Introducing Agent Santé: official health answers while the 811 line is busy
Where to get care, how to book an appointment, where to get vaccinated. Ask Agent Santé at 2 a.m. or at noon, and get a clear answer that cites its official source.
- Out of the 811 queue. Wait times at Info-Santé 811 reached up to two hours on average this fall. Agent Santé answers the general questions that don't need a nurse, at any hour, in French or English.
- Every answer cites its source. Québec.ca, Santé Québec, the INSPQ and the ministry of Health. Each answer links to the official page, so you can check.
- No diagnosis, ever. An answer with personal medical advice is withdrawn and rewritten. For your situation, call 811. In an emergency, call 911.
- Your privacy first. No account, no name. decision-machine-1, our model hosted in Montréal, blocks personal information before any agent sees it, and conversations are erased about 10 minutes after they end.
- Counters and costs in public. About $0.06 per conversation. At 10% of 811 calls, that's roughly $11,290 a year.
- Free and open source. A volunteer project by CloudRaker, built on CloudRaker Run. The site code and the agent instructions are public under Apache 2.0.
Wait times at Info-Santé 811 reached up to two hours on average this fall to speak with a nurse, before the winter peak has even started. Today we launched agentsante.ca so that the questions that don't need a nurse can leave the queue.
Where to get care, how to book an appointment, where to get vaccinated: these are legitimate questions. But every minute spent on the phone answering them is a minute less for someone who really needs a nurse.
Ask at 2 a.m. or at noon
On Agent Santé, you type or say your question in French or English and get a clear answer that cites its official source. No account, no name, nothing to upload. The answers come from Québec.ca, Santé Québec, the INSPQ and the documents of the ministry of Health and Social Services. That information already exists, but it's often hard to find. Each answer quotes the official page and links back to it, so you can check it yourself.
Give it your postal code and it points you to nearby pharmacies, clinics and vaccination sites from the government's directory of health and social services, each with a link to its official listing. For appointments, it links you to the Clic Santé results page. It doesn't read availabilities and it never books anything for you.
What it will not do
Agent Santé doesn't diagnose, doesn't recommend a treatment and doesn't give a medication dose. For advice about your situation, only a nurse can assess it: call Info-Santé at 811. In an emergency, it's always 911.
We don't leave that to the language model's good behaviour. Two checks run on every exchange:
- Before your message reaches the agents, decision-machine-1, CloudRaker's model hosted in Montréal, checks that it contains no personal information. If it does, the message is blocked.
- Before an answer reaches you, the same model checks that it contains no personal medical advice. If it does, the answer is withdrawn and the agent must rewrite it. After three withdrawn answers, the conversation stops.
How it works
Agent Santé runs on CloudRaker Run. An intake agent understands your question and hands it to a specialized agent: gastroenteritis, respiratory viruses, vaccination, seniors, mental health and others. Every agent exists in French and in English. The agents use language models from Anthropic or OpenAI.
You can see each step in the conversation itself. Here is a real exchange:
Behind that screen, a message takes this path:
- 1Your browser Your device
Sends the message. The conversation lives in memory only. - 2Agent Santé server
Checks the session and applies a first filter. - 3decision-machine-1 CloudRaker, Montréal
Looks for personal information. A blocked message stops here. - 4CloudRaker Run agents and language models Canada and US
The specialized agent finds the answer in the official sources. - 5decision-machine-1 CloudRaker, Montréal
Checks the answer for personal medical advice, then your browser shows it.
Only a message with no personal information goes on to the Run agents and the language models. A voice message is first transcribed in Montréal by rakeaudio, CloudRaker's transcription model, and only its text follows that path.
Where your data goes
What stays in Canada, in Montréal. The personal information check on every message, the medical advice check on every answer, and the transcription of every voice message. The recording is not kept and is never sent to the language models.
What goes to the model servers, in Canada and the US. The text of a message the filter accepted, with the verified conversation so far. Never a message blocked for personal information.
What isn't kept anywhere. The browser keeps the conversation in memory only, and reloading the page ends it. Server logs never contain the text of messages or the sound of voice messages. Exchanges are erased about 10 minutes after the conversation ends.
Everything in the open
A health tool has to earn trust, so we publish what it does.
The counters. The transparency page shows, live, how many conversations have started, how many answers were shown after the checks, how many messages were blocked for personal information and how many answers were withdrawn for medical advice. At the time of writing: 151 conversations, 227 verified answers, 8 messages blocked and 29 answers withdrawn. Those withdrawals are the checks doing their job.
The code. CloudRaker built Agent Santé as a volunteer project. The site code and the agent instructions are public under the Apache 2.0 licence. Anyone can read them and verify them.
What it costs
Agent Santé is free for everyone. CloudRaker pays for the AI and the services that run it, and the costs page shows the bill. So far, a conversation costs about $0.06 and a message about $0.03. Most of it is the Run platform (agent compute time and source searches, about 85%), then the language model at its provider price with no markup (about 15%). The checks by decision-machine-1 account for less than 1%.
Info-Santé 811 receives about 2 million calls a year. If an agent like this one handled 10% of those requests, that's 200,000 conversations, for an estimated $11,290 a year in AI and services, using the exact average cost per conversation rather than the rounded $0.06. The page has a slider to try other shares.
That comparison has a limit, and we say it on the page too: Agent Santé doesn't replace the 811. Only a nurse can assess your situation.
A starting point
Agent Santé is a starting point, built on CloudRaker's secure model and agent infrastructure. The same foundation can be extended to answer the 811 phone line and complete an appointment booking end to end, with citizens' information masked and protected before anything leaves the network.
If you work in the health network and want to talk about what comes next, reach out. Journalists will find the architecture, the logo and a contact in the press kit.
Ask your question at agentsante.ca. Free, in French and English, at any hour. Read how it works.
Agent Santé is not a service of the Government of Québec or of Santé Québec, and has no affiliation with them.