As urgent care clinics grapple with burnout and staffing shortages, new AI tools aim to reduce administrative workload and give clinicians more time to focus on patient care.
In the high-pressure world of urgent care, the waiting room has long been a symbol of the health care system’s greatest frustrations. Overstretched staff, anxious patients, and a mounting administrative burden leave physicians and support staff little room for actual care.
However, a quiet transformation is happening behind the scenes, according to software and services platform Experity. Since August, its AI Care Agent has supported more than 650,000 patients, not by replacing doctors, but by reclaiming the “dead air” of the clinical journey. By automating routine follow-ups and providing real-time updates, the technology has already saved 7,000 hours of staff time — equivalent to roughly 28,000 additional patient visits.
Ian Lyman, senior vice president for consumer strategy and innovation at Experity, revealed what he called the uncomfortable truth about health care efficiency. Clinics were not actually spending those hours on tasks that could be deleted. They were spending them on tasks that should never have been their job in the first place.
“The health care industry has been operating on assumptions about patient behavior that are twenty years out of date. We’re seeing that gap in real time,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Administrative Burden Slows Urgent Care
Since announcing Care Agent in late July, Experity has seen a rapid shift in attitude toward the AI-powered platform’s usefulness, with 1.5 million patients interacting with it. The most surprising feedback was how quickly skepticism turned into advocacy once clinicians saw that the Care Agent removed interruptions instead of creating new ones.
Lyman offered two recurring scenarios that the AI Care Agent eliminates. When a provider spends eight minutes on the phone explaining that the patient’s work note is in the discharge packet, on page three, not page one, that is tech support for a bad document delivery system, not patient care.
When front desk staff fields a call from a patient who couldn’t reach the clinic after hours to get the results of a strep test, that is not patient care. That is compensating for a communication gap, he noted.
“What staff now does with the reclaimed time is see more patients and deliver actual patient care,” Lyman said.
Reclaiming Time for Patient Care
According to Lyman, medical directors, nurse managers, and providers have spent years having health care technology fail them. He cited interfaces that promised simplicity but delivered chaos, and so-called seamless integrations that created more work than they eliminated.
“They’ve compensated by building layers of process and workflow around that brittle technology, and those layers have solidified into load-bearing walls. These are people who’ve been burned before. Their skepticism isn’t irrational; it’s earned,” he said.
Jonathan Moss, Experity’s executive vice president and general manager of patient engagement, added that AI assistance lets nurses and front-desk staff use reclaimed clinic hours more productively. He offered four major time-use changes that improve patient-facing care and clinic flow:
- Spending more time with anxious or first-time patients instead of troubleshooting printers or portals
- Turning rooms faster and supporting providers during peak volume
- Reducing call volume by avoiding phone tag related to lab results and discharge instructions
- Proactively fixing issues before they escalate into complaints or bad reviews
“In short, staff is doing the work that improves experience and throughput rather than repeating administrative tasks,” Moss said.
Skepticism Slows AI Adoption
Implementing AI in a high-stress environment goes beyond plug-and-play. The biggest adoption hurdle Experity faced when rolling out its platform across clinics was not infrastructure or integration. It was skepticism, Lyman noted.
Much of the lingering skepticism among urgent care staff is not about capability but control. One nurse manager told him during a pilot of the new service platform that she had seen a decade of game-changing health care tech. All of it added work rather than removed it.
“She expected Care Agent to be another system she’d have to babysit, and another check box providers would need to add to their already slammed workflows. She was surprised when she realized that by adding Care Agent to the workflow, the entire character of the end of the visit was changed,” he recounted.
Operational Habits Slow Rollouts
Moss added that the biggest implementation hurdle was not technology but standardizing operational habits. The most important change was consistent phone number verification at check-in, since Care Agent relies on accurate mobile data.
“We also spent time reinforcing when to send documents digitally versus printing, particularly for minors or sensitive visits. Once teams understood that Care Agent fits naturally into existing workflows with minimal change, adoption accelerated quickly,” he said.
Ian Lyman (left), senior vice president for consumer strategy and innovation, and Jonathan Moss, executive vice president and general manager of patient engagement at Experity.
Moss revealed that several clinicians told him they expected more messages and more follow-up. Instead, they experienced fewer phone calls, less printing, and far fewer repeat explanations.
“What really changed minds was realizing that Care Agent is push-based and contextual. It delivers information to patients automatically at the moment it matters, rather than asking staff or patients to remember another system. For urgent care, that difference is everything,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Altering Focus Brings Better Medical Service
Experity’s AI Care Agent is a HIPAA-compliant, AI-driven patient engagement assistant specifically for urgent care. It directly integrates with Experity’s cloud-based electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management software for urgent care clinics to optimize high-volume, on-demand care.
AI Care Agent streamlines the patient journey via SMS and web chat, automating pre-visit, visit, and post-visit tasks like lab results, discharge instructions, and payment collection.
Lyman clarified that the Care Agent does not replace medical decision-making. Its job is to facilitate it. The core function is to capture patient context and surface it to the right people at the right time.
“Everything else, booking visits, delivering documents, sending lab results, is housekeeping in service of that primary mission,” he said.
Moss offered that providing constant, automated updates changes the atmosphere of the waiting room. When patients know what is happening, tension drops.
“Fewer status-check questions reach the front desk, staff interruptions decrease, and the waiting room feels calmer,” he observed.
He added that Care Agent extends this transparency beyond the visit. Patients no longer wonder where their discharge instructions or results are. They already have them.
“That confidence carries back into the clinic experience,” he said.
What Experity Learned That Industry Missed
Patient behavior and needs that the platform developer learned could be the linchpin for AI Care Agent’s success. According to Moss, three critical factors stand out:
- Patients will self-serve when friction is removed
- Mobile-first engagement is no longer optional but expected
- Urgent care patients act immediately when access is easy
The success of Experity’s AI Care Agent highlights a pivotal shift in the health care narrative: technology is finally moving from being a burden to a bridge.
“Traditional portals fail because they rely on memory and motivation. Care Agent succeeds because it meets patients in the moment,” Moss concluded.