A multi-clinic primary care group, US Southeast
An always-on clinical-operations agent that runs intake triage, prior-auth drafting, and weekly reporting — without ever practicing medicine.
- Clinician-hours returned
- 23 hrs/wk
- Median prior-auth turnaround
- 94 min
- Refusal-lane integrity (audited)
- 100%
The group had grown to fifteen clinicians across four sites, and the administrative weight had begun to consume the nurses. Inbound patient messages waited hours for triage; prior authorizations sat for days before someone could draft them; the weekly operations report was a Friday afternoon that ate two FTEs. The engagement was a single autonomous operator that reads, drafts, and routes the administrative surface of the practice — bound by a refusal lane wider than its work surface, and forbidden from any output that constitutes clinical judgment. The agent reads. The agent drafts. The clinician decides.
- 01Refusal lanes before features
Wrote the no-list before the yes-list: no clinical decision-making, no medication advice, no diagnostic language, no PHI in raw form inside the reasoning context. The refusal lane is audited weekly against a held-out corpus.
- 02PHI-aware ingest
Inbound messages and lab results are pseudonymized before reaching the agent — every patient identifier is replaced with a session-scoped token, every read is appended to an immutable audit log keyed to the practice's HIPAA security officer.
- 03Drafted, never sent
Every prior-auth letter, refill triage note, and weekly report is drafted by the agent and queued for the on-shift clinician to accept, edit, or decline with one click. The agent learns from edits; it does not learn from acceptances.
- 04Reporting as a side effect
The weekly operations report is not a separate task — it is generated continuously from the same audit log that gates the agent's reads. Friday afternoon becomes a five-minute review, not a two-FTE rebuild.
The agent reads, drafts, and routes. The clinician decides.
Source notes redacted · Client identification withheld by agreement