Crisis Protocol

Your Crisis Protocol, Executed the Same Way Every Call

Your clinicians write the protocol. The system recognises the words you listed and performs the action you defined, without assessing anyone's risk.

How it pays back

The Protocol Is the Product

Many practices already have a crisis policy written down. On the phone it is applied by whoever happens to pick up, and it varies with training, tenure and the hour. Encoding it means the same words produce the same action at three in the afternoon and three on a Sunday morning. The system contributes execution, never judgment.

No Judgment Calls, By Design

The failure people reasonably fear is software deciding whether someone is in crisis. That decision does not exist anywhere in this design. There is a list your clinicians wrote, an action they attached to it, and a default route to a person for everything else. There is no risk model and no severity score.

Nobody Reaches a Hold Queue

A caller in distress who reaches hold music while the front desk is on the phone with a pharmacy has met the practice's phone system, not the practice. Every line is answered at once, so the routing step your protocol defines happens immediately rather than after a queue.

A Record You Can Review and Revise

Because triggered calls are captured with the caller's wording intact, the practice can review the transcript set, see which phrases fired and which did not, and revise the list. A crisis protocol becomes something the practice maintains rather than something it assumes is working.

Under 1 second to answer

No hold queue sits between a caller and the routing step your protocol defines

24/7 coverage

The protocol runs identically overnight, on weekends and on holidays

HIPAA BAA included

Call records and escalation logs encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit

Frequently asked questions

Does the AI decide whether a caller is in crisis?

No, and it is worth being blunt about it. There is no assessment step, no screening question and no scoring. It matches words your practice supplied to actions your practice defined. Any judgment about a caller's state is made by a person, after the routing your protocol specified has already happened.

What exactly happens when a trigger phrase is recognised?

Whatever you wrote down. That is usually a transfer to a named destination, your own message read word for word, or both in a sequence you set. There is no paraphrase, no summarising and no reassurance the system invented for the occasion.

Which crisis service does it name?

None by default. You configure the destination, because services differ across the United States, Canada and Australia, and because practices differ on whether the phone should transfer, read a number, or hand the call straight to a person. We do not assert what your protocol should say.

What happens on a call that does not match anything?

It follows your default route, which many practices set to a person. There is no branch that resolves an unclear call on its own. Escalating a call that did not need escalating is a recoverable error; a call that quietly ends in voicemail is not.

What if the caller is not the patient?

Third-party callers follow the branch your protocol defines for them, which is usually different. The system does not confirm whether the person being described is a patient, and it does not evaluate what the caller is reporting. It captures the wording and routes as configured.

Does this replace our on-call clinician or answering service?

No. The clinician your protocol names is still the clinician, and a human service can remain part of the chain. What changes is that every call reaches the routing step the same way, is answered immediately, and leaves a record of what happened.

Related reading

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Crisis Protocol Call Routing for Behavioral Health | Medreception AI