How Eastside Eye Physicians Used Prosper AI to Stop Losing Front Desk Staff

About Eastside Eye Care

Eastside Eye Care is a busy ophthalmology practice in Southeast Michigan, serving a broad patient base that spans routine annual exams to complex surgical cases. The practice operates on ModMed and manages a high volume of appointments daily across multiple appointment types, including comprehensive eye exams, contact lens evaluations, visual field testing, and specialist referrals. Each has its own scheduling logic, insurance requirements, and provider assignments.

Serving a patient population that skews older, Eastside Eye handles significant Medicare volume, insurance authorization workflows, and nuanced scheduling rules like HMO global authorization reminders, contact lens evaluation fees, and referring physician disambiguation, which require consistent, accurate execution on every single call.

Challenge

Eastside Eye Care wasn't losing calls. Less than 1% went to voicemail, and the phones were always answered. The problem was who was answering them — and at what cost.

More than ten thousand inbound calls per month were landing entirely on the front desk, in real time, with multiple lines ringing simultaneously. The volume was relentless, and the work was repetitive: scheduling, rescheduling, confirming, canceling. 

The consequence wasn't missed calls. It had burned-out staff and high turnover. In a single year, the practice cycled through two to three front desk hires, each requiring weeks of training before leaving, taking that investment with them.

"Two, three people tried to come in over the course of the last year. The training that goes in with new staff, and then for them just to turn around and leave — it's a nightmare."

— Karen Blair, Executive Director

For Karen, the real goal wasn't call deflection, but longevity. She needed a way to protect her current team from the grind that was driving people out.

Solution: AI-Powered Patient Access, Integrated with ModMed

Eastside Eye implemented Prosper AI's voice agent as a full patient access layer, integrated natively with ModMed to handle scheduling, insurance logic, and patient verification end-to-end.

Prosper's AI Agent:

• Automated appointment scheduling, rescheduling, and cancellations using Eastside Eye's internal workflows and ModMed scheduling rules, including contact lens evaluation logic and visual field linkages
• New patient registration: collecting insurance information upfront and blocking incomplete registrations from proceeding, reducing downstream errors
• Smart escalation: warm-transferring urgent, complex, or preference-based calls to staff, with call depth tracking to ensure nothing falls through
• Referring provider accuracy: disambiguating same-surname providers and enforcing the correct physician assignments

Prosper's implementation team provided hands-on configuration throughout, refining prompts, insurance restrictions, and scheduling logic through daily feedback loops and SOP reviews with the Eastside Eye team.

Impact

The staff time recovered from phone handling is reinvested in clinical operations quality: correcting insurance misclassifications, updating Medicare numbers across the patient base, and ensuring appointments are accurate before patients arrive. The practice is getting more done, with the same team.

Patient reception has been positive. The most common feedback from patients walking in wasn't frustration; it was concern that a staff member had lost their job. The team's response became its own proof point: Prosper AI’s agent didn't replace anyone. It freed up staff from the high-volume, repetitive phone work that was driving them to burnout.

What’s Next

With scheduling running at 56% deflection, Eastside Eye is expanding Prosper AI into the full patient journey, moving into prior authorizations and insurance claim statusing — the calls that consume the most staff time and carry the highest administrative cost.

"This is very exciting."

— Theresa Brown, Office Manager

Key Takeaway

Eastside Eye Care didn't come to Prosper AI because they had a call abandonment problem. They came because high-volume, repetitive phone work was burning out their best people. No amount of hiring could keep up.

Prosper AI addressed the root cause: by integrating directly with ModMed and handling the full scheduling and patient verification workflow, it removed the repetitive load from staff entirely, without sacrificing the accuracy and personalization that an eye care practice requires. The result is a practice that can finally keep the people it trains.

"You have been absolutely phenomenal in guiding us through literally every question we have, every concern. Very, very communicative — which I think is just huge in something like this."

— Theresa Brown, Office Manager