Service Agents
Service agents are AI agents you author for one service, on its Agents tab. An agent is never a person: it works for, or alongside, the care team, and it always receives the service context, the relevant care team and patient context, and the tools you give it.
Audiences
Every agent has an audience, which decides who it serves and which tools it can have. Audiences replace the old care roles.
| Audience | What it is for | How it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Staff | Work on behalf of the care team: chasing patients, preparing summaries, requesting reviews. | On demand, scheduled once, or daily. |
| Patient | A patient-facing conversational agent over SMS/WhatsApp. Badged Patient-facing. | Only in reply to a patient’s message, once bound in Settings. See Patient Agent. |
| Onboarding | Assess each patient as they join the cohort. Badged Runs on add. | Automatically when a patient is added, once bound in Settings. Can also be run on demand. |
Creating an agent
On the Agents tab, click Add agent. In Add an agent:
- Name: e.g. “Dietitian follow-up agent”.
- Audience: Staff, Patient or Onboarding.
- Status: Active or Inactive.
- Preferred LLM: the organisation’s default model, or a specific one.
- Tools: what the agent may call while it runs. The list depends on the audience (below).
- Description: a short summary of what it does.
- Agent markdown: its instructions, in markdown.
Save with Add agent. Edit (Edit agent, Save changes) and delete (Delete agent?, Delete agent) are on each row.
The table shows each agent’s name, audience, status, tools and preferred LLM. Agents created before tools were standardised may show their old freeform skills as dashed Legacy tag badges; edit the agent to pick proper tools instead.
Staff and onboarding tools (“MCP tools”)
| Tool | What it lets the agent do |
|---|---|
| Send Twilio message | Message the patient over SMS or WhatsApp. |
| Send email | Send an email notification. |
| Clinical resources | Search, browse and read the service’s content library. |
| Request human task | Hand off to a human when it needs input, review or approval. The task appears in the Task Inbox of everyone on the care team, and on the service page. |
Tasks raised by agents are not assigned to a role: the whole care team sees them.
Patient agent tools
| Tool | What it lets the agent do |
|---|---|
| Appointments | List the patient’s appointments and open slots, and book, move or cancel against published availability. |
| Clinical resources | Read the service’s own resources for education and preparation questions. |
| Triage escalation | Flag an urgent (not emergency) symptom to the covering role, on top of the always-on red-flag screen. |
| Hand off to care team | Pass on a question outside the service’s scope, or one it is unsure of. |
| Education & counselling sessions | Walk the patient through a counselling or education protocol step by step, recording consent and what they understood or agreed. |
| Hand over for a full encounter | Send the patient a link to a full AI encounter (history taking, education or counselling) when SMS turns are not enough. |
A fixed platform safety preamble is always layered on top of a patient agent’s instructions and cannot be removed by them.
The onboarding agent
Every new service is created with an Onboarding agent, already bound in Settings → On patient added. Each time a patient is added to the cohort, it reviews them against the service and raises a task only when the patient clearly looks out of scope, so staff are not flooded with a task per patient.
Rewrite its instructions for your service, switch it off, or bind a different onboarding agent from Settings → On patient added (“Assess the patient with the onboarding agent”). The bound agent carries a Bound badge.
Running a staff agent
Each staff (and onboarding) agent’s row has a Run button:
- Who to run against: the whole cohort, or selected patients.
- When: Run now, Schedule for later (a date and time), or Repeat daily (a time of day in UTC, until you cancel it).
- Click Run now, Schedule run or Start daily schedule.
A patient agent has no Run button, since it only ever replies to a patient. It has Preview chat instead; see Patient Agent.
Runs and schedules
Above the agent list on the Agents tab:
- Agent runs: every run against this service’s cohort, manual or scheduled.
- Daily agent schedules: every active daily schedule, with its agent and time. Cancel one here.
Service agents and the Agents library
Service agents belong to one service. They are separate from the web app’s general Agents library (/agents), where agents can be personal or shared with the whole organisation (and a personal, public or default agent can be copied into the organisation with Claim for <organisation>).