Array Behavioral Health Automates On-Demand Patient Encounter Assignment With Workato
The Client Profile: Array Behavior Care
Array Behavioral Care is a leading virtual behavioral healthcare organization delivering psychiatry and behavioral health services through telehealth. The organization, headquartered in Chicago, IL, works with healthcare organizations and patients to expand access to behavioral healthcare, connecting individuals with qualified clinicians through technology-enabled care delivery models.
Operating in virtual behavioral health creates a unique operational challenge: patient demand, provider availability, clinical specialties, state licensure, facility privileges, scheduling, and clinical urgency all need to align before an encounter reaches the appropriate provider. At scale, efficiently coordinating those variables becomes essential to both patient access and clinician utilization. As Array's on-demand behavioral health operations expanded, the organization partnered with Quandary Consulting Group to build a Workato-powered healthcare workflow automation solution capable of intelligently orchestrating encounter assignments across its clinical technology ecosystem.
The Challenges
Manual Patient Encounter Assignment Created a Scalability Bottleneck
Array Behavioral Care's Access Center was responsible for coordinating inbound on-demand behavioral health encounters with available providers and each new encounter initially entered Epic and required assignment to an appropriate clinician. Shift Coordinators within the Access Center reviewed the incoming workload and manually assigned encounters using Epic's trackboard.
At approximately 300 encounters per day, this already represented a substantial operational responsibility, but Array was preparing for significantly greater scale. The organization needed an operating model capable of eventually supporting volumes approaching 3,000 encounters per day. Increasing the number of Shift Coordinators proportionally to encounter volume was neither efficient nor sustainable.
Array needed to transform encounter assignment from a staff-dependent administrative process into an automated clinical operations workflow capable of scaling with patient demand.
Assigning a Patient Required Evaluating Multiple Clinical and Operational Variables
Encounter assignment was not simply a matter of finding the next available provider and Shift Coordinators needed to consider multiple factors before determining which clinician should receive an encounter.
Those considerations included:
- Whether the provider was currently on shift
- State licensure
- Facility credentials and privileges
- Provider readiness
- Provider type
- Clinical specialty
- Current provider queue depth
- Encounter priority
- Service type
- Expected turnaround time
- Existing assignments
- Continuity with the partner hospital or facility
Epic contained important clinical workflow information, but its native functionality did not provide the flexibility Array needed to automatically enforce every assignment consideration; and, as encounter volumes increased, manually evaluating this growing set of rules introduced greater opportunities for inconsistent assignments, overlooked criteria, and operational delays.
Provider Scheduling and Credentialing Information Lived Across Multiple Systems
Another challenge was that the information required to make an assignment did not exist in one place.
- Epic remained the system of record for patient encounters and provider assignments.
- PlanBase contained clinician scheduling information.
- MDStaff contained provider licensing, credentialing, and privileging information.
- KeyCare provided the interface required to communicate assignment decisions back into Epic.
Shift Coordinators therefore had to work across multiple applications while making time-sensitive assignment decisions, Array needed an integration and automation layer capable of bringing these signals together automatically; and, that layer became Workato.
Empty Provider Queues Created Lost Clinical Capacity
Assigning incoming encounters represented only one side of the problem, Array also needed to continuously understand provider queue depth. A clinician might be actively scheduled and available to see patients but have only a small number of encounters—or none at all—waiting in their queue.
Shift Coordinators therefore had to monitor both:
- Patients waiting for providers
- Providers waiting for patients
Doing this manually became increasingly difficult as provider and encounter volumes grew and poor queue balancing could translate directly into underutilized clinical capacity, longer patient wait times, and reduced operational throughput.
Automation Could Not Come at the Expense of Clinical Controls
Healthcare automation also required safeguards that a basic round-robin assignment system could not provide and Array needed the automation to determine whether a provider was actually eligible before assigning an encounter.
If credentialing information was unavailable, no eligible provider existed, an integration failed, or another exception occurred, the workflow needed to fail safely rather than force an inappropriate assignment, the system also needed to respect human judgment.
When an Access Center Shift Coordinator intentionally reassigned an encounter, the automation needed to recognize that intervention rather than immediately overwrite it and the goal wasn't to remove clinicians or operations personnel from the process, it was to automate high-volume, rules-based decisions while preserving human control over exceptions and clinical operations.
The Solutions
Workato Became the Intelligent Orchestration Layer for Encounter Assignment
Quandary Consulting Group designed a Workato-powered automated encounter assignment engine capable of connecting Array's clinical, scheduling, credentialing, and operational systems. Rather than replacing Epic or Array's existing healthcare technology stack, Workato orchestrated information between them.
The architecture connected: Epic → Workato → PlanBase → MDStaff → Assignment Logic → KeyCare API → Epic
Epic continued serving as the authoritative system for encounters and provider assignments and Workato became the automation and orchestration layer responsible for collecting the information necessary to make an assignment, evaluating provider eligibility, applying configurable business rules, selecting the best-fit clinician, initiating the assignment, and recording the decision.
Real-Time Epic Encounter Intake Through HL7
When new on-demand encounters entered Epic, relevant encounter information flowed into Workato through HL7 SIU messaging. This gave the automation engine access to the operational context required to begin evaluating the encounter and instead of waiting for a Shift Coordinator to manually identify and process every new case, Workato continuously monitored encounters requiring assignment.
That changed the workflow to: Encounter Arrives → Workato Evaluates → Provider Selected → Epic Updated → Decision Logged
Workato Connected Provider Scheduling Data From PlanBase
Knowing which clinicians were credentialed wasn't enough and the automation also needed to know who was actually working. Workato integrated with PlanBase to retrieve provider scheduling information, including clinicians currently on shift, shift start and end times, and providers beginning shifts in the near future and this allowed Array to incorporate real-time workforce availability directly into encounter assignment decisions. This would cause a clinician who was technically eligible but wasn't working wouldn't enter the active candidate pool.
Workato Integrated Credentialing and Privileging Data From MDStaff
Workato also retrieved provider licensing, credentialing, and facility privileging information from MDStaff. Before assigning an encounter, the automation could evaluate whether a provider met the minimum eligibility requirements for the relevant state and partner facility. This created an important operational safeguard and only providers meeting the required criteria advanced into the assignment candidate pool.
Intelligent Provider Candidate Selection
Once Workato assembled the necessary information, it created a pool of eligible providers for each encounter.
The workflow first applied hard eligibility constraints, including: On Shift + Licensed + Privileged + Ready for Encounter
Workato could then rank qualifying clinicians according to operational and clinical priorities and the decisioning framework was designed to incorporate factors such as:
- Clinical specialty and encounter match
- Provider queue depth
- Encounter priority
- Service type
- Turnaround-time requirements
- Facility continuity
- Existing workload
- Provider availability
This moved Array beyond basic assignment automation and the solution created the foundation for rules-driven intelligent clinical workload orchestration.
Reducing EHR Context Switching for Providers
One of the most valuable elements of the assignment strategy was its ability to account for facility continuity when determining which clinician should receive an encounter.
When appropriate, the Workato-powered assignment engine could prioritize clinicians who already had encounters associated with the same partner hospital or facility. This helped keep related work within the same clinical environment rather than unnecessarily assigning providers across multiple facility systems. For clinicians supporting multiple partner organizations, every change between facilities can also mean switching between different EHR environments, workflows, and clinical contexts. Repeated context switching adds friction, interrupts focus, and can make it more difficult for providers to move efficiently through their assigned workload.
By incorporating facility continuity into provider ranking and assignment logic, Array could create more intelligently organized workloads that reduced unnecessary system switching while helping clinicians remain focused within the same operational context whenever possible. The objective wasn't simply to assign encounters and fill provider queues as quickly as possible, it was to use Workato automation and intelligent assignment logic to build better queues—giving the right clinician the right encounter while also considering how the overall workload was structured.
Automated Assignment Back Into Epic
After Workato identified the highest-ranked eligible provider, the automation initiated the assignment through a KeyCare-provided API endpoint connected to Epic.
This closed the automation loop: Encounter → Eligibility → Provider Ranking → Assignment → Epic Update → Validation
Workato then validated that the assignment succeeded and updated its operational model accordingly. and the result was a true end-to-end healthcare workflow rather than an integration that merely moved information between systems.
Human-in-the-Loop Automation Preserved Clinical Control
Quandary designed the Workato-powered assignment workflow so automation supported Array's clinical operations without overriding appropriate human judgment. Shift Coordinators continued monitoring encounter assignments within Epic and retained the ability to manually reassign work whenever operational or clinical circumstances required intervention.
The automation was specifically designed to recognize and respect those decisions. When a coordinator manually moved an encounter between eligible providers, Workato treated the reassignment as intentional and did not automatically reverse the change.
If an encounter was moved back into the designated unassigned queue, however, Workato recognized that the case once again required assignment. The workflow reevaluated the encounter against the established assignment criteria and attempted to identify the most appropriate eligible clinician.
When no qualified provider could be identified, the system did not force an assignment simply to clear the queue. Instead, the encounter remained available for Shift Coordinator review and manual intervention, helping prevent automation from making an inappropriate assignment when established criteria could not be satisfied.
This created a practical human-in-the-loop healthcare automation model that combined the speed and consistency of Workato with the oversight of Array's clinical operations team: Automate routine assignments → Respect human decisions → Reevaluate returned encounters → Escalate exceptions → Preserve human control. The result was automation designed not to replace clinical operations oversight, but to reduce the volume of routine assignment decisions requiring manual attention while keeping people firmly in control of exceptions and complex scenarios.
Creating an Auditable Assignment Decision Trail
Every automated assignment needed to be explainable and Workato recorded the information behind automated assignment decisions, including relevant encounter attributes, the candidate provider set, ranking considerations, and the result of the Epic write-back.
This provided Array with an operational audit trail for troubleshooting and performance analysis, giving operations teams the ability where they could understand how and why the automation reached its decision.
Workato Continuously Rebalanced Provider Workloads
The next stage of the solution expanded Workato's role beyond initial encounter assignment. Instead of only determining where new encounters should be routed, the automation continuously evaluated provider capacity, queue depth, and workload distribution to help Array maintain a more balanced clinical operation. Workato monitored clinicians who were actively on shift as well as providers approaching the start of their scheduled shifts. When the system identified an eligible clinician with an empty or unusually light queue, it could evaluate encounters already assigned elsewhere and determine whether appropriate reassignment opportunities existed.
These decisions followed Array's established eligibility and assignment rules. Rather than moving work simply because one provider had greater capacity, Workato evaluated whether an encounter could appropriately be reassigned before making a change.
This created a continuous provider workload optimization loop: Monitor Encounter Demand → Evaluate Provider Capacity → Identify Workload Imbalances → Validate Assignment Eligibility → Reassign When Appropriate → Recalculate Operational State
The result was a more proactive approach to clinical workload balancing. Instead of relying exclusively on Shift Coordinators to manually identify underutilized clinicians or uneven queues, Workato continuously monitored the operational environment and surfaced opportunities to distribute encounters more effectively; and for Array Behavioral Care, this transformed assignment automation from a one-time routing decision into an ongoing workload orchestration process—helping available clinicians receive appropriate work sooner, reducing unnecessary queue imbalances, and allowing Shift Coordinators to focus more of their attention on exceptions and situations requiring human judgment.
The Results
The Workato-powered encounter assignment platform transformed a highly manual Access Center process into an integrated, rules-driven clinical operations workflow and Array established the technological foundation to increase encounter capacity without requiring administrative staffing to increase at the same rate.
90%+ of Routine Encounter Assignments Automated
By automatically evaluating incoming encounters against provider schedules, licensure, privileges, specialty, workload, and other assignment rules, Array substantially reduced the number of routine assignments requiring manual Shift Coordinator intervention.
80% Reduction in Manual Assignment Work
At approximately 300 encounters per day, manual assignment represented significant recurring administrative work and automating the majority of standard assignments allowed Shift Coordinators to shift their attention toward exceptions, operational oversight, and higher-value coordination.
10x Scalability Without Linear Administrative Headcount Growth
The architecture was explicitly designed around a substantial future increase from approximately 300 encounters per day toward 3,000 encounters per day without requiring staffing to increase proportionally.
50% Reduction in Time-to-Assignment
Automated monitoring removed the delay between an encounter appearing in the assignment queue and a Shift Coordinator manually processing it.
30% Improvement in Provider Queue Utilization
Queue-depth monitoring gave Array a systematic way to identify on-shift clinicians with shallow or empty queues and redistribute eligible work by Workato continuously evaluated workload conditions.
Building a Scalable Digital Front Door for On-Demand Behavioral Healthcare
For Array Behavioral Care, the transformation went far beyond eliminating an administrative task. It addressed a fundamental operational constraint on the organization's ability to scale.
A manual encounter assignment process that could support hundreds of daily encounters was not designed to efficiently manage thousands of encounters as demand increased. Yet behavioral healthcare assignments could not simply be automated based on who was available next. Every assignment needed to account for a complex combination of provider availability, state licensure, facility privileges, clinical specialty, partner requirements, workload, encounter priority, and operational conditions.
Quandary Consulting Group used Workato as the intelligent healthcare orchestration layer connecting those variables across Array's technology ecosystem.
The resulting architecture created a continuous flow of information across: Epic + HL7 → Workato → PlanBase + MDStaff → Eligibility & Assignment Logic → KeyCare API → Epic → Operational Monitoring
Instead of requiring Shift Coordinators to manually gather and compare information from multiple systems for every encounter, Workato orchestrated the process from end to end. The platform brought together encounter and provider data, applied Array's eligibility and assignment rules, evaluated available clinicians, identified the most appropriate provider, executed the assignment, validated the outcome, and maintained a record of the decision.
Just as importantly, the architecture recognized the limits of automation. When an encounter could not be confidently assigned according to established rules, Workato preserved human oversight rather than forcing a decision, returning the exception to Array's operations team for review and the result was a more scalable behavioral health encounter management and provider assignment model that combined intelligent automation with human control.
Rather than increasing administrative workload alongside encounter volume, Array created an operational foundation designed to support growth, improve provider utilization, balance clinical workloads, and expand access to behavioral healthcare without requiring manual coordination to scale at the same rate as patient demand.
Our Latest Projects
© 2026 Quandary Consulting Group. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy