HealthcareGen AIHIPAA

AI triage assistant cuts patient intake time by 60%

60%
Faster intake
4.8★
Patient CSAT
$1.2M
Annual savings
14 weeks
Delivery timeline
AI triage assistant cuts patient intake time by 60%

The challenge

A regional clinic network with eight locations was processing over 2,400 patient intakes per week through entirely manual workflows. Front-desk staff spent 15–20 minutes per patient on documentation, insurance verification, and triage routing — creating wait times that drove patient complaints and staff burnout.

Our approach

We began with a two-week discovery sprint, mapping the intake workflow end-to-end and identifying the highest-leverage automation opportunities. We chose a RAG-based LLM approach grounded in the clinic's existing clinical protocols, with HIPAA-compliant infrastructure on AWS using HIPAA-eligible services and a signed BAA.

The solution

We deployed a conversational AI assistant that guides patients through intake questions, summarizes clinical information for staff review, routes cases by acuity, and pre-populates the EHR. Integration with the existing Epic EHR was built via HL7 FHIR APIs. The system includes confidence scoring so low-certainty inputs always escalate to human review.

Results

Within six weeks of go-live, average intake time dropped from 17 minutes to under 7 minutes. Patient satisfaction scores rose from 3.9 to 4.8 stars. The clinic network projects $1.2M in annualized labor savings and has expanded the system to all eight locations.

"Upturn felt like an extension of our clinical team from week one. They shipped a working AI assistant while our previous vendor was still scoping the project."
D
Dana Whitfield
COO, Regional Clinic Network

Key checkpoints

  • HIPAA risk analysis and BAA executed with all vendors
  • HL7 FHIR integration with Epic EHR
  • Confidence scoring and human-in-the-loop escalation
  • Clinical protocol grounding to prevent hallucinations
  • Staff training and change management program
  • Zero PHI exposure in model training data

Technology used

OpenAI GPT-4oAWS (HIPAA-eligible)HL7 FHIREpic EHRpgvectorPythonFastAPI

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