Specialty Clinic — LLM Patient Assistant Reduces Front-Desk Load
A RAG patient assistant with clinical guardrails cut repetitive front-desk inquiries 62% and time-to-answer 68% in 8 weeks.
The clinic ran phone-first support. Repetitive questions — prep instructions, insurance, medications — overwhelmed staff and produced long hold times. SOPs were scattered across documents and email, so answers were inconsistent and new-hire training was slow.
There was no after-hours coverage, so a backlog spiked every morning, and no reporting on deflection or time-to-answer. The 8-week targets: at least a 50% reduction in repetitive inquiries, under 90 seconds median time-to-answer for common questions, and higher CSAT with fewer call-backs.
We curated a source-of-truth corpus — SOPs, prep guides, insurance FAQs — versioned in a secure repo with a clinician-review editorial workflow, then built a RAG pipeline (LlamaIndex/LangChain) serving cited answers with PHI minimization and encryption at rest and in transit.
Conversation design was deliberately narrow: administrative and prep topics only — hours, directions, insurance, forms, pre/post-op. Guardrails included explicit not-medical-advice framing, refusal rules, keyword and intent escalation triggers, PHI redaction, rate limits, and human-in-the-loop handling for edge cases. Handoffs to staff carry a conversation summary.
Rollout was omni-channel: a React web widget site-wide, SMS/WhatsApp via Twilio, and IVR deflection to self-serve, with after-hours auto-response. An intake assist collects visit type, insurance carrier, and allergy/medication checklists (no diagnoses) and sends procedure-specific prep instructions. PostHog dashboards tracked deflection, time-to-answer, escalations, and CSAT, with weekly transcript reviews driving coverage expansion and tone calibration.
After 8 weeks: repetitive inquiries handled by the front desk fell 62%, median time-to-answer on common questions dropped 68% (4:10 to 1:20), CSAT rose 18% on the post-interaction micro-survey, and 40% of after-hours interactions resolved self-serve.
Documenting tribal knowledge into approved SOPs also cut staff onboarding time for FAQs — and by week three the morning backlog was gone.
By week three, the morning backlog was gone. Patients arrive with the right prep — and the team finally has breathing room.
