From rules to reasoning: Introducing agentic care flows

Date

May 20, 2025

What are Worker Agents?

Worker Agents are autonomous, AI-powered agents you can embed directly into Awell care flows. They don’t replace your care flows—they upgrade them. Unlike deterministic flows that rigidly follow pre-defined rules, Worker Agents can handle complexity: unstructured data, multi-step logic, edge cases, reasoning, dynamic decision-making, and more.

Not a chatbot. Not a rules engine. Worker Agents are the orchestration brain—deciding what should happen next, who or what system needs to act, when, with what context. They pull in data, coordinate across stakeholders, and adapt in real time.

	Chatbot or chat agent	Worker agent
What it is	System designed for conversation and simple interactions	Autonomous system that thinks, plans, and acts to complete complex tasks
Specificity	Narrow and task-specific	General-purpose and adaptive—you define the goal, tools, and boundaries
Task nature	Transactional—handles isolated tasks or queries	Mission-oriented—drives end-to-end care objectives across time and stakeholders
Goal orientation	Responds to specific prompts or commands	Pursues long-term goals with flexible strategies
Environment interaction	Typically limited to user-facing chat; may use tools to retrieve data or take simple actions	Coordinates across users and systems through Awell’s care orchestration platform—leveraging existing tooling like `Awell Extensions`
User interface	Chat-based interface	No direct UI — Worker Agents operate behind the scenes as the orchestration brain. The care they orchestrate appears in the activity feed, your Worklist, and existing user interfaces (e.g. Hosted Pages).
Example	A patient messages to reschedule an appointment. The chatbot displays available time slots and confirms one if selected—no follow-up or coordination beyond the initial exchange.	Detects a missed appointment, checks eligibility for rescheduling, contacts the patient via their preferred channel, adapts based on response (or lack of one), coordinates with the scheduling system, and escalates to staff if needed.

You control the goal, the tools, and the boundaries. The agent handles the chaos—figuring out how to get the job done as context changes. And when it hits a wall, it doesn’t guess—it escalates back to you, its human teammates, for help.

Above: Create your own Worker Agents—define the goal, set the boundaries, and let the agent handle the complexity.

You control the goal, the tools, and the boundaries. The agent handles the chaos—figuring out how to get the job done as context changes. And when it hits a wall, it doesn’t guess—it escalates back to you, its human teammates for help.

Worker Agents are deeply integrated with Awell’s orchestration engine, which means they work seamlessly across all the actions your care flows already support—whether that’s sending messages, scheduling tasks, collecting data through forms, etc. They also work out of the box with all of our Extensions, so you can coordinate care across your EMR, CRM, communication tools, and more.

Above: Worker Agents act as the orchestration brain—deciding what happens next and coordinating activities across care teams and systems. The activity feed is displaying a Worker Agent orchestrating activities across users and systems.

The result? Less swivel-chairing, fewer dropped balls, and a care experience that just works—across teams, systems, and settings.

Built for Complexity, Without the Complexity

Designing care flows used to mean modeling every edge case. That worked—until it didn’t. The more complex your processes became, the harder they were to maintain. And eventually, you hit the ceiling of what classic, deterministic workflows can handle.

Above: Real life—and real care delivery—can’t be captured in a flowchart. Worker Agents let you focus on outcomes, not on pre-planning every possible path and exception.

Worker Agents change the game. You don’t need to predict every path—or be an expert in process modeling. You can embed agentic logic exactly where it matters most, without overhauling your flow. Focus on the job to be done and the outcomes you want—not the entire path to get there.

The result: care flows that are flexible by default and resilient in the face of chaos.

Purpose-Built for Healthcare

Healthcare is high-stakes, tightly regulated, and intolerant of unpredictable behavior. That’s why Awell’s Worker Agents—and the infrastructure around them—are designed with safety, transparency, and human oversight at the core.

But we didn’t stop at how they’re built. Worker Agents are also tested differently—under real-world conditions, with metrics that actually reflect care delivery. You don’t just deploy an agent and hope it behaves. You simulate it, stress-test it, and measure its performance in care-like conditions—before it ever touches a patient journey. Our Agentic Evaluation Framework (AEF) brings workflow-first testing to the heart of agent development.

Above: Track what matters. Start with default metrics—or define your own. Our Agentic Evaluation Framework lets you test and monitor Worker Agents against the outcomes that matter most to your care flows.

We focus on what actually matters in care delivery—handoffs, noise, uncertainty—not just model benchmarks.

Here’s what sets Worker Agents apart:

Planning and self-reflection: Agents don’t just react—they plan, evaluate, and adapt mid-run.
Full transparency: Every step, action, and reasoning is visible and inspectable in the Awell platform.
Testing and validation suite: Generate synthetic populations, simulate edge cases, inject noise—pressure-test agents at scale before go-live.
Human supervision, built in: When uncertain, agents escalate to the care team—no guessing, no silent failures.
Operational visibility: Track baton-loss rate, escalation precision, and graceful degradation—metrics that reflect care performance.

We’re building healthcare-grade infrastructure, built for the realities of care delivery.

We Built for Certainty—Now We’re Building for Reality

Worker Agents are the shift we all needed. They replace rigidity with resilience and static rules with responsive execution. They don’t just model care—they move it forward.

Internal testing is already underway with existing customers, especially in areas where rigid flows tend to fall short. The first Worker Agents will go live in production by early Q3, alongside Agent Studio (closed beta)—your command center to build, test, and deploy agents tailored to your care flows.

With Worker Agents, you can:

Adapt at the speed of change: Update logic as care evolves—without rearchitecting flows.
Define outcomes, not every edge case: Express what success looks like. The agent finds the path to get there and handles the chaos.
Balance reliability with flexibility: Get the best of both worlds: pair your deterministic care flows with adaptive, real-time logic—so you stay in control, even when care gets complex.
Stay in the loop: Set boundaries. Design handoffs. Keep humans in control where it matters.

Awell is the Platform for Agent-Powered Care

We’re building the platform that lets healthcare organizations build, test, and put agent-powered workflows to work—safely and confidently—right inside their care flows. And yes, you read that right: with Awell, you can create your own proprietary Worker Agents, tailored to your unique workflows and goals.

Worker Agents are just the first frontier. They bring agentic logic into care flows—logic that responds in real time, coordinates across systems and people, and knows when to involve a human. This is what it looks like when orchestration moves beyond rigid flows and starts to reflect the real-world complexity of healthcare.

And it’s only the beginning.