Triage-and-Booking AI at a UK Telehealth Provider — 71% Demand Deflection, Same-Day Clinician Slots

MindMap deployed a triage-and-booking platform composed of ChatNext (Cn) as the conversational triage interface, Clinical Pathway Engine (Cp) as the clinically-validated pathway logic, Patient Scheduler (Ps) as the booking-and-routing layer, and Multi-Channel Agent (Mh) for the WhatsApp, web and app channel mix.

Phase one was the pathway-library build. The provider's clinical leadership selected approximately 180 clinical pathways covering the high-volume conditions the service was seeing (minor illness, dermatological complaints, sexual health, mental-health screening, women's health, paediatric minor illness, men's health and a long tail). Each pathway was based on the relevant NICE Clinical Knowledge Summary or NHS clinical-pathway guidance, with the clinical leadership signing off the pathway logic.

Phase two was the conversational triage build. The triage conversation walks the patient through the clinically-validated pathway questions for their presenting complaint, with the conversation adapting to the patient's responses and the conversation tone calibrated to be appropriately empathetic without being clinically over-reassuring. The conversation language is plain-English with culturally-appropriate phrasing and accessibility support.

Phase three was the routing logic. Based on the pathway outcome, the patient is routed to one of: self-care guidance (with explicit advice on when to escalate if the condition worsens), community pharmacy (where the pathway indicates a pharmacy-managed condition), alternative NHS service (where the pathway indicates a different service provides better care), same-day clinician appointment (where the pathway indicates clinician judgement is required), urgent clinician appointment (where the pathway indicates rapid clinician contact is required), or 999 / A&E (where the pathway indicates a clinical emergency).

Phase four was the clinician-handoff context. For patients routed to a clinician appointment, the triage conversation produces a structured clinical summary that the clinician receives at the start of the appointment — the presenting complaint, the relevant history, the pathway findings, the system's confidence on the routing decision. This eliminates much of the clinician's history-taking time at the start of the appointment.

The platform runs on the provider's UK-region Azure tenant with full NHS Information Governance Toolkit compliance. All patient interaction processing happens in the UK; no patient data is sent to any non-UK API.

ChatNext's conversational layer uses a fine-tuned Llama 3.1 70B variant trained on the provider's historical triage-and-consultation corpus (with appropriate de-identification). The model is constrained to the pathway logic — it cannot invent clinical pathways or generate clinical advice outside the validated pathway library — and is calibrated for the empathetic, plain-English tone the provider's clinical leadership has defined.

Clinical Pathway Engine encodes the 180 pathways in a structured format that the platform evaluates against the patient's conversation responses. Each pathway has explicit decision-points, evidence citations, and escalation triggers. The pathway library is version-controlled and clinically-reviewed on a defined cadence; pathway updates flow into production through a clinical-governance approval workflow.

Patient Scheduler handles the booking-and-routing across the multiple destination channels (clinician calendar, community-pharmacy referral, alternative-NHS-service signposting, urgent-care routing). The clinician-calendar integration uses the provider's existing scheduling platform; the alternative-NHS routing uses the relevant NHS service-finder APIs.

The audit trail captures every triage interaction, every pathway evaluation, every routing decision, and every clinician interaction outcome. The provider's clinical-governance team has direct access to the audit trail for clinical-safety review; the Care Quality Commission has been granted appropriate inspection access under the provider's regulatory framework.