Pine Park Health is one of the fastest-growing primary care practices serving seniors in the western United States. Founded in Oakland in 2021, the company has expanded to nearly 200 assisted and independent living communities across California, Arizona, and Nevada. The mission is simple but ambitious: bring high-quality geriatric care directly to where seniors live so they never struggle with transportation or access again.
This model has earned Pine Park a reputation for reliability, warmth, and clinical excellence. However, as the organization scaled, one operational bottleneck threatened to slow everything down: the phone.
Most Pine Park patients prefer to communicate by phone. They call to schedule visits, confirm appointment times, request changes to their care, or ask when a clinician will arrive. Families call as well. Community staff call on behalf of residents. Every interaction is important and every detail must be documented correctly so clinicians stay aligned and visits run smoothly.
A single scheduling call typically takes about four minutes when accounting for preparation, identity verification, conversation, and documentation. When multiplied across thousands of patients, those minutes consumed hours of Medical Assistant time every day. During busy periods, documentation quality suffered and no-shows increased. The operational strain quickly became unsustainable.
“We could feel the operational debt building,” says Mike Tadlock, COO of Pine Park Health. “Our care model was scaling, but our communication workflows were not.”
Pine Park’s engineering and operations teams attempted to solve the communication burden on their own. They built an internal ambient AI dictation system and also experimented with building voice automation themselves. Later, they partnered with another vendor. None of these solutions met clinical-level standards.
Real-time voice automation is extremely challenging. Latency disrupted the flow of conversation. Seniors needed slower pacing and clearer articulation. And the system required engineering adjustments for even small updates. It was not scalable.
By early 2025, Pine Park recognized the need for a specialized voice automation partner. Retell AI stood out immediately. The technology was strong, but the partnership mattered even more. Retell interviewed Pine Park clinicians and operators, drafted initial prompts, shaped escalation logic, and designed a data workflow that allowed non-technical staff to make updates easily.
“It felt like Retell became an extension of our team,” Mike says. “The onboarding was one of the best experiences I have ever seen.”
Together with Retell, Pine Park launched two voice agents: Ava and Jay.
Ava focuses on appointment reminders. She calls patients or responsible parties two days before each visit, verifies date of birth, confirms or reschedules the appointment, asks what the patient wants to focus on, and writes everything into the medical chart. If the patient becomes confused or uncomfortable, Ava transfers the call to a live Medical Assistant.
Jay focuses on proactive scheduling. He scans upcoming PCP availability, identifies residents who have not been seen recently, calls to offer an appointment, verifies identity, and documents the result in the chart.
A major surprise came from the patients. Many seniors did not realize Ava was AI. They appreciated her clarity and calm pacing. Some even shared personal updates such as recent hospitalizations, which then triggered Pine Park’s care coordination workflows. With each iteration, Pine Park refined Ava’s speaking cadence and phrasing until she felt natural and familiar to this population.
Pine Park introduced Ava and Jay with the same discipline they apply to clinical protocols.
They began with ten calls per day, personally selected by Mike. Every transcript and recording was reviewed. After hundreds of calls and consistent quality, the team expanded usage gradually. For several months, staff continued reviewing every interaction until the system consistently met expectations.
Today, Ava handles all reminder calls and Jay fills open PCP slots. Medical Assistants now spend their time on higher-impact coordination work rather than repetitive scheduling calls.
The results have been significant and measurable.
Phone communication is central to nearly every workflow in senior care, from medication refill requests to lab follow-ups, imaging updates, specialty referrals, new patient onboarding, and records retrieval. Pine Park plans to expand voice automation across these workflows one by one.
Their next initiative is an intelligent inbound system powered by Retell. Instead of asking seniors to navigate “Press 1 for scheduling,” callers will speak naturally with an agent that understands their needs and routes them instantly.
Pine Park has always believed that great care begins with great communication. With Retell AI, that communication now scales to match the company’s mission and can continue to support growth without compromising quality.