AWS Contact Center

ETERNO transforms patient communication using Amazon Connect Customer

Learn how Berlin-based healthcare scale-up ETERNO is building a scalable, AI-driven customer experience to serve thousands of patients daily across its growing network of outpatient care providers and doctors.

Target metrics

  • > 80% of patient inquiries successfully resolved by AI agents
  • 24/7 availability for appointment booking and rescheduling
  • reducing up to 50% workload of one employee per practice
  • increasing inclusivity through multilingual capabilities

Overview

Across Europe, patients seeking outpatient care face a familiar frustration: long hold times, limited availability outside business hours, and repetitive phone interactions for routine tasks like booking or rescheduling appointments. ETERNO, a Berlin-based healthcare AI scale-up, is on a mission to change that. Founded in March 2021 by CEO Maximilian Waldmann and COO Frederic Haitz, ETERNO is today serving outpatient care practices in 15 disciplines and thousands of patients daily.

To sustain this growth while delivering on its promise of modern, digitally enabled patient care, ETERNO turned to conversational agents through Amazon Connect Customer, to fundamentally reimagine how patients interact with their practices and doctors.

About ETERNO

ETERNO Cloud powers thousands of doctors with software designed to streamline operations, improve patient communication, and support modern outpatient care delivery at scale.

Developed in close proximity to real-world care delivery and refined alongside doctors and operational teams, the platform is built around the recurring, time-sensitive, and after-hours inquiries that make up a significant share of patient communication.

Scaling patient communication for a rapidly growing ETERNO customer base

As ETERNO evolved into a software scale-up, the volume and complexity of patient communication across its network grew rapidly. Thousands of daily calls, many for routine matters such as appointment scheduling, rescheduling, or frequently asked questions for doctors and care teams, placed increasing pressure on front desk and administrative staff.

Before implementing Connect Customer, ETERNO relied on a call center environment and front-desk workflows supported by several disconnected software systems. Managing patient communication required manual data transfers across tools and workflows, creating inefficiencies and making it harder to deliver a consistent experience as more providers adopted ETERNO Cloud.The challenges were clear:

  • Rising contact volumes: With each new practice onboarded to the ETERNO Cloud platform, inbound call traffic increased, straining existing resources.
  • Limited availability: Patients calling outside core business hours had no way to resolve their inquiries, leading to missed calls and delayed care access.
  • Staff burden: Doctors’ teams and administrative staff spent significant time on repetitive phone interactions, diverting attention from in-person patient care.

“As we scaled, patient communication quickly became one of the most important operational challenges to solve,” said Maximilian Waldmann, CEO and Co-Founder at ETERNO “Our teams were spending too much time handling repetitive calls, while patients still faced limited availability and inconsistent response times. We knew we needed a solution that could scale with us without compromising the quality of care experience.”

ETERNO saw the need of its customers for a solution that could scale across providers and specialties, automate routine interactions without sacrificing quality, all seamlessly integrated with ETERNO Cloud.

Why Connect Customer AI agents | a strategic decision for AI-native patient communication

ETERNO evaluated its options and made a strategic decision: rather than incrementally upgrading its existing telephony setup, the company would build a future-proof, AI-native communication platform from the ground up.

“We chose Amazon Connect Customer because it gave us the flexibility to build the AI native patient communication platform we envisioned from the beginning,” said Anton Marcuse, Chief Innovation Officer at ETERNO. “With managed scalability, deep integration capabilities, and access to advanced AI services on AWS, we are not just building for growth, but laying the foundation for a new generation of intelligent patient access.”

Several factors drove the choice of Connect Customer AI voice agents:

  • Agentic AI alignment: ETERNO’s core identity is built around AI in healthcare. Connect Customer’s native offering of AI voice agents, aligned directly with ETERNO’s technology vision.
  • Scalability without complexity: As a fully managed, serverless platform, Connect Customer scales automatically with call volume. For a company constantly adding new customers, this eliminates the need to re-architect infrastructure as adoption grows.
  • Deep integration capabilities: Connect Customer’s API-driven architecture enables direct integration with ETERNO’s core systems for real-time appointment booking and rescheduling, as well as knowledge base synchronization for context-aware patient responses.
  • Pay-per-use economics: With pay as you go pricing, ETERNO only pays for actual usage. This is a critical advantage for a growth-stage company managing costs carefully while scaling across a growing outpatient network.
  • Security and compliance: Built-in encryption (AWS KMS), IAM with least-privilege access, and secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager) meet the stringent data protection requirements of European healthcare, including GDPR compliance.

Working alongside their AWS account team ETERNO designed an architecture that combines Connect Customer as the central customer experience solution with a serverless integration layer built on AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB. platform with a serverless integration layer built on AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Building an AI-powered voice solution for patient care

In Phase 1 of the project, ETERNO is deploying a single, centralized Connect Customer instance that serves all ETERNO Cloud doctors. The implementation focuses on two core capabilities:

Knowledge-based patient support

Inbound patient calls are received by a Connect Customer AI voice agent that uses an interactive voice response (IVR) flow to qualify the nature of each inquiry. For frequently asked questions, such as opening hours, directions, preparation instructions for appointments, or insurance-related queries, the AI agent draws on a synchronized knowledge base sourced from ETERNO Careflow and stored in Amazon S3. This enables the agent to provide accurate, context-specific answers without human intervention.

Automated appointment management

For appointment booking and rescheduling the Connect Customer AI agent conducts structured, guided dialogues with patients. Through API-based integration with ETERNO Cloud, the agent can check availability, confirm patient identity, and complete the booking or modification in real time. Only when an inquiry exceeds the AI agent’s scope is the call escalated to a human agent, ensuring staff focus on complex cases that require clinical judgment.

ETERNO is taking a phased approach, beginning with a closely monitored rollout to validate the platform under real-world conditions and continuously refine the experience. Building on these learnings, the solution will then be scaled across the full ETERNO Cloud customer base.

A future-proof platform for European healthcare communication

With Connect Customer’s natively integrated AI voice agents, ETERNO is building a communication platform designed to grow with the company’s ambitions. The expected outcomes include:

  • Faster patient resolution: Routine inquiries and appointment tasks are handled in minutes, around the clock, without hold times.
  • Staff relief: Front-desk and administrative teams are freed from repetitive phone work, allowing them to focus on in-person patient care.
  • Consistent service quality: Every patient receives the same high-quality, AI-assisted service experience across providers, specialties, and care settings.
  • Operational transparency: Centralized logging and analytics through Amazon CloudWatch enable continuous optimization of AI agent flows and identification of emerging patient needs.
  • Scalable foundation: New providers, specialties, and ETERNO Cloud customers can be onboarded to the platform without infrastructure changes.

“Healthcare is about people and staying connected to them. Too often, that connection is lost in administrative friction. With Connect Customer AI voice agents, we are adding a new layer of intelligence to patient communication, automating calls in a way that still feels personal and human, “ said Maximilian Waldmann, CEO and Co-Founder, ETERNO.

This is only the beginning. AI phone assistants will become the front door of care, helping guide patients to the right next step. We believe this marks a fundamental shift in how healthcare is delivered and an inflection point for both practices and patients.

Looking ahead, ETERNO plans to extend the platform beyond voice to additional channels – including chat and messaging, and to deepen AI capabilities with sentiment analysis, proactive patient outreach, and expanded self-service workflows. The modular, serverless architecture on AWS ensures that these enhancements can be delivered without platform changes, supporting ETERNO’s vision of becoming the leading AI-powered healthcare communication platform in Europe.

In future phases, ETERNO sees this platform evolving into a broader agent suite designed to power smooth operations, sustainable economics, and best-in-class medicine across outpatient care. By extending AI beyond patient communication into the wider care journey, ETERNO aims to build a scalable operating layer for modern healthcare providers across Europe.

Learn more about agentic AI-powered customer experience, or discover how Amazon Connect Customer is transforming healthcare customer experience through conversational AI.

AWS Services Used

  • Amazon Connect Customer – AI-powered cloud contact center for omnichannel patient communication.
  • Amazon Nova 2 Sonic – speech-to-speech foundational model for automated, natural-language patient dialogues.
  • AWS Lambda – Serverless compute for integration logic and API orchestration.
  • Amazon S3 – Scalable storage for knowledge base synchronization.
  • Amazon CloudWatch – Monitoring, logging, and operational analytics.
  • AWS KMS – Encryption key management for data protection.
  • AWS Secrets Manager – Secure credential and secret management.