The Small Practice Pack
The call you missed at 4:50pm is still a patient.
A practice of five to fifty people cannot staff a front desk against every inbound call — through lunch, during procedures, after close. This is a fixed-scope system that answers what your team cannot, captures who it was and what they needed, and puts it in front of you in a form you can act on the same day.
Fixed scope · Fixed fee · Compliance built in, not bolted on
You already have the evidence for this.
There are widely-quoted figures about what missed calls cost a small business. They come from vendors selling the fix, so we will not repeat them here. The honest version is simpler and you can check it yourself: pull your own call log for last month and count the inbound calls with no answer, then count how many of those numbers ever called back.
For most practices that number is uncomfortable, and it is concentrated in the predictable places — the lunch hour, the last forty minutes of the day, and every hour you are closed. A caller who reaches voicemail at a dental office usually calls the next dental office. That is the whole business case, and it belongs to your data rather than ours.
Four things, installed and working.
This is a product, not an open-ended engagement. The scope below is what gets built, written into a scope statement you sign before any work starts.
Missed-call capture 01
Any inbound call your team does not pick up is answered, the caller’s reason for calling is captured in their own words, and a structured summary reaches your staff by text and email within moments — not a voicemail somebody has to transcribe tomorrow morning.
Intake triage 02
New-patient and new-client enquiries are separated from existing-patient questions, billing calls and vendors, then routed accordingly. Urgent language is flagged rather than interpreted — the system escalates, it does not diagnose.
Appointment reminders 03
Reminders go out on your schedule and confirmations come back into one place, with consent captured at intake and opt-outs honoured across both voice and text. The consent record is the deliverable as much as the reminder is.
A weekly page you will actually read 04
One page: how many calls came in, how many your team answered, how many the system caught, what the callers wanted, and which enquiries are still unresolved. Enough to tell whether this is working and to staff against the pattern.
Built in from day one, because retrofitting it does not work.
Automated calling and texting into a healthcare or legal practice is a regulated activity. Most automation work sold to small practices treats this as the client’s problem. It is not — and the exposure runs in both directions.
HIPAA business associate agreement
Handling your patient information makes us a business associate with direct liability. A signed BAA is part of the engagement, and the system is designed so protected health information stays in your systems wherever the workflow allows it.
TCPA consent, captured and logged
The FCC’s healthcare exemption covers prerecorded voice reminders. It was never extended to SMS. Text reminders therefore need prior express consent, which is captured at intake, logged with a timestamp, and revocable across every channel.
Ohio breach notification
ORC 1349.19 requires notification within 45 days. Ohio’s Data Protection Act, ORC Chapter 1354, provides an affirmative defence where a recognised cybersecurity programme is maintained — we build to that standard and encrypt so the safe harbour applies.
Call recording
Ohio (ORC 2933.52) and Kentucky are both one-party-consent states, so your practice may record calls it is party to. We still play a notice, because callers from two-party states are a real and avoidable exposure.
We are not your lawyers. BAA templates, consent language and the master services agreement are attorney-reviewed, and we will tell you plainly when something needs your own counsel rather than ours.
Four steps, and you can stop after any of them.
A thirty-minute call
What your phones actually do now, who answers them, and where the gaps are. If this is not a fit we will say so on that call rather than sell you an assessment to find out.
No chargeThe assessment
We look at your real call patterns and scheduling workflow and write up what can be automated, what should not be, and what it will take. You own the document either way — it is useful even if you never hire us.
Credited in full against an install booked within 30 daysThe install
Fixed fee against a written scope statement with acceptance criteria. Anything outside that scope goes through a change order with a price attached before work starts, which is how both sides avoid the argument that ends most of these projects.
Scoped per engagementThe care plan
Monitoring, prompt tuning, and absorbing the platform changes that silently break automations — carriers, scheduling software, model providers. The retainer enumerates exactly what is included and how many support hours come with it. Thirty days’ notice, and your data exports on the way out.
Optional, monthly
What it does, and what it will not.
The second list matters more than the first. Most automation disappointment comes from a boundary nobody wrote down.
It does
- Answer inbound calls your team cannot reach
- Capture the caller, the callback number and the reason
- Separate new enquiries from existing patients and vendors
- Send reminders and collect confirmations
- Log consent and honour opt-outs across channels
- Flag urgent language for a human immediately
- Report weekly on what came in and what is unresolved
It does not
- Give clinical or legal advice to a caller
- Triage medical urgency — it escalates, it does not judge
- Replace your front desk, or anyone on your staff
- Write into your practice management system without your sign-off
- Send marketing messages under appointment-reminder consent
- Store protected health information where the workflow allows otherwise
- Lock you in — your workflows and data are yours
Built for practices with a front desk under pressure.
Roughly five to fifty people — large enough that the phone genuinely rings, small enough that nobody is employed solely to answer it. Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.
Start with the call.
Thirty minutes, no charge, and a straight answer about whether this is worth doing at your practice. If your phones are already covered, that is a short conversation and we will both have saved some time.
Two more packs are in build — Restaurant Ops, around live food-cost and menu margin data, and Property Manager, around tenant enquiry routing and maintenance intake. Ask if either is closer to your problem than this one.