Appointment confirmation and reminders
Detail
Calls the patient at the notice period you set, confirms attendance and, if they cannot come, frees the slot and offers alternatives on the same call. The diary updates without anyone touching it.
Clinics and medical centres
Reception should not be a call centre
In a medical centre every minute of staff time costs money, and much of the day goes on confirming, cancelling, rescheduling and repeating the same information on the phone. Elop takes over that repetitive layer, answers at any hour, and gives your team back the hours currently lost to mechanical work.
- Every call answered at once, no queue
- Writes straight into your diary
- GDPR by design · signed DPA
What happens in your centre today
It is not an attitude problem. It is a volume problem: there are more repetitive calls than there are hands to answer them.
The phone does not stop. The team does.
Detail
At peak times more calls arrive than two people can take. The patient calling at 09:15 hears an engaged tone, and many never try again.
Every peak-time call missed is an appointment not booked.
Every call is answered at once, including the nine o'clock rush.
Confirm, cancel, reschedule. Again.
Detail
Most phone time goes on three identical tasks that need no clinical or administrative judgement — only someone free to pick up.
Skilled staff hours spent on mechanical work.
All three resolve themselves and land in the diary.
Gaps that never get filled
Detail
A cancellation 24 hours out leaves an empty slot. Filling it means calling the waiting list one by one, and there is almost never time.
A full diary in the system, an empty waiting room.
Every cancellation triggers waiting-list calls straight away.
No-shows without warning
Detail
The patient who never confirms is the one most likely not to turn up. Without an active reminder the no-show is treated as inevitable when much of it is avoidable.
Clinicians idle with a closed diary.
Active confirmation before the visit, with nobody calling one by one.
Out of hours, nobody is there
Detail
When the centre closes, so does the phone. Patients call anyway — at night, at weekends, on bank holidays.
Real demand lost for want of someone to catch it.
The phone stays answered at night, at weekends and on bank holidays.
Growing means hiring
Detail
More patients means more calls, and more calls means more reception staff. Cost rises in a straight line with volume.
Margin that does not grow at the pace activity does.
More patients no longer means more people on reception.
What Elop does for your centre
Concrete processes, end to end, recorded in your system. If it is not written where your team works, we do not consider it resolved.
Cancellations and rescheduling
Detail
The patient calls, explains in natural language, and the agent finds a slot under your centre’s rules: clinician, test type, room, duration. No touch-tone menus, no waiting for someone to pick up.
Active waiting list
Detail
When a slot frees up, Elop calls the waiting list in priority order until it is filled. What used to be the task that never got done now happens in minutes, automatically.
Patient reactivation
Detail
Outbound campaigns to patients who have not been seen for a while: annual check-ups, treatment follow-up, post-operative review. With the script and tone you approve, and a clear opt-out.
Administrative enquiries
Detail
Opening hours, location, parking, test preparation, documents to bring, insurance cover. FAQs resolved on the first call, at any hour.
Surveys and clinical follow-up
Detail
Post-visit satisfaction surveys and structured clinical-trial follow-up, with questions read verbatim and answers recorded exactly as given.
A clearly defined handover
Detail
A clinical urgency, a complaint or a distressed patient are not cases to automate. We agree with you exactly where the agent stops and passes the call to your team with the context already gathered.
Out-of-hours cover
Detail
At night, at weekends and on bank holidays the agent answers, books what can be booked, and records the rest so your team sees it first thing.
What changes, and where you see it
These are the metrics we ask to be measured on. The range depends on where each centre starts; we agree the baseline with you before going live.
- 0 s
Phone wait time
The agent answers every call simultaneously. No queue and no engaged tone, not even in the nine o’clock rush.
- 24/7
Real cover
Nights, weekends and bank holidays included, with no on-call rota and no outsourced call centre.
- Hours/week
Time returned to reception
Confirmations and rescheduling stop occupying people. That time goes back to in-person care, which is where the patient notices.
- Gaps filled
Waiting list activated instantly
Every cancellation triggers automatic calls until the slot is filled, instead of waiting for someone to find a spare moment.
It connects to what you already run
We are not asking you to change software. The agent reads and writes in your scheduling system so the work is recorded where your team already looks.
If your software has no API we work with scheduled imports and exports. We check this in the first technical session, before you sign anything.
Integrations- Appointment scheduling and clinic diary software
- Electronic health records via API
- CRM and patient databases
- Calendars (Google Calendar, Microsoft 365)
- Messaging for reminders (SMS, WhatsApp Business, email)
- Webhooks and scheduled files where no API exists
Hear it yourself
Pick the scenario closest to your centre and leave your number. You will get a real call within seconds.
- The call arrives within seconds.
- Talk normally: interrupt, ask, change the subject.
- No cost, no commitment, and the conversation is not recorded.
What centres ask us before starting
The same questions, in the same order, in almost every first meeting.
How will an older patient take it?
Better than people expect, because there is no menu and nothing to dial: you just talk. The agent repeats information when needed, slows down when it detects difficulty, and hands over to a person the moment the patient asks. In healthcare rollouts that handover is one of the first things we define.
What about health data?
The agent works with scheduling data, not clinical records, unless a specific flow requires it and we agree that in writing. We sign a DPA as processor, minimise what is stored and document the legal basis. If a flow involves special categories of data we handle it separately, with its own assessment.
Are patient calls recorded?
Only if your centre chooses to, and always with the prior notice to the patient that the law requires. We publish the recording clause we apply and it is covered by the DPA. Many centres start without recording and enable it later purely for quality control.
What if the system goes down?
Calls fall back to your existing number. Automating must never mean losing your phone line: operational continuity is one of the commitments we publish and it forms part of the service agreement.
How long until it is running?
An appointment confirmation and reminder flow goes through script design, connecting the diary and testing against real calls before opening full volume. We set the timeline with you in the technical session.
Will I have to let someone go?
The centres we work with do not cut headcount. They stop needing to add it in order to grow, and reassign to reception the hours that used to go on the phone. The part of the job that disappears is the repetitive part — usually also the part that wears people down.
Start with one flow, not a platform
You do not need to automate the whole centre at once. We pick the process costing you the most time — usually appointment confirmation — put it into production with agreed metrics, and decide the next step with real data on the table.
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