How can a community health center answer every patient call?

One front door for every service you run

Federally qualified health center phone lines carry every service you offer, and callers don't know or care which department they need. The agent works out what each caller wants from what they say, in their own words, and sends them to the right clinic or team, which takes the phone tree out of your community health center call center.

A caller says, "Necesito cambiar mi cita del jueves" (I need to change my Thursday appointment). The agent carries on in Spanish, finds the appointment and offers new times your rules allow.

How Howard Brown Health runs its patient line

Howard Brown Health is a federally qualified health center for the LGBTQ+ community, serving more than 40,000 adults and youth a year across seven clinics in Chicago. Founded in 1974, it marked its 50th year in 2025. Its call center averaged about 15,000 calls a month, with spikes to 60,000 during Covid and Monkeypox. Staffing the phones around the clock was hard, and some patients speak Spanish or Polish rather than English.

Its agent, Alex, now answers 24/7 and connects to MyChart. When a caller sounds distressed and at risk, Alex escalates the call to a person immediately. Against a 20% target, the agent contained 30% of calls. Handle time on routine requests fell 72%, and patient satisfaction rose 4%.

"I was really taken aback by how accurate and natural the virtual agent was," says Lauren Sullivan, Howard Brown's Chief Information Officer. "PolyAI fits the bill for our desire to continue to innovate and make sure technology barriers are as low as possible to get patients as engaged as possible."

Routine requests, handled by your rules

You set the rules and the agent applies them on every call, so your FQHC patient access team sees the same handling on a Saturday night as on a Tuesday morning. These are the kinds of requests teams build in, and we believe the place to start is the calls nobody can answer today, after hours or on surge days, because those are the ones that end in voicemail. Check your voicemail box on a Monday morning and you'll see the list.

Appointments and reminders

The agent books, moves and cancels appointments within your rules. It confirms upcoming visits by voice or SMS and rebooks on the same call when a patient can't make it.

Refills, results and records

Refill requests go into your refill workflow with the details your team needs. Patients asking about test results hear how to see them in your portal, the way Howard Brown's agent guides patients into MyChart.

Cost and coverage questions

Callers ask what a visit costs and whether you take their insurance. The agent answers from your approved content, tells callers about your sliding fee discount program in the wording your team has approved, and routes eligibility questions to the staff who handle them.

Callers in distress

Your clinicians decide which words and situations send a call straight to a person, and the agent follows that rule every time. The agent does not give medical advice or assess symptoms, so a caller in crisis reaches your team at once, with what they've already said passed along.

Built around the systems you already run

Howard Brown Health moved its telephony from RingCentral to Dialpad, and the agent moved with it, with minimal downtime. Epic connects through SMART on FHIR, PolyAI also connects to athenahealth and NexHealth, and if a system has an API, PolyAI connects to it.

For your IT team: you build the agent in Dialog Studio (formerly Agent Studio) or as code with the Agent Development Kit (ADK), and test every change on a branch before it goes live. 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. Data handling, retention and model use are governed by your agreement and deployment configuration.