Clearstep

Clearstep is an AI triage and care navigation platform that US healthcare organizations embed into their own websites and patient portals, handing the judgment of “which department to see, where to go, and when to go” over to an algorithm. It does not build a consumer app; it plugs into a hospital's digital front door as a white-label layer, and its users are CIOs, CMIOs, and access center operations teams.

Core Capabilities

• Conversational triage: after symptom assessment it determines acuity and routes patients to the right department, care setting, and time slot
• In-house classification model: a multi-label NLP classifier trained on 48,383 annotated utterances covers 506 chief-complaint categories, while the LLM only backstops about 3% of the long tail
• Voice and agent copilot: voice agents take inbound and outbound calls, and non-clinical agents equipped with an AI copilot can also complete triage following the protocols
• Pre-visit intake: it automatically generates structured medical history and clinical summaries, returning the 15 minutes saved per visit to the physician
• Scheduling and capacity optimization: clinically appropriate self-scheduling and template redesign fill appointment slots that previously sat idle
• White-label integration: connects to EHRs such as Epic and Cerner, and triage summaries can be written back to the chart

Where It Fits Built for the digital front door, call center, and patient experience teams of mid-size and large US health systems. The typical goal is to hold down emergency department and nurse hotline call volume and steer patients to urgent care or video visits. Individual consumers, independent clinics, and non-US markets are out of scope.

Differentiation Comparable products are either pure LLM or pure knowledge base; Clearstep layers the two by risk: the Schmitt nurse triage protocols and its in-house model carry the main path, while the LLM only backstops. That narrative clears hospital clinical governance review more easily. The endorsements are solid too: Mount Sinai runs it on its public-facing site, and the DIU handed it the intelligent routing for the MHS digital front door.

Editorial Take On the narrow AI triage track, Clearstep has the most complete evidence chain among peers: peer-reviewed model disclosure, a government contract, and a production deployment that can be scraped directly. It also knows its own boundaries: US only, institutional procurement only, and no public pricing or trial. Mid-size and large organizations that have already decided to go through hospital procurement are worth prioritizing; individual developers and overseas teams should stay away.