
The challenge wasn’t just volume, it was the predictabilityof the questions. Roughly 70 percent of patient emails fell into a small numberof categories: appointment availability, directions and parking, what to bringto appointments, how to access the patient portal, prescription refillrequests, and insurance acceptance questions. These questions had standardanswers. But each one still required a staff member to read, decide, compose,and send.
“Our coordinators are skilled clinical administrators. Theyshouldn’t be spending half their day telling patients where to park,” said Dr.Marsh.
Approach
Riverside connected their primary patient inbox and theirbilling inquiry inbox to InboxPilot. Given the sensitive nature of medicalcommunication, the practice chose to run InboxPilot in draft mode rather than auto-send— every reply was reviewed by a coordinator before going out. The goal was todramatically reduce the time spent composing responses, not to eliminate humanreview entirely.
The Knowledge Center was built from the practice’s existingmaterials:
• A patient FAQ document covering their 35 most commonquestions
• Appointment scheduling policies and availability windows
• Insurance plans accepted at each location
• Prescription refill request procedures
• Patient portal access instructions
• Directions, parking, and check-in instructions for eachlocation
Custom labels were configured for: Appointment Request,Prescription Refill, Insurance Question, Patient Portal, Billing, Test Results,General Question, and Urgent.
Email actions routed anything labeled Urgent to a separateflagged folder reviewed every 30 minutes. Billing emails were routed to thebilling coordinator’s inbox automatically.
Solution
Within five weeks, Riverside had transformed their patientemail workflow. Coordinators opened their inbox each morning to find draftreplies already prepared for the majority of overnight and early-morningemails. Most drafts required only a quick scan and a click to send – the KnowledgeCenter was accurate enough that corrections were rarely needed.
What previously took three hours of email work per day wasreduced to under 45 minutes. The coordinators’ remaining email time was spenton genuinely complex situations – test result communications, billing disputes,and patients expressing concern or distress – where human judgment and empathymattered most.
Patient satisfaction scores for administrative responsivenessimproved noticeably in the first quarter after deployment, with severalpatients specifically commenting on how quickly they received responses totheir questions.
Results
What’s next
Riverside is now exploring enabling auto-send for a defined subset of low-risk, purely informational responses – parking instructions, portal access guides, and directions – where no clinical judgment is involved.They are also considering deploying a website chatbot on their patient-facing website to handle new patient inquiries before they reach the inbox.
Their next milestone: reducing total daily email handling time to under 30 minutes per coordinator by Q4 2026.
This case study is based on a composite of real customer experiences using InboxPilot’sAI email automation features.
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