An AI front desk, so your team stops living on the phone.
An AI front desk answers every inbound call, finishes the routine ones inside your EHR, and hands the rest to your staff with the context already gathered. MedPhone runs one in production for medical and dental practices, live today on athenahealth.
Where a front desk actually spends its day.
Front office automation is usually sold as a headcount argument. It is really a time argument, and the time is already gone before anyone counts it.
The phone owns the day
Front desk teams spend up to 80 percent of their day on the phone. That is not the job they were hired to do, and it is the reason the rest of the job runs late.
The queue never empties
Every call that rings out becomes a callback, and every callback that misses becomes another one. The backlog does not clear at 5pm, it rolls into tomorrow.
The hours nobody covers
One hundred and twenty eight hours a week fall outside opening. The 7:30am rush, evenings, weekends. Those callers are not in your miss rate report because nobody was there to miss them.
We wrote up how many calls a medical practice actually misses, including how to pull your own number rather than trusting anyone else's.
What the AI front desk finishes on the call.
Not a message in a queue for the morning. The action itself, written into the chart before the caller hangs up.
Booking and rescheduling
New patient booking with the intake questions asked, plus rescheduling and cancellation against the provider availability that actually exists, not a generic grid.
Refills and insurance
Prescription refill requests routed into the provider inbox, and insurance verification intake taken while the patient is still on the line.
Same day and waitlist
Same day requests and waitlist calls handled at the moment they come in, which is the only moment they are worth anything.
After hours and triage routing
Callbacks and urgent triage routed by rules you set, so the 8pm caller reaches the right person rather than a voicemail box.
The mechanics of a single call, step by step, are on the how it works page.
What stays with your team, on purpose.
This is not a replacement argument. Nobody who has bought MedPhone has let a receptionist go. They have taken the phone off them.
Anything clinical
Clinical questions go to the nurse line. That is a rule, not a preference, and it is configured per practice rather than left to the model.
The difficult call
A patient who is frightened, angry or grieving should reach a person. The agent hands those over rather than working through a script at them.
The judgment calls
Complex triage, anything unusual, anything the practice has said it wants a human on. You decide the list. The agent does not get to expand it.
What it gave one practice back.
10 to 15
hours a week off the phones at Synergy Medical, back into billing and collections.
40 to 50
after hours calls a week that used to reach voicemail and now get handled.
2,848
calls answered in two months, more than half resolved without a person touching them.
Synergy Medical is a family medicine practice in Michigan running on athenahealth. The full numbers, and what we did not count, are in the case study.
From $150 a month, against roughly $52,000 a year for one fully loaded front desk hire who covers forty of the week's one hundred and sixty eight hours.
AI front desk FAQ
What practice managers ask before they put this in front of their staff.
Still have questions?
Can't find the answer you're looking for? Reach out to our team and we'll get back to you shortly.
An AI front desk is software that answers a practice phone, works out what the caller needs, and completes the routine requests itself inside the EHR rather than taking a message. Booking, rescheduling, refill requests and insurance intake are handled on the call. Anything clinical, urgent or unusual is routed to your staff under rules you set.
No, and any vendor telling you otherwise is selling you the wrong thing. It takes the phone off your front desk, not the job. Practices running MedPhone have moved ten to fifteen hours a week out of call handling and into billing, collections and the patients standing in front of them.
MedPhone starts at $150 a month for 500 call minutes, with overage at $0.30 a minute disclosed upfront. Pricing is billed on the calls answered rather than per seat, so adding front desk staff or another location does not raise it. A fully loaded front desk hire in the US runs about $52,000 a year by comparison.
MedPhone is live in production on athenahealth as a verified Marketplace Partner. The eClinicalWorks integration is in build, and ModMed, Dentrix and NextGen are approved to integrate but not yet live. Custom integrations are available for practices at 10 providers or more on other systems.
It depends on the vendor. MedPhone signs a Business Associate Agreement before your first live call, encrypts PHI at rest with AES 256 and in transit with TLS 1.3, and logs every call and EHR action for audit. Every subprocessor that can touch PHI is under an executed BAA, and the named list is available to compliance officers on request.
On athenahealth the integration already exists, so the work is configuring your transfer rules, your appointment types and the questions your practice asks at booking. That is a conversation and a short build rather than a project. On an EHR we have not shipped yet, the honest answer is that you would be joining a list.
Hear it take a call before you decide anything.
Twenty minutes. A real call, your EHR, and an honest answer on what it would and would not take off your front desk.
Book a demo