The phone is still the main way into most private healthcare institutions. A patient who wants an appointment, has a question about price or is running late calls. And the phone rings exactly when everyone is busy: the nurse is with a patient, the front desk is taking a payment, the doctor is in the middle of an exam.
How big the problem is
For clinics in BiH, Croatia and Serbia, there are no publicly available measurements of missed calls. Data from other countries nonetheless shows the same pattern.
- In Germany, 88% of respondents agree that doctors’ offices are often hard to reach by phone (Bitkom, 2024).
- In England, 56.9% of patients say it is easy to reach their GP practice by phone (GP Patient Survey, Ipsos for NHS England, 2026). The rest do not say so.
- In the call centers of the US Veterans Health Administration, the share of calls that callers abandoned before being answered fell from 12.0% to 8.3% after two years of work on availability, and a longer wait for an answer was associated with patients’ poorer impressions of whether they could get urgent care on time (Griffith et al., American Journal of Managed Care, 2019).
What an unanswered call costs
The cost does not show up on an invoice, but it shows up in the calendar and at the front desk.
- An appointment that was never booked. A patient who can’t reach your clinic may call another one. That appointment does not come back.
- An empty slot that could have been filled. A patient who wanted to cancel but reached no one often simply doesn’t show up.
- Interrupted work. Every call taken in the middle of an exam or a payment interrupts something else. The front desk does two jobs at once, both worse.
- The same questions, day after day. Opening hours, prices, preparation for an exam, parking. The answers don’t change, and someone says them again every time.
How to reduce the number of missed calls
1. Measure. Most phone systems and carriers show the number of received and missed calls per hour. Without that number you don’t know when the problem is biggest.
2. Staff to the calls, not the other way around. If most calls come in the morning, the front desk should not be handling payments and check-in at the same time then.
3. Take repeat questions off the phone. Publish opening hours, prices and preparation instructions on your website, so patients find the answer without calling.
4. Cover the times when no one is there. After hours, on weekends and during breaks, the phone goes unanswered. An answering machine takes messages, but it doesn’t book appointments.
5. Introduce an AI phone assistant. An assistant such as AiMED Voice answers every call, books appointments directly into the clinic’s calendar, answers questions from what the clinic enters and logs every conversation with a summary. At the start of the call, the caller hears that they are talking to an AI assistant and that the conversation is recorded.
What the assistant does not solve
An AI assistant does not replace a doctor and does not give medical advice. It does not interpret symptoms, does not assess urgency and does not read reports. When a caller says they have urgent symptoms, it tells them to call emergency services on 112. When a caller asks for a person, the call goes to the clinic.
What it handles is administration: answering the phone, booking, rescheduling and canceling appointments, and answering organizational questions. That is exactly the part of the work that makes the phone go unanswered.
To see one call from pickup to the record in the portal, watch the animated presentation on the How it works page. If you would like to see the assistant with your services and calendar, request a demo.
