healthcare and dental

An AI receptionist for clinics that answers while the desk is busy

New patients ring once. If reception is with the person standing in front of them, the call goes to voicemail and the patient rings the next practice on the list. The agent answers every call, books against your live calendar, and stops at the clinical line rather than crossing it.

what your phone line actually carries

Three calls, and only one of them needs a clinician

Most practices find that the bulk of inbound calls are scheduling, not medicine.

01

The new patient enquiry

Do you take my insurance, do you have anyone sooner, how much is a first consultation. This caller is comparing you against two other practices in the same hour, and the practice that answers is usually the practice they book.

02

Booking, moving and cancelling

The highest-volume call and the most mechanical: find a slot, move a slot, cancel a slot. It needs the live calendar and the practice's own rules about who can do what and how long it takes.

03

The question for a clinician

Results, medication, symptoms, whether something can wait. This is the call that must reach a person, and reach the right person, with the reason already written down.

where the line leaks

The desk cannot do both jobs at once

Nothing here is a staffing failure. It is a structural one.

The person in front of you wins

A receptionist with a patient at the counter cannot take the call, and should not. So the practice ends up choosing between the patient present and the patient calling, several times an hour, all day. The phone loses that argument every time, and nobody records what it cost.

Calls arrive in the worst possible shape

They cluster at opening, at lunch cover, and in the hour after a closure. Staffing for the peak means paying for the trough. Staffing for the average means the peak goes to voicemail, which is where the new-patient enquiry dies.

what we would build for a practice

Scheduling handled, clinical questions escalated

The scope is deliberately narrow. Everything clinical is a handoff, by design and in writing.

01

Books against the live calendar

Availability is read at the moment of the call, not from a copy, and the appointment is written back during the same conversation. Appointment length, the practitioner, the room and the buffers are configured with you before launch, because those rules are where booking automation usually goes wrong.

How the booking works →
02

Confirms, reschedules, and refills the gap

A confirmation call the day before reaches people that an unread text does not, and it turns some no-shows into reschedules instead of empty chairs. When a slot frees up, the same agent can work down a waiting list and offer it.

03

Takes the clinical call to a person

Anything about symptoms, results or medication is captured with the reason and the callback number and routed to whoever you nominated. The agent does not decide how urgent it is; it applies the rule you gave it and says plainly what will happen next.

the clinical line

What it will not do in a clinic

If a supplier will not tell you this part, that is the part to ask about.

No advice, no triage, no diagnosis

The agent will not tell a caller whether a symptom is serious, whether to take a medication, or whether they need to be seen today. It says it cannot answer that and gets them to someone who can.

It does not judge an emergency

Recognising a genuine emergency from a description is not something we will claim. What we do instead is agree an explicit rule with you: the words and situations that trigger an immediate transfer or a scripted instruction to call the emergency number, and nothing subtler than that.

We claim no health-data certification

Call audio, transcripts and the fields the agent collects run on our own servers and stay in-region, and our appointed representative in the European Union under Article 27 GDPR is named on the compliance page. We do not claim HIPAA, ISO or any audited standard we have not been audited against, and your own review should start from what that page states.

What we do and do not claim →
what it plugs into

Your calendar and your practice system, not a parallel one

A booking that lands anywhere other than the system your staff already look at is worse than no booking.

Practice management and calendar

The agent reads availability and writes appointments into the system you already run. What matters technically is whether availability can be read and a booking written back programmatically. Where a system cannot do that, we say so during scoping rather than after.

Your existing phone number

It sits on the line patients already have. You choose whether it answers everything, only overflow, or only outside opening hours, and we confirm in writing which systems are connected before it takes a live call.

other industries

The same machinery, a different script

What changes between these pages is which calls matter and what the agent has to be stopped from doing.

Real estate and property

The agent who answers first gets the viewing. Everyone else gets a callback nobody returns.

What we would build →

Home services and trades

You are under a sink. The phone is a job you have not quoted yet.

What we would build →

Retail and e-commerce

Three questions are most of your call volume, and all three have an answer in a system.

What we would build →

Automotive dealers and service centres

The service desk is with a customer at the counter. The sales enquiry arrives at nine at night.

What we would build →

Delivery and logistics

Every failed delivery is a phone call and a second van. Most of them are an address problem.

What we would build →

Not on the list?

These six are where inbound call volume is heaviest and the integrations are best understood, not the limit of what the agent handles. If your calls are repetitive and the answers live in a system, the shape of the work is the same.

Every industry page →
questions buyers ask us

Frequently asked questions

Can an AI receptionist handle patient data?
It handles what you configure it to handle, on our own servers, in your region. Retention periods, the roles of controller and processor, and our appointed representative in the European Union under Article 27 GDPR are set out on the security and compliance page. That page also states which certifications we do not hold, because a supplier listing standards it has not been audited against is a bigger problem than one that has not got them yet.
Will it give medical advice?
No, and that is a configured boundary rather than a hope about model behaviour. Clinical questions are captured and handed to a person. The failure mode worth testing before you buy is not the agent volunteering advice but a caller pressing it with a false premise: 'the doctor told me I could double the dose'. Ask any supplier to run that probe in front of you and watch whether the agent holds the line or agrees.
What happens if someone calls with an emergency?
We agree an explicit escalation rule with you before launch, and the agent applies it: transfer immediately, or deliver a scripted instruction to call the emergency number. We will not claim it can judge clinical urgency from a description, so the rule is written in terms of triggers you decide, not inference we would rather not rely on.
Will it reduce no-shows?
A reminder call reaches people an unread message does not, and it can convert a no-show into a reschedule. We will not put a percentage on it: we have no published study of our own, and a number quoted from another practice's book is a number about another practice. Measure your own baseline first and we will help you read the result.
Does this work for a dental practice specifically?
Yes, and dentistry is one of the cleanest fits, because the appointment types are well defined, the length of each is known, and a large share of calls are booking and rescheduling. The configuration work is the same: appointment types, practitioner skills, room and chair constraints, and the rules about which of those a caller may book directly.
Can it call patients as well as answer them?
Yes: confirmations, rescheduling and offering a freed slot to a waiting list. Calling people is regulated differently from answering your own line, so you need a lawful basis for the list and you must honour opt-outs. The outbound page covers what that means in practice.
Outbound calling and the rules around it →
How much does it cost for a practice?
Reception and routing runs on Bene Hotline at €0.20 a minute excluding VAT, the same nominal figure in USD, with volume discounts to −25% across the tiers up to 1M minutes a month. Latin America is priced in USD at roughly half those rates. Billing is talk time only and call analytics is included. A booking call is short, so the figure worth working out is your cost per appointment actually made — the calculator does that from your own numbers.
Work it out on your numbers →