What a virtual medical receptionist is, and which kind a practice needs.

Search virtual medical receptionist and you get three different products on one results page, which is why the prices look so far apart. One listing sells a trained person in another building, answering your line under your practice name. Another sells software that holds a spoken conversation on that line. A third sells a chat assistant answering on the practice's own website. All three get called a medical office virtual receptionist, and only one of them catches the enquiries your clinic is actually missing.

The oldest of the three still covers plenty of practices. A medical answering service puts a human on your line when the desk is unstaffed. It is the same product as a medical call answering service, and the thing people search for as “answering service for doctors office”. They greet the caller as your practice, follow your script, take a message, and pass anything urgent to whoever is on call. Give them access to your appointment system and many will book into it.

One group of patients never touches the phone at all. The patient comparing two private clinics on fees, insurers and how soon they could be seen usually does it from the sofa, on a phone, reading instead of dialling. When that patient closes the tab, the call log looks exactly as it did before, and the one record a practice manager checks has nothing in it about them.

A patient who reads your website and clicks away never shows up in your call log. Phone records can only ever show you the people who rang.

What it takes off the desk is a narrow job, and a useful one. A website chatbot is trained on pages the practice has already published — fees, registration, insurers, what a health screen covers, remote or in person — and answers strictly from those. Ask it something the clinic has yet to publish and it says so and hands over, because it only ever answers from pages you approved. Private GP clinics start with a setup prepared for the sector, with these boundaries already in place.

Lead capture turns that into an enquiry your desk can act on. The dull questions get asked before a person spends time on it: who is asking, whether the clinic already has them on file, what they want, when they could come. The patient can continue on WhatsApp with your team, and an email alert goes to whoever the practice named for that kind of enquiry.

The dividing line is the consulting-room door. Front-of-house work sits on one side: money, access, paperwork, logistics. Everything a clinician would answer sits on the other, and the practice sets the sorting rules at setup.

• Clinical judgement stays with clinicians. Symptoms, results, medication and how soon someone needs seeing are clinician work. Each ends the assistant's turn and alerts the person the practice named.
• Fees come from your published list. Where a figure is only set at the consultation, the assistant takes the enquiry down and your team gives the price.
• The diary stays with reception. Your appointment system sits outside the assistant's reach. It captures who is asking, what for and when they can come, and your desk books it.
• Insurer decisions stay with insurers. It repeats which insurers your page lists and what a patient needs beforehand. Whether a policy authorises an appointment goes to whoever handles that.
• Safeguarding goes to one named person. A message touching a child patient or a vulnerable adult reaches the person the practice nominated for it, ahead of the general inbox.
• The phone line stays exactly as it is. Worth repeating, because the name suggests otherwise: this answers on the website. The AI phone agent is waitlist-only.

One more search is worth clearing up, because it sits right next to this one. Look up medical chatbot or healthcare chatbot and most of what comes back is a symptom checker. A symptom checker asks a patient what hurts and returns a possible cause, or a rating of how urgently they should be seen. That is a different product for a different buyer, and the risks are different too.

Adoomi sits outside that category by design, and will stay outside it. No triage, ever. An urgency rating, a possible cause, a reassurance that something sounds minor — each of those is a clinical act. Each one ends the assistant's turn and reaches the clinician the practice named, with the patient's wording intact. It holds in surgery hours and on a bank holiday alike.

Private medicine gets researched once the working day is over, exactly when a practice is least able to answer. A website assistant keeps working through the evening, the weekend and the bank holiday, so an enquiry that arrives on a Sunday is answered on a Sunday.

What it must never do out of hours is judge how serious anything is. It shows what your own site publishes: the clinic's number, the NHS route for urgent advice, the emergency route. It flags the message to the person the practice named, and says plainly that a clinician replies when the clinic opens. The practice writes that wording, and the assistant repeats it.

That wording is worth publishing whether or not a clinic buys an assistant, because it is what a worried patient needs from your contact page tonight. If your site has yet to publish one, adapt this:

Do the sums on your own records, and treat every brochure — this one included — as advertising:

1. Start with last month. Pull the call log and mark every call that came in while the desk was unstaffed. Separately, count the written enquiries — website and email — that waited a day or longer.
2. Cost the spoken side. Take that call count and apply the per-call rate on your own tariff sheet, if you already buy the service. Where you have yet to buy one, put the same count to two providers and ask them to quote.
3. Cost the written side. One flat figure, identical in a busy month and a quiet one: Adoomi's Local plan is £8 a month for 200 message credits. The full plan comparison lists the other plans.

Whatever share of step one arrived in writing is the part the website side covers, 24/7. Those patients get an answer while they are still on the page, and the repeat questions about opening times and fees stop reaching the desk. Many clinics run both, because each one catches patients the other misses.

Setup takes about ten minutes: connect the clinic website, read what it proposes to say to a patient, and add one line to your site. That middle step is the whole job — you are deciding what the clinic is willing to say to a stranger, in writing, before anyone has met them. Pricing is flat: the Free plan is £0 with 50 message credits and one credit buys one AI answer, then £8 (Local, 200), £20 (Growth, 500) and £75 (Scale, 4,000).

On data, since a practice manager will be asked: conversations are held on EU infrastructure, exported or erased on a GDPR request, logged as identifiers only, and served by a cookie-free chat window. None of this makes you compliant with anything — your registrations, policies and processes do.