A triage voice agent that takes first-contact details and routes patients in under 90 seconds.

The story

East Care runs one of East Auckland's busiest walk-in urgent-care hubs from Botany Road, open 7am to 1am every day of the year with accident and emergency, pharmacy and radiology all onsite. On a typical shift the front desk is trying to do two jobs at once: look after a waiting room full of people who have physically turned up, and keep pace with a phone line that never really stops. The calls are relentless and overwhelmingly routine; directions, opening hours, current wait times and the perennial 'should I even come in for this?', and every one of them takes a receptionist's attention away from the person standing in front of them. The real risk sat in that queue. When a genuinely unwell caller phoned, they waited their turn behind a string of routine enquiries, and there was no reliable way to surface a red-flag symptom early without a clinician personally fielding the call. Pulling triage nurses onto the phones to catch those cases meant taking them off the floor, where they were needed most; leaving reception to manage it meant urgent and trivial calls were treated identically until someone happened to notice. East Care needed first contact triaged and routed in seconds, with clinical urgency recognised the moment it appeared, all without adding headcount or asking nurses to choose between the phone and the patient in the room.

What we built

1. 01

   Voice agent answers every inbound call within a ring, takes name, NHI and presenting complaint in natural conversation, and assesses clinical urgency against agreed triage criteria inside the first 30 seconds

2. 02

   Routes the high volume of non-urgent callers to instant self-help (current wait times, opening hours, what to bring) and books call-backs straight against the practice management system so nothing slips

3. 03

   Hot-transfers any red-flag symptom directly to the triage nurse with a structured summary already populated on screen, so the clinician picks up with the context rather than starting cold

4. 04

   Hands cleanly to a human at any point a caller is distressed, confused or simply asks for a person, so the agent never becomes a barrier to care

5. 05

   Logs every call with full auditable fields, giving the clinical team a clear record to review routing decisions and tune the triage thresholds over time

“The phones used to run the front desk, and my real worry was always the genuinely unwell caller sitting in the queue behind someone asking about parking. Now every call is triaged in the first half a minute, the urgent ones reach a nurse in seconds with a summary already on screen, and the team can actually look after the people standing in front of them. We audited the first fifteen hundred calls and it hadn't missed a single red flag, which is what let us trust it on first contact.”

Results at a glance

• Average call handling time cut from roughly 4 minutes to under 90 seconds, so callers get an answer instead of a queue and the line no longer dictates the pace of the front desk
• Reception freed to look after the people physically in the waiting room, taking the constant phone pressure off the team and trimming walk-in wait times
• Urgent callers now reach a triage nurse in seconds rather than waiting behind routine enquiries, with the clinical context already in front of the nurse
• Clinical audit of the first 1,500 calls found no missed red-flag escalations, giving the team confidence the agent is safe to stand in front of first contact