After-Hours Triage for Cerbo Practices

Who calls after the doors close

Evening and weekend calls to a functional medicine or direct primary care office are rarely about opening times. A member's child has a fever on a Saturday. A patient who started a new supplement protocol feels lightheaded. Someone who had an infusion that afternoon notices swelling around the site. A prospective patient finally has a quiet moment at home to ask about getting started.

Annie, MedReception AI's after-hours agent, answers those calls. Nobody is sent to a mailbox that sits unchecked until Monday.

Annie's job, and the line she does not cross

Annie collects what happened, when it started, who the patient is and how to reach them, then applies the escalation rules your practice set. She does not tell the caller what is causing their symptoms, whether to stop a medication or supplement, or whether they need to be seen. Those are clinical decisions, and they belong to your clinicians.

Urgent and clinical calls follow your escalation rules exactly as written. That is why the rules deserve more attention than anything else in an after-hours setup.

Writing the overnight escalation rules

Have a physician own this document, and keep it short enough that anyone on the team can read it in a few minutes. It should cover:

• Symptoms and situations where the caller should contact emergency services immediately
• Situations that meet your threshold for reaching the on-call clinician, if your practice runs an on-call process
• Calls that can safely wait for the morning, such as refill requests, scheduling and billing
• The wording Annie uses with each group, approved by your physicians
• Patient groups, such as members, who have a different after-hours promise from everyone else

Defining the membership promise

Many direct primary care memberships advertise after-hours access. Before launch, decide in writing what that means in practice. Does a member with a non-urgent question get a callback the same evening, or first thing the next day? Which situations justify waking the physician? A promise that lives only in the physician's head gets applied differently every night.

Once the promise is written, Annie applies it the same way on every call, and the physician on call is involved only in the situations your escalation rules send to them, rather than every question a member happens to think of at nine at night.

The morning handoff

Every overnight call still ends in a structured summary: who called, why, what they need and how urgent it is. When staff sign in the next day, they work from a sorted list instead of a pile of messages, and they can see which calls were escalated overnight and which were held for the day.

MedReception Autopilot then files those summaries into each patient's Cerbo chart from the staff member's own signed-in browser, so the Saturday call sits in the record beside the visit notes.