Introduction
What is a Service?
A Service is a named care pathway run by an organisation in the Medbot web app. It is the container for everything needed to run one: a care team drawn from the organisation’s members, a cohort of patients, service context and a content library that every AI agent draws on, service agents, AI encounters patients complete on the patient portal, and a Workstation for running the service’s clinic day.
Examples of a service: “Colorectal SOC: Referral to Discharge”, “Post-op Cardiac Rehab”, “Diabetes Management: Primary Care”.
Services were called Care Programs. The feature was renamed and reworked: services now use the organisation’s own roles instead of care roles, patients come from the organisation’s Medplum, and old
/programs/...links no longer work. See What changed.
Services belong to an organisation. With an organisation selected in the web app, find them under Services in the sidebar, or go to /services.
Key concepts
| Concept | What it is |
|---|---|
| Service | The top-level container: name, specialty, setting, and status (draft or published). |
| Care team | The organisation members who staff the service. Each joins with the role they already hold in the organisation (Admin, Doctor, Nurse or Receptionist). There are no service-specific roles. |
| Coverage | Who is covering a role right now (for a rota with leave), so the platform can notify “whoever is the covering Nurse today” rather than a named person. |
| Cohort | The patients enrolled in this service, taken from the organisation’s Medplum patient directory. A patient can be in several services’ cohorts. |
| Service context | Plain-language description of how the service runs, who does what and when to escalate. Given to every agent run. |
| Content library | Reference material and counselling protocols the service’s agents and AI encounters can draw on. |
| Service agent | An AI agent scoped to this service, with an audience (Staff, Patient or Onboarding), tools and markdown instructions. |
| Onboarding agent | Created with every service. Runs automatically when a patient is added to the cohort and flags patients who look out of scope. |
| Patient agent | An optional Patient-audience agent that patients can text over SMS or WhatsApp about appointments, education and symptoms. |
| AI encounter | A structured conversation (history taking, health education or financial counselling) that the patient completes on the patient portal, or on a clinic device in the in-clinic kiosk. |
| Patient context | An AI-maintained briefing per patient, kept current from encounter notes, that every agent is given. |
| Workstation | The service’s view of today’s clinic queue: who has arrived, where each patient is in their visit journey, and the clinical consult screen. |
What you can do with a Service
- Set it up through a guided wizard: care team, agent context, agents, settings, content library, patients.
- Manage a cohort: add patients from the organisation’s directory (they get a patient-portal invite), track tasks, notes and messages per patient, and open any patient’s page.
- Author and run service agents for staff, for patients, or for onboarding, on demand or on a schedule.
- Send AI encounters to patients (history taking, health education, financial counselling), or hand a clinic device to the patient for an in-clinic text or voice encounter.
- Record a consult for up to an hour and review an AI-drafted clinical note section by section before adding it.
- Run the clinic day from the Workstation: see who has arrived, move patients through their visit journey, and run the consult.
- Turn on a patient-facing SMS/WhatsApp agent with safety screening and a review-before-send mode.
- Run a lightweight appointment book against the care team’s published availability, with optional reminders.
Who can see a service
Every member of the organisation can see the list of its services, and any member can create one. Opening a service is limited to:
- its owner (the person who created it)
- active members of its care team
- the organisation’s admins (and
superuseraccounts) - Medbot platform administrators
Anyone else gets “not found”. The owner edits the service’s details, finishes its setup, and can delete it.
What changed from Care Programs
| Before | Now |
|---|---|
Care Programs at /programs | Services at /services. Old /programs links do not redirect. |
Six default care roles (Consultant, Clinic nurse, PSA, Dietitian, Care coordinator, Pharmacist) and a special Patient role, managed per program | No service roles. Each care team member’s role is their organisation role. |
| Agents scoped to a care role | Agents have an audience: Staff, Patient or Onboarding. |
| Workflow tab and wizard step | Service context tab (the Agent context wizard step). |
| Platform-wide patient directory with add/edit/delete | The organisation’s Medplum patients, managed from /patients by admins. |
| Welcome message authored in the Content Library | Welcome message typed inline, with {{variables}}. |
| Freeform “Other skills” on agents | Removed. Old tags show as Legacy tag badges. |
| Sandbox page | Removed. Use Preview chat on a patient agent. |
| New: content library, AI encounters and kiosk, encounter recording, onboarding agent, channel and reminder settings, Workstation. |
Where to go next
- New to Services? Start with Creating a Service.
- Staffing it: Care Team.
- Managing patients: Patients & Cohort.
- Telling agents how the service runs: Service Context & Content.
- Building AI agents: Service Agents and Patient Agent.
- Structured conversations with patients: AI Encounters & Kiosk.
- Recording consults: Encounter Recording.
- Running the clinic day: Workstation.
- Booking: Appointments.