Patient intake: the new patient call answered and scheduled

Your front desk is in front of a patient. Meanwhile the phone rings with a new patient who found you online, and the third time it rings out they book somewhere else.

Nobody at the practice ever finds out. The schedule looks fine, because it’s full of the patients who were persistent enough to get through, and the gap between "busy" and "growing" gets blamed on marketing.

Your questions, in your order, on the phone while the patient is still willing to answer:

• Name, date of birth, phone and email
• New patient or returning
• What they need and roughly when — the reason for the visit in their own words
• Insurance carrier and plan, if you collect it before scheduling
• Referring provider, if applicable
• Preferred days and times, and whether they’d take a short-notice slot
• How they heard about the practice

Then we book it against your calendar rules — appointment type, duration, provider, buffers, how far out — and confirm it with the patient before hanging up. How booking works.

We are not clinical staff and we don’t behave as if we were. We don’t interpret symptoms, don’t advise whether something can wait, don’t discuss medication, and don’t decide urgency on medical grounds.

When a caller describes a symptom, the script routes: to your triage line, to your on-call clinician, or to emergency services with the direct instruction to hang up and dial 911 if the situation matches the list you’ve given us. That list is written with your practice during setup and we follow it word for word.

The costly call for a full practice isn’t the new patient — it’s the cancellation at 8 a.m. for an 11 a.m. slot. Left alone, that’s three hours of clinical capacity gone.

If you keep a short-notice list, we work it when a cancellation lands, rather than letting the gap sit until someone at the desk has a free minute. How this plays out in dental practices.

Health calls are exactly where a language barrier does the most damage: the caller is trying to describe something they’re worried about, in a second language, to a stranger. We answer in Spanish on the same number, with the same script and the same clinical boundary. How bilingual reception works.

One answered call = one billable call, whatever we do on it, including the booking, the insurance capture and any transfer your rules require. Plans from $119 to $649; practices with long intake forms or multi-provider scheduling are Custom Operations. Full pricing.