QuickMD achieves faster resolutions with Zendesk

QuickMD is one of the nation’s premier telehealth providers for opioid addiction treatment. As the company has grown, it has also expanded its services to meet more patient needs, including mental health, women’s health, weight loss, and urgent care.

Serving patients navigating sensitive, time-critical healthcare needs, QuickMD is committed to delivering compassionate, accessible, and consistent support.

To scale its impact and meet rising demand, the company consolidated all patient, clinician, and pharmacy communication into one unified Zendesk platform—replacing fragmented systems with real-time messaging and intelligent routing, while also building a foundation that enables responsible AI adoption.

Unified support for urgent, high-stakes care

QuickMD delivers virtual care to more than 10,000 patients every week, the majority of whom are seeking support for opioid addiction treatment, medication access, or urgent medical questions. These interactions require fast responses, clarity, and trust.

But as QuickMD grew, the company’s previous support setup—email, tickets, siloed phone lines, and separate tools for clinician coordination—created friction for both patients and staff.

“About 60 percent of the issues we deal with are urgent or high priority,” explains Colin Crowley, VP of Patient Services at QuickMD. “Email and tickets just don’t work in that context.”

As a result, patients often had to repeat their story as they moved across channels. Agents lacked full context, slowing down triage. The lack of live channels created a delay in being able to address patient concerns in a timely manner. And clinician and pharmacy communications were disconnected from patient conversations, making coordination unnecessarily complex.

QuickMD needed a streamlined, real-time, compliant support system designed for healthcare.

Zendesk becomes the single source of truth

QuickMD turned to Zendesk to unify all channels into one seamless workspace. With Zendesk Messaging, QuickMD was able to transform its patient support across the web. The transition was seamless, taking just about eight months and now involves QuickMD maintaining 30-second chat response times in all patient interactions.

“Zendesk Messaging has become mission-critical to how we deliver patient care,” Crowley says. “With our original system, we didn’t offer support over phone or chat. Now, those channels represent the majority of our contacts. We receive more than 10,000 inquiries per week, and just 15 percent of those tickets come from email.”

Every downstream workflow now operates within the same ecosystem. Pharmacy coordination and phone escalations are handled through Zendesk Voice, while prescriptions, appointments, and triage are directed through chat to ensure each request reaches the right team quickly.

The escalation of patient issues to appropriate internal teams for investigation and resolution has been streamlined through the integration of Slack.

“With Slack, we can meet patients where they are,” Crowley says. “We can take care of child tickets through side conversations and make approval requests.”

At the same time, agents have a complete view of every patient—including history, notes, and pharmacy communication—consolidated in Agent Workspace.

“If we didn’t have Zendesk, we’d be running five or six separate systems for phones, messaging, tickets, and clinician coordination,” Crowley notes. “Instead, everything is unified in one place—and that’s what allows us to deliver a consistent patient experience.”

The consolidation onto Zendesk was especially critical given QuickMD’s HIPAA requirements. “HIPAA compliance is integral to everything we do, and Zendesk gives us that,” Crowley adds. “Pair that with the reputation, and the ability to unify all our channels, and Zendesk was the right partner.”

Confidence in the future of AI-powered patient support

The Zendesk platform has paved the way for QuickMD to begin exploring AI thoughtfully and on their own terms. With standardized workflows, consolidated context, and messaging as the primary entry point, the team has been able to trial a range of Zendesk AI capabilities—including Copilot, AI Assist, and writing and tone enhancement tools—evaluating how each might support agents managing sensitive, urgent conversations.

“This unified foundation ensures we can adopt AI thoughtfully,” says Crowley. “We’ve been trialing these tools while planning to use intelligent triage and auto-assist to keep raising the standard of patient care.”

With Zendesk’s native HIPAA compliance and strong data governance, QuickMD can feel confident in moving the needle with AI responsibly—protecting patient privacy while empowering frontline care teams. Most recently, the team has begun leveraging Zendesk QA, utilizing the AI technology within it to streamline quality assurance analysis across thousands of patient contacts.

“We’re looking forward to continuing to evolve our quality assurance process with Zendesk QA,” says Crowley. “The AI technology there is already helping us bring greater consistency to how we review and learn from patient interactions.”

QuickMD’s partnership with Zendesk has reshaped how the company supports patients through some of their most vulnerable moments. What began as a move to streamline communication has grown into a fully unified, scalable, AI-ready support operation.

With messaging at the heart of the experience and AI capabilities continuing to mature across the platform, QuickMD is building a telehealth model where patient care is faster, more compassionate, and more connected than ever.