A public-health portal needs Claude agents that can call department tools for clinic hours and vaccine inventory. What Agent SDK step enables those capabilities?

Registering clinic-hours and inventory tools with the Agent SDK for the health-service agent is the step that enables Claude agents to call department tools for clinic hours and vaccine inventory. Tool registration binds callable schemas and handlers into the agent runtime so the model can request live department capabilities instead of guessing. Without registration, the agent has no sanctioned path to those systems regardless of prompt wording. Configuring static system-prompt guidelines for clinic-hours answers fails by concept: static prompt text is not a live tool call and cannot give Claude live access to clinic hours or vaccine inventory. Enabling conversation memory for the health-service agent to recall prior vaccine questions fails to give Claude live access to clinic hours and inventory, so it cannot answer current department questions accurately. Subscribing the health-service agent to usage logging for clinic-hours response metrics fails to give Claude any way to call department tools for clinic hours and inventory—it only observes responses after the fact. Exam caveat: registration enables capability; it must be paired with auth scopes, rate limits, and environment-specific endpoints (prod versus test inventory). Do not register write/admin inventory tools on a public hours-only agent. Operational check: register least-privilege hours and inventory read tools in the Agent SDK, verify schema validation on calls, test against the public-health portal scenarios, monitor tool error rates, and confirm prompt-only fallbacks are not silently used when tools fail.