Can AI handle prescription refill calls?

What the agent does on a refill call

Refill calls follow a pattern your team knows by heart, so prescription refill automation starts with the agent taking each step in the order your protocol sets.

• Verifies the patient's identity against your records.
• Takes down the medication and the prescriber.
• Confirms which pharmacy to send it to.
• Checks the request against the rules you set, such as whether a visit is due.
• Routes the request to your refill queue, as a task in your EHR where your system allows.
• Tells the patient what happens next and how long your team takes to respond.

A patient who says "I need my blood pressure pills, and I've moved, so it's a different pharmacy now" is asking for two things at once. The agent catches both. It takes the refill request, confirms the new pharmacy's name and address, and notes the change so the prescription doesn't go to the old one.

Your refill rules decide where each request goes

These are the kinds of rules teams build in. You set each one and the agent applies it on every call, and we think routine renewals for established patients are the place to start, because the rules behind them are usually written down already.

A visit is due before the next refill

If your policy says a patient needs to be seen before another refill, the agent tells them so in plain words and offers to book the visit on the same call, inside your scheduling system.

Controlled substances and clinical questions

Requests for controlled substances go to the person or queue your policy names. So do clinical questions, such as whether a new medication is safe alongside an old one. The agent does not approve refills, change a prescription or answer a clinical question. It passes those to your clinical team with the patient's details already captured.

Status checks

Refill status is the call patients make twice: once to ask, and again when nothing has arrived at the pharmacy. Where your EHR or pharmacy system shows where a request stands, the agent tells the patient on the call, and flags a request that looks stuck.

Nights and weekends

The agent answers around the clock, so a patient who notices on Saturday that they're nearly out can put the request in then. It's in your queue when your team is back. Check how many medication refill requests are sitting in voicemail on a Monday morning, because the agent could have taken each one over the weekend.

Connected to the systems your team already works in

The agent acts in your systems during the call, and if a system has an API, PolyAI connects to it. Epic connects through SMART on FHIR, and PolyAI also connects to athenahealth and ModMed. Where your EHR accepts it, the refill request arrives as a task in the queue your team already works.

For your IT team: you build and change the agent in Dialog Studio (formerly Agent Studio), or as code with the Agent Development Kit (ADK). Your team tests each 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.

A prescription refill phone line already in production

Howard Brown Health, a federally qualified health center serving more than 40,000 people a year in Chicago, uses its agent, Alex, for prescription refills alongside scheduling and FAQs, with MyChart connected. Calls the agent handled averaged about 58.6 seconds, against 3.5 minutes for calls handled by staff.

"Being able to contain routine calls freed up our staff to focus on the tasks that are most valuable and require additional nuance," says Lauren Sullivan, Howard Brown's Chief Information Officer.