Rush leads the way in agent-first patient support with Agentforce.

With care demand rising, Rush needed more than call centers to keep pace.

Rush is a leading academic medical center in Chicago, delivering high-quality care across hospitals, clinics, and outpatient services. Their mission goes beyond medicine: Rush is committed to building healthier communities through compassion, innovation, and a focus on reducing healthcare disparities. Rush is committed to bridging the gap for patients, especially in underserved communities, by transforming what can be a complex care journey into a smooth, seamless experience. 

This focus on connected care led Rush to create a contact center where representatives handle thousands of monthly calls, from prescription refills to clinic referrals. Even though the team delivered consistently high-quality service, the process behind the scenes was complex. Reps were often organized by department — like scheduling, aftercare, billing, or prescriptions — and patients were routed based on each rep’s area of expertise. 

Epic, their electronic health record system, already managed critical clinical, billing, and scheduling details. But other valuable information — like demographics, call history, or chatbot interactions — lived outside of Epic. By bringing these data sources together, Rush could give reps a complete picture of each patient. That connected view meant faster answers, simpler processes, and a more seamless experience for patients and staff. Rush also saw the opportunity to automate routine requests, ensuring their teams could spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time delivering the exceptional, personalized care Rush is known for.

Agentforce will resolve FAQ and prescription refills, cutting routine calls by 15%.

On top of their unified data, Rush is building an always-on digital workforce with Agentforce — the agentic layer of the Agentforce 360 Platform — to handle routine questions and tasks. With PwC as their implementation partner, they’re the first healthcare provider to use agentic AI to support patients, and they’re leading the way in showing how this technology can help people get the care they need faster. 

Many of the questions patients ask are simple, like clinic hours or directions. Soon, patients will be able to chat with Agentforce directly on the Rush website. They can type a question in plain language — like “What time does the clinic open?” — and Agentforce will instantly pull the answer from Rush’s Excel spreadsheet via Data Cloud. If the patient has location services enabled on their browser, Agentforce will even be able to suggest the nearest clinic.

“Agentforce helps drive actual solutions,” said Gautney. “For example, a call center rep might handle 25 different tasks, but if we replace part of that work with Agentforce, it allows the human rep to focus on more complex cases.”

Agentforce will also automate prescription refills, the second-most common reason why patients contact Rush’s customer support. After a patient signs in through Rush’s Epic-authenticated webpage, Agentforce will receive a secure session ID or contextual token. This allows it to safely access relevant data in Health Cloud — like prescriptions or appointment history — and take action on behalf of the patient without directly handling any protected health information. All data will be routed through secure, HIPAA-compliant systems, ensuring it only flows between authorized platforms like Epic and Health Cloud using approved, encrypted pathways.

After each chat interaction, Agentforce will send a short satisfaction survey through SharePoint — connected via MuleSoft API — so Rush can continue refining their agents and improving the overall patient experience.

Rush expects Agentforce to autonomously handle about 15% of incoming inquiries, freeing call center staff to support patients with complex needs.

“Agentforce allows our reps to focus on beginning the care journey for our patients, particularly those who may be handling a new diagnosis,” Gautney said. “Having more time to provide a personalized experience is key.”

Looking ahead, Rush plans to expand Agentforce to serve as a centralized coordinator across their entire chat ecosystem — orchestrating interactions between existing Fabric chatbots and human reps. Over time, Rush envisions a “care team” model, where multiple AI agents bring expertise in areas like finance or care coordination, all unified by a central coordinator agent powered by Agentforce. By drawing on a complete Customer 360 view through the Agentforce 360 Platform, Agentforce won’t just answer questions — it will help drive care continuity, close gaps, and elevate patient experiences across the entire system.

With Health Cloud, Data Cloud, and MuleSoft working together on the deeply unified Agentforce 360 Platform, Rush can bring together clinical and nonclinical data from across the patient journey, within and outside Salesforce. And now with Agentforce taking action on that unified data, Rush can create a digital workforce to scale with the demands of their industry. 

“As more and more people age and become sicker, there's more people to provide care for. How do we do more with less in very complex care settings?” said Gautney. “That's really where we believe Agentforce is an important bridge and an important tool to extend the great work our clinicians and our educators do every day.”

The ability to connect Salesforce to Epic was essential. Using MuleSoft’s API integrations, Rush can securely move data between Epic, Salesforce, and other key platforms like Genesys for call center interactions — without disrupting operations. Greater efficiency means more patients served — a critical factor in Chicago, where many underserved neighborhoods struggle to access care. With Salesforce, Rush is showing what’s possible when powerful technology meets a mission to serve — one patient, one moment, one community at a time.