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

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.

"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."