How Livestrong delivers 24/7 cancer support that's clinically safe and emotionally intelligent

The challenge: making cancer support accessible around the clock

Livestrong has spent decades building one of the most trusted names in cancer support, helping people affected by cancer navigate treatment, survivorship, and the medical system. Their services—free, expert support for people with cancer and their loved ones—are grounded in evidence and backed by decades of experience in the cancer community.

The need for support doesn't follow business hours. People receive diagnoses in the evening, face treatment decisions over the weekend, and need answers when questions arise. Livestrong's human support team is excellent, but they're not available 24/7, and the volume of people reaching out has grown year after year. The organization needed a way to extend their reach without diluting the quality and safety that people depend on when they come to Livestrong for help.

The stakes are high: cancer support requires clinical accuracy, empathy, and the ability to recognize when someone is in crisis and needs immediate human intervention. A chatbot that invents answers or misses warning signs isn't just unhelpful—it's dangerous. Livestrong needed technology that could meet people where they are, at any hour, while maintaining the same standards of care and safety that define the organization.

The solution: an AI agent grounded in trusted sources with crisis detection

Livestrong and Whitelabel built an AI agent that delivers 24/7 cancer support with clinical safety as the foundation. The agent answers questions about cancer types, treatments, side effects, and survivorship—always citing its answers to Livestrong's curated knowledge base and trusted medical sources. Every response includes the source it drew from, so people can verify the information and feel confident in what they're reading.

The agent is grounded, meaning it never invents or improvises. If a question falls outside what it's been trained to answer from verified content, it says so clearly and routes the person to Livestrong's human team. That design choice is intentional: better to admit a gap than to hallucinate medical advice.

Crisis detection is built into every interaction through Whitelabel's Crisis Escalation system. The agent monitors for 25+ categories of crisis language—self-harm, abuse, medical emergencies, severe depression—and immediately escalates those conversations to human staff and appropriate hotlines. The system doesn't rely on simple keyword filters; it understands context and nuance, so it catches what matters without over-triggering on everyday language about difficult topics. All of this runs on SOC 2 and HIPAA-compliant infrastructure, with encryption and access controls designed for sensitive health data.

Real outcomes: thousands supported, clinically safe at scale

Since launching, the Livestrong agent has supported 4,448+ people, answering questions about cancer at any hour, in any time zone. Ten percent of those conversations resolve in a single chat—the person gets the information they need, feels supported, and moves forward without waiting for a callback or navigating a phone tree. For questions that need human follow-up, the agent captures context and routes the conversation to the right specialist, so the handoff is seamless.

The agent handles routine and urgent questions with equal care, always citing the source and always watching for signs that a human needs to step in. Because the agent is available 24/7, Livestrong's reach has extended beyond what the human team could cover alone, without compromising the quality or safety that people expect when they turn to Livestrong in a vulnerable moment.

What other nonprofits can learn

The Livestrong case shows how to build AI for high-stakes, high-trust domains where safety isn't optional. The design principles are transferable: ground every answer in verified content and cite the source; monitor for crisis language with systems that understand context, not just keywords; and be explicit when the AI doesn't know, rather than letting it improvise.

For nonprofits in healthcare, mental health, social services, or any domain where bad advice can cause real harm, the Livestrong model offers a template. AI agents can extend your reach, handle routine questions, and free up your human team for the interactions that require judgment and empathy—but only if the agent is built with safety and grounding as the foundation, not features you add later.

Livestrong's work also demonstrates why crisis detection matters. People in crisis often reach out to trusted organizations first, before calling a hotline or going to an emergency room. If your AI can recognize that moment and escalate it immediately, you've built a safety net that wasn't there before. The Crisis Escalation system used by Livestrong is available as part of Whitelabel's suite, and it's designed to integrate with your existing workflows and escalation protocols.