An AI receptionist physiotherapist practices can leave on the line while they treat

Physiotherapy appointments reach your team as callback requests rather than as entries in your diary. Someone at the practice then phones the patient, settles the date and time with them and enters the session themselves. Until that conversation has taken place, the patient holds no appointment, and the receptionist tells the caller that the team will be in touch.

The request records the patient’s name, contact number and whether they are new or already receiving treatment. It includes the prescription’s reason in their words, their preferred start date and suitable hours. For a child or a dependent adult, it also records who is calling on their behalf. Nothing outside the fields your practice chose at set-up is asked for.

Booking a course of physiotherapy is rarely a matter of finding one empty hour. A knee after surgery may need a longer first session, a pelvic floor programme goes to the practitioners trained for it, and a treatment pool or a gym may be available only at certain times. Your team knows those constraints, which is why the series is planned by a person who can see the whole diary.

Take Inès, who calls on a Thursday evening a few days after her shoulder operation, with a prescription for rehabilitation in her bag. The receptionist records that she is a new patient, that her surgeon wants treatment to start soon and that she can only come in the late afternoon because she cannot drive yet. On Friday morning your team reads the request, calls her and plans her first sessions around those afternoons.

A caller can also speak to a person while still on the line, if someone is at the desk. The receptionist transfers to the desk when it is staffed and a transfer line is configured; otherwise it takes a callback request. The guide on deciding between a live transfer and a return call helps a practice sort its calls between the two, given the staff it has.

Every request appears in your dashboard with a written summary and the reason in the patient’s own words. In a group practice, whoever handles the diary that day works through the list in the order the schedule allows. A physiotherapist on their own can deal with it at the end of the morning, without listening to a recording first.

The summary also stays on record, which helps when a patient later says they rang and nobody called back. The full path of a call, from the greeting to the request in your list, is set out on the page explaining how ClinicAll works.

A physiotherapy practice treats many people in the weeks after an operation or a period in bed, and some of their calls describe something more serious than a stiff joint. The receptionist gives no medical advice and applies your emergency rules, which your physiotherapists draft before go-live. It does not decide on its own that a call is urgent.

Chest pain and sudden breathing difficulties, particularly after surgery or immobilisation, require an immediate call to 15 or 112, according to the Assurance Maladie site ameli.fr in France. For a practice treating patients after joint replacements or fractures in a cast, this is the rule to write first. A patient who rings to postpone a session because they feel breathless and have chest pain then hears the emergency numbers, not an offer of another date.

Assurance Maladie (ameli.fr) advises callers in France to dial 15 or 112 immediately for sudden limb weakness, facial asymmetry or speech problems, even if the signs disappear. Neurological rehabilitation brings these patients and their families to your phone. With the rule in place, a relative who mentions that the signs came and went still receives the instruction, and a record of the call waits for your team.

Sciatica is everyday work for a physiotherapist, so the signs that change its urgency deserve their own rule. The ameli.fr page on sciatica lists numbness around the perineum, loss of strength in a leg and problems with urination or bowel control as reasons for urgent medical assessment. If your rules name them, the receptionist passes that instruction to the caller instead of filing an ordinary request for the next available session.

In Germany, the KBV’s page on emergency care directs life-threatening emergencies to 112, while 116117 takes urgent problems that are not life-threatening yet cannot wait until the next consultation. A practice there can enter both numbers in its rules, each with the situations it covers. The receptionist relays them as written; picking one on the caller’s behalf is never left to it.

Write these rules with your physiotherapists, in the words a patient would use rather than clinical terms, and set down what the receptionist should say for each. Review them when your caseload changes, for example when you start taking post-operative patients from a new surgical team. A rule only helps if the line is answered when the call comes, and the opening-hours coverage tool shows when your practice leaves nobody by the phone.