Using Agentic AI to Create Behavioral Health Care Navigator for FQHCs

Peregrine Health, a behavioral health company serving Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), has partnered with agentic AI company UnityAI to launch a virtual behavioral health navigator. 

Healthcare Innovation spoke with executives from the two companies and heard from one of the FQHCs already beginning to deploy “Emma,” a virtual care navigator created by Peregrine using UnityAI’s technology to modernize and scale patient engagement across behavioral health services.

Emma — short for Engagement, Messaging, Management, and Access — automates scheduling, referral management, follow-ups, and patient communication.  Peregrine says the result is a more streamlined patient experience, reduced administrative burden, and stronger clinic performance.

Peregrine is deploying Emma as part of its virtual behavioral health model, which pairs intelligent technology with a team of licensed providers working in partnership with FQHCs. The premise is that by combining clinical capacity with automated patient engagement, this model will help clinics expand access and reduce administrative strain.

One early user is HealthPoint, an FQHC with several locations in the Brazos Valley in Texas. In e-mailed responses to Healthcare Innovation’s questions, Mary Wauters, chief operating officer, said that like many FQHCs, HealthPoint faces challenges with engagement due to barriers such as transportation, limited phone access, and competing priorities in patients’ daily lives. “Behavioral health outreach often requires multiple contact attempts, and staff spend considerable time managing voicemails, reschedules, and follow-ups, which can slow down care access. These realities make it essential for us to find smarter, more efficient ways to keep patients connected to care,” she said. 

HealthPoint has partnered with Peregrine for about three years to expand access to behavioral health services across its clinics. Their virtual providers are fully integrated into HealthPoint’s care model, Wauters added, helping it reach more patients while reducing administrative strain on the internal team. 

Wauters said that HealthPoint uses Emma to manage appointment outreach, reminders, and rescheduling for behavioral health visits. “Since implementation, we’ve seen fewer no-shows and faster response rates from patients. Patients are responding more consistently, and the care navigation team can focus on patient support rather than repetitive phone outreach,” she said. 

She added that they would like to expand Emma’s role to include outreach for scheduling annual wellness visits, follow-up visits, screenings, and patient satisfaction. “There’s strong potential to use it for ongoing engagement that helps to maintain continuity of care.”


Edmund Jackson, Ph.D., CEO of Nashville-based UnityAI and former chief data officer at HCA Healthcare, said the company now does about 250,000 AI agent calls per month across multiple different verticals, from primary care to radiology to behavioral health, “so we understand the workflows and these requirements really, really well at this point.”

UnityAI says that overall, it reduces no-shows by 16%, completes 90% of scheduling tasks autonomously and improves patient access and staff efficiency within weeks of deployment.

Jackson noted that everything in healthcare is semi-custom developed and in behavioral care, being sensitive and honoring the patients through the process is very important. They started with appointment confirmations, he said, “but there’s a whole workflow involved, from confirmations, cancelations, rescheduling, scheduling from the beginning, change of site, just under the umbrella of scheduling. And we're working together with Peregrine to enable Emma to do all of those things.”


Peregrine operates across 17 states and has more than 300 clinic locations. April John, the company’s chief product officer, said Peregrine provides support to FQHCs from both clinical and operational aspects, with an emphasis on using technology to do that. 

“Leveraging AI for some of these really challenging workflows where we can be impactful such as patient engagement became really interesting to us,” John said. Doing outreach for appointment confirmations is one of the early use cases. “If we’ve got 70 or 80 appointments per partnership per day, now we're making those outbound calls utilizing Emma,” she said. 

John said that so far they have seen great outcomes. “We very much wanted to decrease no-show rates, and to see that come to fruition was exciting,” she said, adding, “Emma doing this large amount of outreach has really helped us to see the numbers improve and the ROI that comes from that.”

“Emma can respond to a very direct question that a patient might be asking, or escalate that to a person who might have that answer, which is different than the engagement that you see in many organizations, where that engagement is pretty static,” John said. “It does not have the empathy that I think Emma can provide.”

Jackson said it's often surprising to people how much more of an empathetic experience the AI can provide than a harried human being. “People in call centers have got a lot of work to do, so they're under a lot of time pressure,” he said. “The AI agent has all the time in the world.”