Lansing – October 27, 2026 -- IntelePeer and Michigan Orthopedic Center have built an agentic AI triage workflow that sorts inbound post-surgical calls into emergent, urgent or routine tiers. It replaces a queue in which 50 simultaneous calls were returned in the order received.
The catalyst was Dr. Clay Dorenkamp, an orthopedic spine surgeon at the Lansing practice. An elderly patient who valued his clinical care told him he was impossible to reach. Dorenkamp argues the problem is structural: post-op call volume scales with every case, and missed calls can mean a complication caught late or an avoidable emergency department visit.
Agent captures symptom data and assigns urgency tiers without giving medical advice
The agent records symptom onset, surgical date, current status and relevant history, then applies confidence scoring to set the urgency tier. Its guardrails bar medical advice, treatment direction and any opinion on whether symptoms are serious. All clinical decisions stay with licensed staff.
Under the old process, a potential wound infection sat in the same queue as a question about returning to golf. Now the emergent case surfaces immediately, and the physician gets a complete intake summary. The result is one callback loop instead of four. The system runs 24/7 with no hold times or voicemail loops.
Staff-neutral deployment targets turnover, not headcount
Dorenkamp framed the rollout as staff-neutral to win over the team. The aim is to lift administrative load from roles with high turnover and constant retraining, not to cut positions. He says adding back-office headcount to handle the same volume managed five years ago is unsustainable because the economics do not support it.
IntelePeer says that if the agent resolves 30% to 50% of inbound volume, or collects enough to close a case in one callback, staff workloads improve materially. Medical assistants and front-desk staff currently absorb the frustration of patients who have tried to reach the office for days.
ED utilization and physician cognitive load replace handle time as lead metrics
IntelePeer ranks ED utilization above handle time, call dropout rate and first-call resolution. Faster contact and more accurate routing should cut unnecessary ER visits, which feeds quality improvement and value-based care initiatives. Dorenkamp likens the effect on physician cognitive load to ambient scribe technology: an organized queue and complete summaries reduce mental burden.
IntelePeer deploys its SmartAnalyticsTM tool at the start of each engagement to set a baseline before any AI goes live. In orthopedic and spine practices, it says it routinely finds 15% to 20% of calls unanswered and elevated repeat-caller rates. Chief AI Officer Mark Langanki said: "20% of calls just never get answered."
Same infrastructure extends to post-op check-ins and outcome collection
The agentic AI platform also supports post-op check-in calls, appointment recall outreach, waitlist management and patient-reported outcome collection. IntelePeer says conversational outreach can close the data gap in spine surgery, where consistent outcome data has been hard to capture.
Dorenkamp envisions AI across a private orthopedic practice's full back office, from first referral through end of treatment. IntelePeer says it is building toward that with Michigan Orthopedic Center.