In a practice, the phone always rings at the wrong moment: during a consultation, while someone is at the front desk, over lunch. And most of those calls ask the same few things.
An AI phone assistant takes those calls for you, and sends you a written summary of each. Here is what you can hand over, where the line is, and what a practice settles before switching it on.
The calls you can hand over
These are the everyday calls, the ones that need no medical judgement:
- Appointments. Booking, moving and cancelling, in the free slots of your calendar once it is connected. Without a connected calendar, the assistant notes the request and your team confirms.
- Practical questions. Opening hours, address, parking, what to bring, how to get a certificate. Only from the information you have given it.
- Prescription renewals. The assistant notes the request, the name and the number. The practice decides.
- Messages. Who called, why, and which number to call back, in an email after every call.
- Closures. Holidays and public holidays announced correctly, never a promise that you are open on a day you are not.
The assistant decided nothing: the request is noted, the doctor decides. That is exactly the split that works.
Where the line is
The right split does not follow how hard a call is, but what kind of call it is: what gets written down goes to the assistant, what gets decided goes to the team.
| Assistant | Practice team | |
|---|---|---|
| Book, move, cancel an appointment | Yes, calendar connected | Yes |
| Hours, address, access | Yes | Yes |
| Take a message | Yes, with the number | Yes |
| Prescription renewal | Notes the request, decides nothing | Decides |
| Test results | Never | After checking |
| Symptoms, medical advice | Never, passes to the team | Yes |
| Life-threatening emergency | Points to 144 | Yes |
Three rules are built into the assistant itself:
- No triage. Judging whether a symptom can wait until tomorrow is a medical act. For a call about a symptom, the assistant takes a message for the team.
- No advice, no results. No dosages, no test values, no “that can wait”.
- 144 for a life-threatening emergency. One sentence, straight away.
“… with thoughtful design, rigorous validation, and responsible deployment, generative AI voice agents could become a critical extension of the care team …”
Medical confidentiality, in practice
Swiss professional secrecy covers the doctor and the people assisting them. Whether an outside service answering the phone counts as one of them, or as a third party, is not settled in Swiss law. The safe route is the one practices already use for a billing office: tell your patients.
In practice, two or three lines in your patient information: the line is handled by an outside service, this is what the service does, and this is what is kept. The SAMW / FMH practice guide also names artificial intelligence as a case where a data protection impact assessment may be needed: plan for one.
What happens to the data
A call to a practice can say why someone needs to see a doctor. At Voko, what remains of it is limited from the start:
- The audio is not recorded by default. Recording only runs if you switch it on, and callers are then told. For a practice, the written summary is enough: there is no need to switch it on.
- The caller’s number and the summary are erased after 30 days by default, or after the delay you choose. What stays is what billing needs: date, duration, minutes.
- No AI training. The data is used to provide the service, never to train models.
- Every provider is named, with its country, in our privacy policy. We do not claim to host your data in Switzerland: we tell you where it goes.
For more on the law, read what Swiss law actually requires of a voice assistant.
Getting started in a practice
- Choose when the assistant answers
The usual shape: the calls your team cannot take during consultations, over lunch and in the evening. Outside that, a greeting and a voicemail.
- Give it your practice's words
The names of the doctors, the practice, nearby villages and common medications. A short list is enough for those words to be understood.
- Set the exit
A transfer number for opening hours, and one clear rule: any call about a symptom goes to the team.
- Read the first ten calls
The summaries of the first real calls show what is left to adjust: a phrasing, a misheard word, an unnecessary question. Rarely the technology.
The assistant handles what gets written down, your team handles what gets decided. To see what that looks like for a practice, visit our page for medical practices. To hear it, enter your practice's website: in under a minute, an assistant that knows your services and opening hours answers you.