Matching frontier LLMs at 22 lower latency: a 184M-parameter intent classifier for healthcare text

Healthcare practices drown in inbound patient text. Email, contact forms, live chat, SMS, voicemail transcripts — every channel sends messages that need to be routed: to scheduling, to billing, to clinical, to the front desk. It's a high-volume, deterministic, latency-sensitive task. The obvious answer in 2026 is to throw a frontier LLM at it. Claude Haiku 4.5 will give you 95% accuracy on this kind of classification. GPT-4o will too. But every call costs real money, adds about a second of netwo