Virtual Receptionist for a Clinic: Answering That Does Not Interrupt a Treatment

This page is written for clinics where the therapist is also the receptionist: physiotherapy, aesthetics and medical cosmetics, complementary medicine, dietitians, speech therapists, psychologists. In such a clinic the phone rings exactly when your hands are on the patient, and the missed call is usually a new patient moving on to the next clinic on Google.

A Tuesday at a physiotherapy clinic: where the calls disappear

Ronit runs a physiotherapy clinic in Givatayim with one more therapist. Treatments run 45 minutes, back to back, from 8:00 to 19:00. During a treatment the phone is on silent. On a typical Tuesday she finds 11 missed calls, returns half at lunch and the rest at 19:30, and reaches four people. Two of them have already booked elsewhere.

These are the calls that came in that day, and every clinic will recognize them: 8:10, a new patient asks whether the clinic accepts a Maccabi referral and what to bring. 9:40, an existing patient wants to move Thursday's appointment. 11:05, a man with sharp back pain after lifting something, struggling to stand. 12:30, an equipment sales rep. 16:00, a woman asks the price of a series of 10 treatments. 18:50, a mother asks whether the clinic treats 6-year-olds.

What the assistant does with each of those calls

At the end of the day Ronit does not return 11 calls. She approves 4 appointments with one click, phones one person in pain, and marks the price question for a 3-minute call. The rep's call stays on the list without disturbing anyone.

What the assistant collects, and what it never asks

In the characterization you tick the details the clinic needs. The assistant asks only those, in an order that makes sense in conversation, and reads the phone number back to confirm it.

• Collected: full name, phone, treatment type or a brief reason for calling, new or existing patient, convenient times, health fund and whether there is a referral (if the clinic works with health funds).
• Not collected unless you enable the field: ID number, detailed medical history, payment details. Recording those adds risk without serving the call.
• Agreed in advance: what to say about prices, whether private insurance is accepted, the address and parking instructions, and what equipment or clothing to bring.

Urgency rules for a clinic: what gets transferred immediately

In a clinic the gap between “I want an appointment next week” and “I cannot stand up” is the gap between a routine inquiry and a case that needs the therapist now. In the characterization you define the words and situations, and the assistant acts on them.

Privacy in the clinic: Amendment 13, recordings and medical data

Amendment 13 to the Privacy Protection Law came into force on 14 August 2025. Call details are personal data, and what a patient says about their body is specially sensitive information. The clinic is the data controller, and Azorly holds the data on its behalf under a data processing agreement. In practice that means the following.

• Notice at the start: the assistant says it is a digital assistant and that the call is recorded. That satisfies the notice duty in section 11 of the Privacy Protection Law and the Privacy Protection Authority's disclosure requirement for AI systems.
• Lawful recording: under the Secret Monitoring Law a party to a call may record it, and the clinic is a party.
• Minimal collection: only the fields you enabled. No ID number and no medical history by default.
• Access and retention: recordings and transcripts live in the clinic's dashboard, with a user per team member and a retention period you set. A Consumer Protection Law amendment requires some medical-sector businesses to keep recordings of sales calls for two years, and retention can be set accordingly.
• A patient's request for a copy: a recording can be exported with one click.

Connecting without changing your number or interrupting a treatment

What it costs a clinic