We delivered an AI triage coordinator for a Charleston family managing a father's unexpected cardiac event — one that tracks every specialist, medication, insurance authorization, and rehab appointment across four providers and two facilities, keeps three adult siblings aligned on care decisions across two time zones, and makes sure nothing falls through the cracks during the weeks between the ER and recovery

Her father collapsed at a restaurant on East Bay Street on a Tuesday evening. By Wednesday morning he was in the cardiac ICU at MUSC with two new stents, a medication list that had tripled overnight, and a care team that included a cardiologist, an interventional cardiologist, a hospitalist, a cardiac rehab specialist, and a discharge planner — none of whom seemed to talk to each other unless she was standing in the room making them. She is the oldest of three siblings. She lives in Mount Pleasant, twenty minutes from the hospital. Her brother lives in Charlotte. Her sister lives in Austin. Their mother, who is seventy-four and in good health but has never managed anything more complex than the household bills, was sitting in the ICU waiting room trying to remember which doctor had said what, which medication was new and which had been changed, and whether the nurse who came in at 6 AM was the same one who had explained the blood thinner protocol or a different one. The first seventy-two hours were chaos. The interventional cardiologist came by at 6:15 AM and spoke for four minutes. The hospitalist came at 10 AM and changed one of the medications the cardiologist had started. The cardiac rehab team did an assessment at 2 PM and said he could start walking the hallway on Thursday if the hospitalist agreed, but the hospitalist had already left for the day. The discharge planner appeared on Wednesday afternoon and said he would likely go home Friday if his labs looked good Thursday morning, but nobody had told her mother that he would need someone at home around the clock for the first week, that the house needed a grab bar installed in the bathroom, and that he could not drive for six weeks. Her brother called from Charlotte three times on Wednesday asking what was happening, and each time she had to reconstruct the day's events from memory while standing in a hospital hallway with her phone on twelve percent battery. Her sister in Austin texted every hour asking for updates and got frustrated when the updates were slow, not understanding that the updates were slow because the person providing them was also the person asking the doctors questions, helping her mother find the cafeteria, filling out insurance pre-authorization forms, and trying to remember whether the new blood thinner was the one that interacted with grapefruit or the one that interacted with ibuprofen. We built her a coordinator that functioned as the single source of truth the hospital does not provide. Every medication went in with the dose, frequency, prescribing doctor, start date, and the reason it was prescribed — not in medical shorthand, but in language her mother could read and her siblings could understand. When the hospitalist changed the beta-blocker dose on Thursday morning, the system updated the list immediately and noted what changed, why, and who ordered it. When her brother called that evening and asked "what medications is Dad on now," the answer existed in one place and was current as of two hours ago. The appointment and authorization tracking started before discharge and did not stop for eight weeks. The discharge paperwork listed follow-up appointments that needed to be scheduled: cardiologist in one week, primary care in two weeks, cardiac rehab evaluation in ten days, lab work in five days to check the blood thinner levels. The system scheduled all four, confirmed them, and tracked what each appointment was for and what questions needed to be asked. When the cardiac rehab facility called to say they needed a prior authorization from the insurance company before the evaluation, the system flagged it immediately — because if the authorization was not submitted by Friday, the evaluation would be delayed by two weeks, which would delay the start of rehab by three weeks, which the cardiologist had said was the window where rehab makes the biggest difference in long-term outcomes. She called the insurance company that afternoon instead of discovering the gap the day of the appointment. The sibling coordination was the part that kept the family from fracturing. Three adults, all worried, all with different information, all with opinions about their father's care, and no shared record of what was actually happening. The system maintained a timeline that all three siblings could see: what happened today, what is scheduled for tomorrow, what decisions are pending, and what each person is handling. When her brother wanted to fly down for the weekend, the system showed him that their father's rehab evaluation was Monday morning and that someone needed to drive him — so the brother booked a flight that arrived Sunday and stayed through Monday, which was more useful than a Saturday visit when nothing medical was happening. When her sister in Austin started researching alternative cardiac rehab programs she had found online, the system gave her the context she was missing: the rehab program their father was entering was the one his cardiologist had specifically recommended because it included a supervised exercise component that was indicated for patients with his particular stent placement. The sister stopped researching and started helping with the insurance paperwork instead. The medication interaction monitoring caught two problems in the first month. Her father's primary care doctor, who had not been involved in the hospital stay, renewed a prescription for an anti-inflammatory that interacted with the new blood thinner. The system flagged it before he picked up the prescription. Three weeks later, her mother bought an over-the-counter supplement a friend had recommended for heart health, and the system identified that it contained an ingredient that could affect the blood thinner's efficacy. Small catches, but the kind that send people back to the ER. "The hospital saved his life," she said. "But the hospital discharged him on a Friday afternoon with a paper bag full of medications and a stack of forms, and then it was just us. I am not a nurse. I am not a case manager. I am a daughter who was terrified, and I needed something that could hold all the pieces so I could hold my family together."