Mass General Brigham says its AI intake agent, MGB Care Connect, gets 77% of the patients who use it seen by a physician the same day. The agent runs inside the MyChart patient portal, gathers symptoms, assesses urgency and routes each patient to a live visit, a virtual visit or urgent care. It saw about 36,000 patients in its first year and now handles roughly 150 a day, according to remarks at MGB's World Medical Innovation Forum on September 22 and 23, 2026, reported by Becker's Hospital Review.
Care Connect launched in September 2025 as a partnership with K Health, aimed at the primary care shortage in Massachusetts. According to KFF Health News, a team of 12 physicians working remotely covers it around the clock, and the AI sends them a suggested diagnosis and treatment plan for common conditions such as colds, rashes and sprains. By the time a physician sees the patient, the agent has drafted a note pulling in relevant history from the medical record.
It has critics. Some MGB primary care physicians told KFF Health News the program treats the symptom of the shortage rather than the cause, and worry it could slowly displace in-person care. The health system says it is not replacing in-person primary care.
The number that matters
77% same day is the figure that will travel, and it should. It measures the outcome a patient cares about, not how many questions the AI answered or how long the chat ran. Most practices that put AI on their website measure the second kind of number, if they measure anything at all.
Why it matters for your business
Large health systems set patient expectations for everyone else. Once a patient has gone from describing a rash at 10pm to a booked visit the same day, a form that says "we will call you within one business day" starts to look like a closed door.
Independent practices do not need to build a clinical triage agent to meet that bar. The comparable work is plainer: make sure an inquiry that arrives at night or at the weekend gets an answer, the right questions and a booked appointment rather than a voicemail.
Start by measuring two things you probably do not track today: the time from a first inquiry to a booked appointment, and the share of inquiries that arrive outside office hours. If the second number is large and the first is long, that gap is where new patients go to the practice down the road.
Sources
- 10 AI takeaways from Mass General Brigham's World Medical Innovation Forum (Becker's Hospital Review, September 2026)
- Your Next Primary Care Doctor Could Be Online Only, Accessed Through an AI Tool (KFF Health News, February 2026)
