What does a voice agent do for a behavioral health provider?

The calls behavioral health teams take all day

Behavioral health calls are sensitive, and the caller is sometimes the patient and sometimes a parent or partner. You write your intake rules and your escalation rules into the agent, and it applies them on every call. These are examples of what teams build in.

Intake and enrollment

A caller who says "I need help with my drinking and I don't know where to start" hears a calm voice, a few intake questions in plain language and a clear next step. The agent collects personal details and insurance information in conversation, then passes a complete record to your admissions team so the caller doesn't repeat their story.

Therapy and medication-management appointments

Some patients need a therapist and a prescriber, and the order of those visits matters to your clinicians. The agent books both on one call, following the sequence your rules set and matching each patient to a provider who treats what they need.

Parents and guardians booking for minors

When a parent calls for a teenager, the agent separates the caller from the patient and asks the consent and guardian questions your team wrote. Rules on who can consent vary by state and by service, so your compliance team sets them. Anything unclear goes to a person.

Questions about programs and insurance

Callers ask what a program involves, whether you take their insurance and what happens at admission. The agent answers from the content your team approves and hands anything else to your admissions team.

Callers at risk reach a person at once

On these lines, we believe a caller in crisis should reach a person before answering a single scheduling question. Your clinicians define the words and signs that count. When a caller says something on that list, the agent stops the intake, gives the crisis line your clinicians chose and transfers the call to your team at once. The agent does not assess risk or counsel anyone. Howard Brown Health, a federally qualified health center in Chicago, runs its agent the same way: it recognizes when a caller is at risk and escalates immediately.

What an addiction treatment provider sees

Diamond Recovery provides addiction and mental health treatment across the US, from detox to outpatient programs, and takes 500 calls a day and growing. Its PolyAI agent asks intake questions with empathy, collects personal information and insurance credentials, and passes them to a specialist team. It answers more than 40 common questions, overall call containment is 74%, and enrollment has gone up. "The PolyAI agent scales to meet our peak call volumes, relieving our overburdened staff and ensuring all calls are triaged efficiently for empathetic patient care," says Mark Oxley, its CTO.

Diamond Recovery runs its agent with Twilio and Salesforce, and PolyAI connects to Epic through SMART on FHIR and to athenahealth. Patient data runs under HIPAA Security Rule controls examined within our SOC 2+ report, and a business associate agreement (BAA) is available for eligible healthcare deployments.