Rachel Papka, chief innovation officer at Steinberg Diagnostic Medical Imaging Centers, joins CMSWire’s Beyond the Call to discuss how healthcare contact centers shape some of the most anxious moments in the patient journey. She explains how empathy, operational transparency and technology come together when patients are scheduling exams, waiting for results or trying to reach someone during stressful situations.
Papka also shares how Steinberg Diagnostic improved its contact center through better metrics, expanded self-service and a careful balance between automation and human support. Looking ahead, she says one of healthcare’s biggest challenges is deciding when AI can improve access and when patients need a person on the other end of the line.
Speakers
Dom Nicastro
Inside Our Conversation
Table of Contents
- From PBX Operator to Healthcare Innovation Leader
- Why Healthcare Contact Centers Carry Emotional Weight
- Staying Close to the Front Lines
- Rethinking Contact Center Performance Metrics
- Why Radiology Patient Journeys Are Often Transactional
- Designing Access for a 24-Hour City
- The Next Challenge: AI and Human Balance
- The Human Moments That Define Healthcare CX
- Why Leaders Must Prioritize People Over Metrics
The Gist
- Empathy anchors healthcare contact center strategy. Rachel Papka says leading through the pandemic reinforced the importance of understanding both patient anxiety and agent pressure in high-volume healthcare contact centers.
- Operational metrics must reflect patient realities. Steinberg Diagnostic focused heavily on abandon rate and call evaluations to better understand patient tolerance for wait times and improve service delivery.
- AI adoption in healthcare must balance automation with human empathy. Papka believes one of the biggest challenges ahead is deciding when automation improves access and when patients need immediate human support.
Healthcare innovation often happens far from the exam room.
While physicians deliver diagnoses and treatment, much of the customer experience unfolds earlier — when someone schedules a test, calls a contact center or waits anxiously for results.
At Steinberg Diagnostic Medical Imaging Centers in Las Vegas, those early moments of the patient journey are where Rachel Papka spends most of her time. As chief innovation officer, she oversees both health information technology and the organization's contact center operations — an unusual pairing that reflects her belief that technology, processes and people must work together to improve patient experiences.
Papka's approach to innovation is rooted in empathy, operational transparency and a willingness to step directly into frontline roles to understand how systems affect both patients and employees.
From PBX Operator to Healthcare Innovation Leader
Papka's career in healthcare began shortly after high school.
"I went into healthcare straight out of high school," Papka said. "Beginning my college career, I started in the hospital, the local hospital, as the PBX operator."
From there she moved through multiple operational roles including patient registration, emergency department intake and radiology scheduling.
"At that time, I was really using that old school phone," Papka said. "I dabbled a little bit in registration and then ER registration and ended up in radiology scheduling."
Those early roles exposed her to the operational mechanics behind healthcare delivery. Over time she discovered a passion for improving the systems that shape the patient journey.
"Many years ago I just really fell in love with the process of implementing technology to make the patient journey so much more seamless," Papka said. "That's where I found my passion."
Her work eventually expanded into healthcare IT and electronic medical record implementation across larger health systems.
"I never thought I would be in outpatient radiology," Papka said. "That wasn't something on the map."
Yet the specialty provided an opportunity to influence patient experience at scale.
"I found myself continuing to fall in love with how I can affect the patient journey," Papka said. "I wasn't somebody that wanted to be patient facing. I wasn't somebody that was made to be a nurse or a doctor."
Instead, she realized she could reduce anxiety for patients by improving the systems surrounding clinical care.
"Being able to have some type of effect and reduce an anxiety level of a patient was really important to me," Papka said. "And so today, as that innovation officer, it's what I do all day long."
Related Article: Digital Experience, AI and the Fight for Patient Trust
Why Healthcare Contact Centers Carry Emotional Weight
Healthcare contact centers differ from many traditional customer service environments because patients often call during moments of uncertainty or fear.
"What would happen if somebody just got some horrible news around a cancer diagnosis and then the next test is a PET scan, but you couldn't get ahold of anybody?" Papka said. "You would just kind of feel hopeless at that moment."
That emotional context shapes how Papka approaches operational design.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Steinberg Diagnostic remained open and avoided layoffs. That meant Papka spent long stretches sitting directly beside agents as call queues surged.
"They looked at me and said, 'Rachel, what are we gonna do?'" Papka said. "And I said, one call at a time. Just one call at a time."
The experience reshaped how she thinks about leadership.
"Over these past few years and even more so after the pandemic, I learned that I'm an empathy driven leader," Papka said. "I'm a leader that in a sense; I need to feel."
That mindset continues to influence how she evaluates both operational metrics and cultural priorities.
Staying Close to the Front Lines
Despite her executive role, Papka still occasionally answers calls or works intake desks in clinics to better understand operational friction points.
"As I watch the queues and I see something go high, I'll jump in and take a phone call," Papka said.
In some cases that means directly handling patient escalations.
"I've had times where our hold time was a little bit longer and somebody wanted to complain and say, 'I want to talk to the executive' or 'I want to talk to the person in charge,'" Papka said. "And I was like, "You got them. Let's work through this together.'"
She also spends time in clinic operations.
"I still go out to the clinics, and I will actually sit at the intake," Papka said. "I'm very proud of myself. I know how to schedule an x-ray and a mammogram today."
Those experiences help identify operational gaps that dashboards or analytics alone might miss.
Rethinking Contact Center Performance Metrics
For years, Papka believed the organization delivered strong customer service — but lacked data to prove it.
"We were a very successful radiology company, but we didn't have any success stories within the contact center," Papka said.
Customer surveys and call evaluations were introduced to create measurable benchmarks.
"That was a really big focus," Papka said. "Not only to have me believe that we have great customer service in the contact center, but be able to show it and be able to prove it."
Key Contact Center Metrics
Steinberg Diagnostic refined its contact center measurement approach to better reflect patient experience realities.
| Metric | Why It Matters | Operational Insight |
|---|---|---|
| Abandon rate | Measures callers who hang up before reaching an agent | Helps determine whether patients are willing to wait longer for care access |
| Call evaluations | Randomized supervisor reviews of recorded calls | Identifies coaching opportunities and customer service consistency |
| Customer surveys | Post-interaction patient feedback | Provides recognition and patient sentiment insights |
Among these, abandon rate became a particularly important signal. Understanding call center statistics like this helped the team make data-driven decisions about staffing and patient access.
"We figured out during the pandemic how long our patients are willing to hold," Papka said.
While service level metrics measure how quickly calls are answered, abandon rate reveals whether patients are willing to wait for help.
"Service level on one hand may dip a little bit because I can't answer the call as fast as I would like to," Papka said. "But the focus is still, were we able to help the patient?"
Related Article: The CX Reckoning of 2025: Why Agent Experience Decided What Worked
Why Radiology Patient Journeys Are Often Transactional
Outpatient radiology presents a unique customer experience challenge: many patients interact with the organization only once.
"When it comes to outpatient radiology, we're not in the norm of your surveys because I may see you once in a year and I may never see you again," Papka said.
Because of that, loyalty metrics may be less meaningful than delivering a seamless experience during a single interaction.
"Outpatient radiology is very circumstantial," Papka said. "Only really the sick patients are we gonna see multiple times."
Each call therefore becomes a single opportunity to deliver a positive experience.
Designing Access for a 24-Hour City
Las Vegas operates around the clock, which means healthcare access must do the same.
"We're in Las Vegas and we're in a 24-hour town," Papka said. "Which means people need to schedule or access their results 24 hours a day."
To meet that expectation, Steinberg Diagnostic built self-service capabilities into its contact center platform.
Patients can schedule appointments, cancel appointments or retrieve results even when live agents are unavailable.
"If you call outside of the contact center hours, we want you to still be able to schedule," Papka said.
Self-Service Options Built Into the Contact Center
Digital tools allow patients to manage key parts of their imaging journey outside traditional contact center hours.
| Capability | Purpose | Patient Impact |
|---|---|---|
| 24-hour scheduling | Allows appointment booking anytime | Improves access in a round-the-clock city |
| Easy appointment cancellation | Encourages patients to cancel early | Opens slots for other waiting patients |
| Results access via patient portal | Provides faster imaging result visibility | Reduces anxiety associated with waiting |
Allowing easy cancellations is sometimes controversial.
"People have asked us why do you let people cancel so easily," Papka said.
But Papka views the policy as a way to improve access for others.
"If you cancel it early enough, I can fill your slot," Papka said.
The Next Challenge: AI and Human Balance
Looking ahead, Papka believes one of the biggest challenges in healthcare CX will involve deciding when automation should support patients — and when human interaction is essential.
"One of the biggest battles of 2026 is how much AI do you actually put in healthcare versus when is it appropriate to make sure that they have the first resolution with a human interaction," Papka said.
Her team is exploring ways to monitor tone and frustration levels in automated interactions.
"If there's areas that they get frustrated with, then I need to go ahead and drop them to a human interaction," Papka said.
Patient preferences remain split.
"We probably have 50-50 of both type of patients," Papka said.
Some complete the entire scheduling journey digitally.
"We have patient journeys that can actually never talk to a human until they actually get to our clinic for their imaging scan," Papka said.
Supporting both digital and human pathways will remain a design priority.
The Human Moments That Define Healthcare CX
Despite advances in automation and analytics, Papka says the most meaningful moments still come from agent-patient interactions.
One recent call illustrates why.
"She sits right on the corner and she has this glow and this energy to her," Papka said of one senior agent. "She's one of our senior agents that works in healthcare for all the right reasons."
After receiving strong patient feedback, Papka listened to the call recording herself.
"She was patient. She listened," Papka said.
The interaction went beyond simple scheduling.
"You could feel through the phone call that our agent was there strictly to make sure that she was okay on the other side," Papka said.
For Papka, the moment reinforced why empathy must remain central to healthcare CX.
"When I listened to the recording, I felt it as well," Papka said. "It was genuine and it made me so proud to know that this was the type of experience we were able to offer."
Why Leaders Must Prioritize People Over Metrics
Scaling empathy across a contact center ultimately comes down to leadership priorities.
"One of the themes I focus on as a leader is people work before paperwork," Papka said.
That principle remains central to her leadership philosophy.
"We can so quickly get wrapped up in a metric," Papka said.
Instead, Papka encourages leaders to spend time understanding the people doing the work.
"Go sit down next to another team member," Papka said. "It's okay to do 10 minutes of small talk and figure out how they were through the weekend."
Even as hybrid and remote work expand across healthcare organizations, she believes empathy must remain visible.
"When you pick up that phone," she said, "remember your mother and how would you like your mother to be treated on the other side."
