What an AI medical receptionist does, and what it costs.

Search AI medical receptionist, or AI receptionist for doctors, and the same two products come back. One is software that speaks. It answers the clinic telephone, holds a spoken conversation and rings off. The other is software that writes. It replies in a chat window on the practice's own website, in the language the patient typed. The marketing blurs the two. Your buying decision should not. They reach different patients, and they go wrong in different ways.

Adoomi builds the written one. It replies on your clinic's website, and your telephone keeps ringing where it rings now. Adoomi's AI phone agent sits on a waitlist and has yet to ship. A third option has no AI in it at all — a remote human, employed elsewhere, greeting your callers as your practice — and the virtual medical receptionist guide weighs all three together.

Take the promises out and a short, real list is left. It answers what your website already publishes, straight away, whether or not anyone is at the desk. It writes down who is asking and what they want. Then it hands the enquiry to a person your practice named.

• Published facts, answered on the spot. Your fees as the page lists them, the insurers you take, how registration works, what a health screen covers, how to reach you once the doors shut. A website chatbot answers strictly from pages your practice approved. There is nothing else for it to draw on.
• The same answer, day or night. Private medicine gets researched after the working day ends, precisely when a clinic has fewest people free to reply. A patient reading your fee page on a Sunday night gets an answer on Sunday night. They are still on the page when it arrives.
• Who is asking, written down. Lead capture asks the dull questions before a person spends time on them: name, contact, whether your practice already holds a record, what they want and when they could come in.
• A handover to one named person. The patient keeps typing to your team over WhatsApp, and an email alert goes to the person your practice put down for that kind of enquiry. Their own wording travels across, so nobody has to start again.
• Wording your practice signed off. You read what the assistant proposes to say before a patient does, and change whatever you dislike. That includes the first line a patient sees when the chat window appears, which is the part most practices want to word themselves.

Triage is the judgement of how ill somebody is and how soon they should be seen. A possible cause, an urgency rating, a word of reassurance that a symptom sounds minor — each one is a clinical act, and each one belongs to a clinician. So an AI receptionist in a clinic does none of them, on a Tuesday morning and over a bank holiday alike.

That limit holds because of the way the assistant is built. It answers only from material your practice approved, and clinical judgement never went into it. Guardrails and handoff is where those rules get set, once, before go-live. The healthcare template arrives with the tighter version already switched on.

This is the question a practice manager gets asked in the corridor, so it deserves a straight answer. Adoomi replies in writing, in a chat window on your own site. Whether it introduces itself as software is your decision, made in the review step, before any patient reads a word of it.

What tends to bother patients is being fobbed off, rather than being answered by a machine. Writing helps there. A patient reads the answer, keeps it on screen, reads it twice and forwards it to themselves. Where the answer runs out, they reach a person with a name and a job at your practice.

Your practice reads every answer before a patient does. Nothing goes live until somebody at the clinic has signed off the wording.

Control is the part worth checking in a trial. Read what the assistant proposes to say, put your worst questions to it deliberately, and change your own page wherever the wording is wrong. Conversation review then keeps every thread in full, handovers included. What patients were told becomes something you read, instead of something you assume.

The two sides are priced in different ways, which is why quotes are hard to lay side by side. A telephone answering service sells you people's time. You pay per call or per minute, often above a monthly minimum. So the invoice climbs in exactly the month your phone was busiest.

Ask any telephone provider for both figures at once: the per-call rate and the monthly minimum. Either one on its own tells you very little. The real figure sits on their tariff sheet or in the quote they write for you, never in the headline on the website.

Adoomi charges the same whether the month is busy or quiet. Free costs £0 and carries 50 message credits, and a credit is spent each time the assistant answers. Then Local is £8 for 200 credits, Growth £20 for 500, Scale £75 for 4,000, and Advanced £250 for 14,000. A credit covers one answer on the everyday models, and more than one on the more advanced ones. The pricing page lays all five out together.

Getting live takes about ten minutes. Point Adoomi at the clinic website, work through the draft answers, then paste one line into your pages. The middle step is where the time really goes, because you are settling what a stranger may be told about your practice, in writing, months before anybody meets them. The trial gives you 14 days and 200 messages, and asks for no card.

1. Start with last month. Open the call log and mark each call that came in with nobody on the desk. Then count the written ones — contact forms, emails — that sat unanswered overnight or longer.
2. Price the spoken side. Put that call count to two telephone answering providers and ask each for a quote, with the per-call rate and the monthly minimum both written down.
3. Price the written side. One figure, unchanged whichever kind of month you had. The Local plan costs £8 and carries 200 message credits, spending one each time the assistant answers.
4. Then read the answers. Point the £0 Free plan at your own published pages and read the drafts it produces. Judge those against the enquiries you counted in step one, instead of against a demo somebody else built.

An assistant that works through the evening is only worth having if it knows where to send somebody who should be seen sooner. It does that by showing what your own site publishes, word for word, and adding nothing of its own. The wording is yours. The assistant is the thing that repeats it at the weekend.

Those routes differ by country, and a practice writing this for the first time usually wants a model to start from. Adapt whichever row below fits, publish it on your contact page, and the assistant reads it back to the patient who needs it.

American readers ask about HIPAA at roughly this point, so here is the honest version. HIPAA is the United States rulebook for protected health information. Adoomi makes no claim about it. Anyone buying in the States should ask every shortlisted supplier, Adoomi among them, and keep the reply in writing.

On data, since somebody will ask you: chats are held on EU infrastructure, and a GDPR request will export them or wipe them. The chat window is cookie-free, and the logs carry identifiers only, in place of the words a patient typed. None of this makes your practice compliant with anything — that job belongs to your registrations, your policies and the way your team works.

Every supplier in this category, this page included, is advertising. These four questions separate what has shipped from what is on a roadmap. Each one has an answer a supplier can show you rather than describe.

1. Ask to read real transcripts. You want actual conversations rather than a scripted demo, including the ones that went badly. A supplier who keeps failed conversations away from a buyer is telling you something. Read a week of them before you sign anything.
2. Ask what it does with a question it cannot answer. This is where these products separate. The honest answer is that it says so and hands over to a named person, carrying the question with it. The dangerous answer is that it has a go.
3. Ask where the data sits and who can erase it. You want a country, a published sub-processor list, and a route for a patient who wants their conversation deleted. Adoomi's answer: EU infrastructure, export or erasure on a GDPR request, identifiers in the logs in place of message bodies.
4. Ask which parts have actually shipped. Then apply the same test here. Adoomi's website assistant is live and answering today. Adoomi's AI phone agent has not shipped and remains waitlist-only. A supplier who blurs that line for a buyer has usually blurred it internally too.