By Amy Hillsman, Senior Director, Virtual Care Center, Reimagine Care
Cancer care doesn’t pause when a patient leaves the clinic. Often, the most challenging moments—symptoms flaring, anxiety peaking—happen late at night or over a weekend, precisely when direct support feels most distant. Traditionally, patients facing these afterhours situations are faced with calling an automated service or reporting their concerns to an operator and waiting nervously for a return phone call and many times the call is from an unfamiliar provider. Even during day-time hours, trying to report issues or ask questions is met with the cold reality of phone trees and voicemails with the promises of a callback within 24 to 72 hours. As a nurse practitioner, I’ve seen firsthand the profound frustration, fear and anxiety that these delays cause.
Patients are overwhelmed by many aspects of cancer – the details of their diagnosis, the treatment regimen, the possibilities of side effects, multiple new prescriptions – just to name a few. All of their questions are important, and they want answers immediately. But, with widespread clinician shortages and staff being stretched to their max during clinic hours, that immediate help is frequently unavailable. This reality falls short of the prompt, easily accessible and compassionate care every patient deserves.
Advanced technologies like AI offer tremendous opportunities to help bridge these gaps, but we, at Reimagine Care, believe it’s imperative to balance automation with a human touch. And any AI that supports people-driven care must be designed with deep empathy – especially for patients facing one of the most difficult diagnoses they could ever face. It was this conviction that led us to develop Remi, an SMS-based, AI-powered virtual assistant that connects patients to our clinical team through the simple act of texting.
Bridging the Communication Gap with Accessible Technology
A core principle in designing effective remote support is removing barriers. Traditional tools like clunky patient portals requiring forgotten passwords, or phone calls leading to voicemail limbo, create significant hurdles, especially for someone feeling unwell and vulnerable. Technology should integrate seamlessly. Remi, for instance, eliminates these issues by living in the native texting app on a patient’s phone – no downloads, no logins needed.
Patients can easily reach out, any time of the day or night, 365 days a year, and the technology can provide immediate acknowledgment, starting the process of getting help without delay. A patient simply texts us, perhaps saying, “I’m feeling nauseous.” Remi responds instantly, beginning a guided conversation. It asks targeted questions based on branching logic, mimicking how a triage nurse gathers information, but doing so immediately. This approach respects the patient’s condition; we know someone dealing with severe nausea has limited tolerance for endless questions. If a patient is feeling nauseous and their head’s in the toilet, you’ve only got a few questions before they check out.
Augmenting Care: Intelligent Assistance with Human Oversight
The goal of integrating AI like Remi is to augment human judgment and capabilities. The virtual assistant acts as a fact-gatherer. Once Remi has the necessary details, it alerts a clinician. With the alert, the clinician already has context – symptom onset, severity, actions taken. This allows us to intervene faster and more effectively. The true value emerges in critical situations. Recently, a patient texted about a “new rash on her face.” Remi guided her to describe it and send a photo. The image was quickly escalated to a nurse practitioner who recognized the rash near the eye as shingles – a potential medical emergency threatening the patient’s vision. We intervened immediately, calling in medication and arranging an urgent appointment. Remi facilitated timely intervention when minutes mattered.
It is critical that patients feel in control where they can, which is difficult when so much of their control has been taken away by the cancer diagnosis and all that comes with it. Remi allows them to control when and how often they message and provides consistent access to answers and education around their symptoms or concerns, and that is so important. On top of that, the capability to have prompt access to human expertise with just a simple text is powerful and a game changer. This ensures technology provides speed, while human empathy and clinical reasoning remain readily available.
Furthermore, effective healthcare technology like AI must focus on human dignity. Tone matters, as does simplicity. Even small acknowledgments make a difference. When Remi responds to a patient reporting consistent medication adherence with “Good job. Keep up the good work,” it reinforces positive behavior during difficult treatment courses. It also recognizes keywords related to mental and emotional distress, triggering specific support pathways. Additionally, any interaction, which is stored as a text thread, becomes an invaluable record for patients and their families, bridging information gaps often felt when caregivers can’t attend appointments or aren’t available during the triage interaction.
Our objective with tools like Remi and virtual assistance is to enhance the human element of care – not only for patients, but for our provider partners. Our technology and clinical team enable our provider partners to stay fully focused on their patients—present in the moment, available for complex problem-solving, and able to build genuine human connections—without being overwhelmed by constant emails, EMR messages or administrative tasks that typically pile up during or after clinic hours.
At Reimagine Care, we aim for the highest quality of care, achieved through the seamless collaboration with our provider partners. Technology delivers speed and consistency; our virtual care center clinicians deliver judgment and empathy. Together, we provide what every person facing cancer deserves: timely, informed and truly compassionate support, whenever and wherever they need it most.