AI medical receptionist: an agent for your front desk

Not the whole front desk. An AI medical receptionist agent can take over its admin queue. That means scheduling requests, referrals, records requests and insurance checks. It also covers prior authorization paperwork. It works inside athenahealth, eClinicalWorks or Epic. Anything that is not clearly admin goes straight to a nurse or doctor. The agent never gives medical advice.

A practice’s front desk does three jobs at once. It greets patients at the window and answers the phone. It also works the queue that never shows on the schedule: portal messages, faxed referrals, records requests, voicemails asking to reschedule. That queue is where the day’s backlog builds.

Much of it is typing. A referral arrives by fax, and someone types the patient and insurance details into the practice management system. A reschedule request comes through the portal, and someone finds a slot and replies. A payer requires a prior authorization. Someone gathers the notes, fills in the form and follows up for days.

Prior authorization alone is a second job. The American Medical Association reports that physicians and their staff spend an average of 13 hours a week on prior authorization requests.

athenahealth, eClinicalWorks and Epic hold the schedule and the chart. They don’t read an incoming fax, match it to the right patient or draft the reply. That work still passes through a person’s hands, one field at a time, while the phone keeps ringing.

• —Scheduling and rescheduling requests from the portal, email and your web form. The agent matches them to open slots and confirms once your staff approves.
• —Incoming referrals and records requests read, matched to the right patient and prepared for entry. Anything uncertain is flagged, not guessed.
• —Insurance eligibility checks done before the visit, so coverage problems show up the day before, not at the window.
• —Prior authorization packets built from documents already in the chart, then tracked with the payer until a decision comes back.
• —Draft replies to admin messages, such as directions, forms and paperwork, in your practice’s tone. Staff review them before they go out.
• —Anything that is not clearly admin goes straight to a nurse or doctor. The agent never assesses symptoms, never triages and never gives medical advice.

We have not yet deployed an agent in a US practice. Our delivered reference is French. Our agents already work in a Paris surgical practice. They sort incoming patient messages and route them to consultation booking. They draft the patient newsletter for the surgeon’s approval and collect supplier invoices every month.

The lesson from that practice applies here. The gain comes from less re-keying and chasing. It does not come from putting software between patients and your staff. Every message that needs judgment still reaches a person. It gets there sooner, because the routine ones are already handled.

For your practice, we would start with one queue: referrals, reschedules or prior authorizations. We measure how long it takes today, and again once the agent runs. You decide, on those numbers, whether to go further.

The agent is installed in your environment, and your files stay stored on your machines. Only the text a task needs is sent to the AI model, over an encrypted connection.

We review HIPAA duties with the practice before anything goes live. That includes whether a Business Associate Agreement is needed, and with whom. We write down which systems the agent can open and which fields it reads. We also list what text is sent for each task. Your privacy officer can then judge the setup on facts.

The agent works under its own login, with the least access its task needs. Every action is logged. At the end of the day, it picks a few of the files it handled at random for a staff member to check.

How we protect your files →

From $1,700 per agent, then $170 per month for maintenance, plus applicable taxes.

One agent handles one queue. We scope it with your office manager after a first call, based on the systems you already use. Nothing in your EHR or practice management system has to change.

See pricing →