Why this matters
A busy practice gets a hundred or more portal messages a day. Most are routine: refills, appointment changes, billing questions. A few are urgent and written casually, and those are the ones a full inbox hides.
In this module you build an Airia agent that reads a message and returns three lines: the category, who owns it and one reason. It never repeats the patient’s name, date of birth, MRN or phone, and anything that sounds like an emergency always goes to the nurse on call now. The label routes the message; the person who picks it up reads the original in the portal.
This lesson is training, not legal advice. A guardrail does not make a tool HIPAA compliant on its own: your organization also needs a Business Associate Agreement with any vendor that handles PHI, its own policies, access controls and staff training. Ask your compliance officer before any real patient data goes near an AI tool. Every patient in this lesson is made up (Pat Example, MRN 000-TEST).
What you’ll build
An Airia agent, Portal Message Triage, that answers in three lines (Category, Route to, Reason) with no identifiers.
Three tested messages: a refill to the nurse line, chest pain to the nurse on call now, and an appointment change to the front desk.
What you need
- Nothing to start the practiceThe practice is built from real Airia screens and touches no account.
- An Airia account, to do it for realCheck airia.com for plans and agent limits.
- Your categories and ownersWho handles refills, scheduling, billing and clinical questions at your practice, and who takes urgent messages.
Concepts
2 ideas you’ll use in the practice.
Minimum necessary output
The triage label goes into a queue that many people see. It only has to say what the message is and who should take it, so it should never carry a name, date of birth, MRN or phone number.
A fixed three-line format makes that easy to check and easy to read on a phone.
The urgent rule comes first
Write emergencies as a hard rule: chest pain, trouble breathing, stroke signs, heavy bleeding or thoughts of self-harm always mean Urgent, routed to the nurse on call now. The agent does not answer the patient; it gets a person.
Test the urgent message first and again after every change. The agent still reads the full message, so keep real messages out until the tool and its controls are approved.
Practice
Do every step yourself in a practice copy of the real tool. It checks your work, and “Do it for me” finishes any step you get stuck on.
Do it for real
Now repeat it in your own account. Tick each step as you go.
Quick check
3 questions to check you’ve got it.
1. What should the triage answer contain?
- Category, owner and one reason, with no identifiers
- A summary of the message with the patient’s name
- A reply to the patient
Show the answer
Category, owner and one reason, with no identifiers. The label only routes the message. The owner reads the original in the portal.
2. A message mentions chest pain. What must happen?
- Urgent, to the nurse on call now
- Clinical question, to the nurse line tomorrow
- The agent gives advice
Show the answer
Urgent, to the nurse on call now. Emergencies are a hard rule so the safe answer is the default.
3. Which test message should you run first after every change?
- The urgent one
- The billing one
- Any of them
Show the answer
The urgent one. A sorting mistake on a refill costs minutes. On an emergency it can cost far more.
Airia: Turn a Radiology Report into a Patient-friendly Summary with No Identifiers
Next, plain-language radiology summaries: the findings in words a patient understands, with nothing from the report header.
Start module 3 →