Industries  /  Dental & medical practices

Dental & medical practices

Reception cannot answer the phone
and the person at the desk.

One of them always waits. When it is the phone, the caller who rings off is disproportionately likely to be a new patient — the most valuable call the practice receives, and the one least likely to ring back.

The pattern in every practice

Dental, GP, physiotherapy, optometry, veterinary, aesthetics. The call mix is remarkably consistent.

01

The rush is predictable and unstaffable

Monday morning, the hour after opening, the hour after the working day ends. You cannot staff reception for the peak without overstaffing every other hour of the week.

02

Most calls are three questions

Book, move, or cancel an appointment. Add opening hours, parking and "do you take my insurance" and you have the overwhelming majority of the phone volume.

03

The valuable call sounds like the routine one

A new-patient enquiry arrives in the same queue as a diary change, and gets the same wait. It is also the one with a competitor's number open in another tab.

What the AI handles, and what it must never touch

This boundary matters more here than in any other industry we work with, so it is drawn explicitly in the flow rather than left to the model's judgement.

Handled
  • Booking, moving and cancelling appointments against your availability.
  • Opening hours, location, parking, accessibility.
  • Which treatments you offer and their published prices.
  • Insurance and payment plans you accept.
  • New-patient registration details, captured properly.
  • "Am I due a check-up?" and routine recall questions.
Routed straight to a person
  • Anything clinical. Symptoms, medication, pain, post-operative questions — no exceptions, branched before the AI ever hears them.
  • Anything urgent. A dental emergency goes to a priority queue, not a booking flow.
  • Complaints, and anything about a treatment outcome.
  • Safeguarding or distress signals.

The flow builder has a dedicated widget for choosing between AI and a person, so this is a branch you configure and can see — not a behaviour you hope for.

The compliance side

Practices are held to a standard most software buyers are not, so this is worth going through before the feature list.

Recording disclosure

A spoken notice before recording, configured per queue, for two-party-consent jurisdictions. On by default where you set it, not something a receptionist has to remember.

Data subject requests

Export everything held against a phone number, or erase it — recordings, transcripts, callbacks and contacts — with records anonymised rather than orphaned.

Redaction

Card numbers, national insurance and social security numbers and long account digits are masked out of stored transcripts automatically.

Retention

Recordings and transcripts age out on a schedule you set, enforced by a worker rather than by policy.

Access control

Sixteen granular permissions and custom roles, so a receptionist, a practice manager and an associate see different things.

Audit trail

Every configuration change recorded with who made it and when, readable and exportable.

We do not hold a HIPAA BAA or a SOC 2 report today, and we will not imply otherwise. If your practice requires either before signing, tell us and we will be straight about timing. Everything we have and have not done is on the security page.

What it costs, against what it recovers

New-patient value is the number that decides this, and it is usually much larger than the first appointment.

Your figuresExample
New-patient calls missed per week5
Lifetime value of a patient$900
Share who would have registered1 in 5
Lost per week$900
Lost per year~$47,000
RecreateCX, Pro plan$69/mo + usage

Illustrative arithmetic, not a claim about results. Use your own patient value and your own missed-call count — your phone system reports the second one.

Most practices run on Small Business.

$199 a month covers up to fifty people, so the whole reception team, the practice manager, the hygienists and the associates all get logins without a per-seat charge — and adding a Saturday receptionist costs nothing. A single-handed practice can start on Pro at $69.

Start free for 30 days — a real number and a working AI receptionist with $15 of credit. Forward your existing line to it outside opening hours and see what arrives overnight.

What practices ask us

Will it give clinical advice?
No — and not because we ask it nicely. Clinical questions are branched to a person before the AI handles them, and the platform guardrails sit in a layer your own instructions cannot override. If you want it to refuse a whole category outright, that is a flow branch you configure and can see.
Does it connect to our practice management system?
If your system exposes an API, the AI can read and write through a permissioned connection where every call is schema-checked, classified read or write, and logged. Tell us which system you run and we will be honest about the fit.
Can patients always reach a human?
Yes, and it should be the first thing you test. Asking for a person routes straight to your queue. If the AI is unavailable for any reason the call goes to a person rather than dead air.
What about out-of-hours emergencies?
Branch them before anything else. Out of hours, an urgent caller can be routed to an on-call number or given your emergency instructions, while routine callers book or leave details for the morning.
Do you have a HIPAA BAA?
Not today. We would rather tell you now than during procurement. The security page lists what we have done, what we have not, and every sub-processor that can touch data.
Start with the overnight calls

Forward your line after hours and see what arrives.

It is the lowest-risk way to try this, and for most practices it is also where the surprise is.

Google or Microsoft · 30-day free trial · $15 credit · no card required