SOS Wellness

The challenge

SOS Wellness is an Ohio behavioral health provider offering psychiatry, therapy, medication-assisted addiction treatment, intensive outpatient programs and case management for children, teens and adults. It sees patients at offices in Middletown and Norwood and by telehealth across Ohio, is licensed by the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, and holds CARF Preliminary Accreditation.

Because SOS Wellness treats substance use disorders, its privacy obligations go beyond HIPAA. Under 42 CFR Part 2, records that identify someone as seeking substance use care carry additional federal protections. A typical AI receptionist or website chatbot is not designed around that rule, so the practice needed technology built for it, along with a website that felt welcoming to people taking a difficult first step.

An entirely new website

CallSphere replaced the practice's website with a new one, keeping SOS Wellness's brand and facts while redesigning the experience and rewriting the wording. More than 100 public pages now explain programs, conditions treated, insurance, locations, clinicians, patient rights, crisis resources and careers, with an accessibility widget and a clear path to request care.

Existing links redirect to their new pages, so visitors who arrive from an old address still find the right place. Staff edit pages, team profiles and office locations from their own admin workspace, and a change to an office updates the footer, homepage and contact details together.

AI assistants that answer at any hour

A 24/7 AI information line answers general questions about the practice by phone, and an AI assistant on the website answers by chat and browser voice. They explain services, insurance options and how to get started. Each one says it is an AI at the start of the conversation, and voice conversations also disclose that they are recorded.

The assistants provide public information only. They do not diagnose or give clinical advice. Crisis language triggers a fixed, code-defined response in website chat, without calling an AI model: call 911 in an emergency, call or text 988 at any time, and how to reach the SOS Wellness team.

One automated front-office workflow, end to end

Every step from first question to staff follow-up now runs in one connected system. A prospective patient asks the assistant a question, checks insurance coverage through a live Stedi connection, and submits an appointment or callback request. The request enters an encrypted staff queue, and the team is alerted by email and by real-time notifications in the workspace.

Front-desk staff open the request, update its status and add notes. The workspace records who changed each status and who viewed the request, gives front-desk and administrator accounts different access, and exports data in formats including PDF, Excel and CSV. Callback messages from the phone line and the website form reach the same callback queue.

The Valant EHR connection is authenticated, and direct booking will switch on after clinical operational review. Until then, AI does not write to the patient record or book visits: SOS Wellness staff confirm each appointment with the patient, and the website says so plainly.

How CallSphere supports 42 CFR Part 2 and HIPAA compliance

CallSphere and SOS Wellness have signed a Business Associate Agreement and a Qualified Service Organization Agreement. Acting as a qualified service organization, CallSphere is contractually bound by 42 CFR Part 2 when it handles the practice's Part 2 records, including the obligation to resist efforts to obtain patient-identifying information in legal proceedings, except as Part 2 permits.

The system treats every appointment request as a Part 2 record. Names, contact details, insurance details and notes are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they are stored, and duplicate detection uses keyed fingerprints instead of readable contact details. Audit entries record the person, the action and the request ID, not the patient's information. Opening a request creates an audit entry, and application logs and public error messages leave out request content.

Website chat transcripts are stored encrypted in SOS Wellness's own database and deleted automatically after 30 days. Voice recordings are encrypted in a private storage account dedicated to the practice. AI processing runs under zero-data-retention terms. Permission to contact a person is recorded separately from consent to treatment, text messaging has its own optional checkbox, and separately maintained SUD counseling notes are outside the service scope.

Compliance remains a shared responsibility. SOS Wellness keeps its own duties, including patient consent and its privacy program, and these safeguards are not a government certification or legal advice. For a practice evaluating AI, the useful test is whether a vendor will sign a QSOA and show how the rule shapes the product, not just whether it says it is HIPAA compliant.

The results

SOS Wellness now runs its public website, AI assistants, intake queue, callback queue and staff access in one system built for substance use and mental health privacy rules. People can get practice information by phone at any hour, requests arrive encrypted and in one place, and the team can see who handled each one.

Clinical decisions stay with SOS Wellness's clinicians. The same foundation is ready for direct EHR booking once the practice completes its review, so new automation can be added without rebuilding the website or the staff workflow.