Why this matters now
Urgent care services are under constant pressure to help people find the right care quickly, especially when they are unwell, unsure where to go, or struggling to navigate complex healthcare information.
For this national urgent care provider, the issue was not only access to care — it was access to the right information before care. Patients often needed guidance on symptoms, service availability, and next steps, but the existing digital experience required them to search through large volumes of online content and use the right medical or service terminology.
The organization wanted to make trusted healthcare information easier to find, reduce avoidable calls, and give people a clearer digital route to self-serve safely. Its main goals were to:
- Build public trust in digital self-service for urgent care
- Reduce pressure on call centers and clinical teams
- Create a scalable, multilingual digital front door for patients
- Reduce barriers for users with lower digital or health literacy, and help people make faster, more informed care decisions.
The Challenge
The urgent care provider’s website contained a large amount of trusted healthcare information, but patients could struggle to find the right answer at the moment they needed it most.
People often landed on the website feeling unwell, anxious, or uncertain. The organization needed a way to help patients ask questions naturally, in multiple languages, and receive clear, approved information without forcing them to navigate several pages manually.
The challenge was also operational. Every avoidable call placed extra pressure on urgent care lines and contact center teams. The provider needed to encourage safe self-service while keeping strong governance in place: the AI agent could not provide unsupported clinical advice, and had to rely only on approved content, rather than pulling unsupported information from the wider internet.
The Solution
The organization deployed a Druid AI agent as a conversational virtual assistant on its urgent care website.
The AI agent allows people to ask health-related questions in their own words and instantly receive relevant information from approved website content. Instead of requiring users to search by exact clinical terminology, the agent can understand plain-language phrases and route the user to the right trusted content.
The solution was built with several core capabilities:
- Natural-language search across approved content
Patients can describe symptoms or questions in everyday language and receive relevant urgent care information from the organization’s approved knowledge base. - 24/7 digital self-service
The AI agent is always available, helping users find guidance without waiting for operating hours or navigating complex website menus. - Multilingual support
The solution supports users in multiple languages, helping make urgent care information more inclusive and accessible. - Governed, trusted responses
The AI agent was configured to avoid unsupported clinical interpretation and to surface only approved content from the provider’s own knowledge base.
Therefore, the agent was integrated with Microsoft Azure OpenAI and Microsoft Azure Translation Services to generate responses from predefined knowledge sources and support multilingual access. - Real-time demand analytics
The organization can see what patients are searching for — such as dental pain, mental health, or minor infections — and use those insights to improve website content and service planning.
Learnings
AI agents work best in healthcare when they start with a focused, low-risk use case.
This deployment focused on helping people navigate approved information, not replacing clinicians or making diagnoses. That made the AI agent practical, governed, and easier to adopt.
Trust depends on clear guardrails.
The organization made sure the AI agent only used its own approved content. This avoided unsupported answers and helped build internal confidence among clinical, information governance, and digital teams.
Plain language matters.
Patients do not always search with clinical terms. The AI agent made it easier for people to describe symptoms naturally and still find the right information.
Digital self-service can support, not replace, human care.
By helping people find answers earlier, the AI agent reduced avoidable demand while preserving escalation paths for situations that require human support.
Analytics are part of the value.
The AI agent did more than answer questions. It gave the organization real-time insight into what people were searching for, helping teams identify high-demand topics and improve the digital front door over time.
