Should an urgent care center use an AI answering service?

The calls urgent care teams take all day

Urgent care and emergency phone lines carry plenty of calls that aren't clinical: hours, wait times, directions, and the follow-up appointments patients need after they leave. You write your rules into the agent once, and it applies them on every call. These are examples of what teams build in, and we think post-visit follow-up is the place to start, because those calls are easy to forget once the patient leaves your building.

Hours and wait-time questions

A caller who asks "how long is the wait at the Elm Street clinic right now?" gets the current figure where your system publishes it, along with hours and directions. If they start describing symptoms, the agent follows your protocol instead of guessing.

Follow-up visits after discharge

Your team shares the list of patients your clinicians want seen again, and the agent calls or texts each one, offers slots with their own doctor or your clinic and books the visit on the same call. A patient who says they feel worse goes to your clinical team at once.

Specialist referrals

Patients often leave with a referral to orthopedics, cardiology or another specialty, and the booking is left to them. Where your network's specialist schedules are connected, the agent books the referral visit on the call; where they aren't, it collects the details and passes them to your referral team.

Imaging and lab follow-up

When a clinician orders an outpatient scan or a repeat lab after the visit, the agent calls the patient to book it at a site your rules allow and confirms by SMS. Questions about results go to your clinical team, because the agent does not give results or medical advice.

The agent follows your protocol on urgent calls

The agent does not diagnose or independently assess clinical urgency. If a caller describes an emergency, the agent tells them to call 911 and transfers them to a person, following your approved emergency protocol. Other symptoms follow the escalation and handoff pathways your team defines, and whoever takes the call hears what the caller has already said.

Ready for the spikes

Howard Brown Health, a federally qualified health center in Chicago, averaged about 15,000 calls a month and saw spikes to 60,000 during Covid and Monkeypox. Its PolyAI agent, Alex, now answers 24/7, reached 30% call containment against a 20% target and leaves the center better prepared for the next surge. Its agent works with MyChart, and its telephony moved from RingCentral to Dialpad with minimal downtime.

PolyAI connects directly to Epic and to athenahealth, and to other systems through their standard connections, so the agent works with the systems your team already uses. Your team changes rules in Dialog Studio (formerly Agent Studio), tests them on a separate copy and publishes when they're ready, so nothing goes live until you've checked it. We protect patient data to the standard HIPAA's security rules set for health information, and a BAA, a contract that makes us accountable for that protection, is available for eligible healthcare deployments.