AI Symptom-Intake Chatbot for a Same-Day Urgent Care Clinic

Overview

Built an AI-powered intake chatbot for a same-day urgent care clinic that asks patients structured questions about their symptoms before they arrive, then hands a clean summary to the front desk and clinical staff. The chatbot follows a conservative, clearly-scoped script built with clinical input and always defers to a human for anything outside routine intake — it triages for urgency, not diagnosis. This let the clinic reduce the time front-desk staff spent verbally gathering the same intake information from every walk-in patient during peak hours. The tool also flags red-flag symptoms for immediate staff attention rather than waiting in the standard queue. Front-desk staff at a same-day urgent care clinic spent significant time during peak hours verbally gathering the same symptom and intake information from every walk-in patient before they could be seen. We built a conservatively-scoped AI intake chatbot, built with clinical input, that asks structured pre-arrival questions and hands a clean summary to staff — triaging for urgency, not diagnosis, and always deferring to a human for anything outside routine intake. We worked directly with clinical staff to define exactly what the chatbot should and shouldn't ask, keeping the scope conservative from the start. After testing the script against a range of real, anonymized intake scenarios, we piloted it during a slower week before rolling it out through peak hours. Front-desk intake time per patient dropped by an estimated 4 minutes during peak hours, shortening the overall walk-in wait experience while red-flag symptoms now reach staff immediately instead of waiting in the standard queue.