Conversational AI for healthcare appointments

Missed appointments are not a reminder problem. They are a conversation problem.

CliniCall answers your phones, and talks with patients — by voice, SMS and WhatsApp — to book, confirm, rebook and refill appointments in real time. Capacity your service has already paid for gets used, instead of lost.

Voice, SMS and WhatsAppAn operational tool, not a medical deviceSet up in days, not months
Outbound voice call3 days before · Dermatology
Outcome
Freed slot
Reception time used
Representative conversation. Names, clinics and times are fictional.
The problem

Every empty slot was already funded, staffed and paid for.

A missed appointment is not just a gap in a diary. It is clinical time the system bought and did not get: a longer waiting list, a patient who was not seen, and a slot that could have gone to someone else who was waiting for it.

~£1bnEstimated annual cost of missed appointments to the NHSWidely cited NHS England estimate
£136+Estimated cost of a single missed appointmentNHS Lanarkshire estimate
7.39mTreatments on the NHS England waiting listNHS England, September 2025
2%Annual productivity improvement asked of NHS providersNHS 10 Year Health Plan
Why reminders alone cannot close this. A reminder cannot negotiate. When a patient cannot attend, the service needs to know now, offer an alternative now, and offer the freed slot to someone else now. That is a conversation — and conversations have never scaled with reception staff alone.
The platform

Two engines. One platform.

Most tools in this space do one half of the job: they tell patients about appointments, or they help the few patients who already engage to move them. CliniCall does both halves, and joins them together.

  • Conversational calling engine. Real two-way, natural-language conversations that confirm, decline and reschedule — escalating intelligently across SMS, voice and WhatsApp, with handover to a person built in from the start.
  • Real-time scheduling and backfill engine. The moment a slot is released, it is offered to the right patient on the waiting list under your clinical rules, so freed capacity is used rather than quietly lost.

It listens, then acts

No keypad menus and no scripted branches. A patient can say “not Thursday, I’m working” and get a real answer, in the same call.

It writes back in real time

Designed to read and write directly to scheduling systems, because a rebooking that has to be re-keyed by reception is only half a rebooking.

It hands over cleanly

Anything outside the rules goes to a person, with the full context attached. Staff spend their time on exceptions, not on dialling.

Four products, one platform

From the moment a patient rings, to the clinic that fell over.

CliniCall covers the whole appointment lifecycle in four parts — inbound and outbound, both sides of the missed-appointment problem. Choose the one that looks most like your service.

Front Door · Inbound

Answer every call, and give the clinician a clean list

The practice phone stops being a bottleneck. Patients get answered straight away, and the clinician gets a structured list to work from instead of a morning of call-backs.

  • A patient phones the practice and speaks to CliniCall, which captures the information needed to book an appointment — the same details a receptionist would take.
  • Every caller arrives with the clinician as a structured summary, not a recording to sit through.
  • The clinician decides who is seen and when — today, next week, or another route entirely. CliniCall makes no clinical judgement at any point.
  • Once the clinician has decided, the platform calls each patient back to tell them their appointment.
The difference: Nobody sits in a phone queue at 8am, and the clinical decisions are made calmly on a complete list rather than one call at a time.
Your number, not ours

What is your service losing, and what is a share of it worth?

Every business case for this starts with one figure: the value of the capacity you are currently losing. Move the sliders to your service and see it. The arithmetic is on screen — nothing is hidden behind it.

Your service

Start from a typical service, then move the sliders to match yours.

Across every clinic and clinician in scope — a single practice, a department, a whole board, or a system.
Published NHS rates commonly sit between 5% and 12%, and run higher in some specialties.
NHS Lanarkshire has put a routine missed appointment at £136 or more. Diagnostics, theatre lists and private clinics are worth considerably more than that — use your own figure.
How much of the lost capacity CliniCall converts back into a used slot. We measure the real figure with you from week one.
Capacity worth recovering, each year£1.6m12,096 appointments a year that would otherwise be lost, put back into use.
Capacity lost to missed appointments£4.7m
Recovered at 35%£1.6m
Appointments a year432,000
Missed a year34,560
Recovered a year12,096

Arithmetic only, over 48 operating weeks. An estimate to start a conversation, not a forecast.

Model this properly with us

An illustrative model using your own inputs, not a forecast or a guarantee. Real outcomes are measured from your own data during a pilot. See the assumptions in full.

Confirm & Backfill · hear it for yourself

This is what your patients actually hear.

A Confirm & Backfill call, start to finish: CliniCall checks a patient can still attend, and moves them when they cannot. Natural conversation, no scripts and no keypad menus. Fifty seconds will tell you more than the rest of this page.

Patient name and clinic details in this recording are fictional.

Hear it against your own pathways
Where it fits

Not another reminder. Not another portal. Not another form.

CliniCall sits alongside what you already run and does the parts none of them can: reach the patients who do not respond, put a freed slot back to work, and answer the phone when it rings.

Outbound — reaching patients about an appointment

 One-way remindersSelf-service portalsCliniCall
Reaches patients who do not respondNo — the message is sent and that is the end of itNo — the patient has to come to itYes, escalating across channels until a person is reached
Handles “I can’t make that”Directs the patient to phone the practiceOnly if the patient is digitally confidentRebooks inside the same conversation, in natural language
Fills the slot that was freedNoOnly if another patient happens to lookOffers it to the right waiting patient automatically
Recovers a whole cancelled clinicNoNoContacts and rebooks the whole list in parallel
Effect on reception workloadIncreases it — the calls come back inboundReduces it for digital patients onlyTakes the repetitive calls off the team entirely

Inbound — when the patient rings you

 Call queue & call-backOnline triage formsCliniCall Front Door
What happens at 8amEveryone waits; the queue is the productNothing — the form is open, but the phone still ringsEvery caller is answered at once. There is no queue
Reaches patients who will not use a web formYes, if they hold long enoughNo — that is the cohort it missesYes. It is a phone call, which is what they already do
Who decides urgencyWhoever answers, under pressureOften the tool, by algorithmYour clinician, every time. Front Door never triages
What the clinician receivesA note, if there was time to write oneWhatever the patient typedA structured summary of every caller, in one list
How the patient finds outThey ring back, or wait for a callA message, if they check itCliniCall calls them once the clinician has decided

Online triage tools that assess urgency may be regulated as medical devices. Front Door is not, and is not intended to be, because the clinical decision stays with your clinician. How we hold that line.

Designed for healthcare

Built around governance, not bolted onto it.

The first questions any NHS service asks are about safety, data and accountability. They are the right questions, and they shaped how CliniCall was built.

Safety-first by design

Your clinical rules govern which appointment types can be moved and who is offered a freed slot first. Every conversation can hand off to a person.

Augments, never replaces

CliniCall works alongside existing letters and channels, protecting reachability and equality of access rather than assuming every patient is digital-first.

Privacy built in

Secure links carry no patient-identifiable information, and deployments are grounded in consent and a data protection impact assessment from day one.

Real-time integration

Designed to read and write directly to NHS scheduling systems, because real-time write-back is where the return multiplies.

An operational tool

CliniCall supports administration and scheduling. It is not a clinical or diagnostic medical device, and it never makes clinical decisions.

Measured from day one

Confirmation rates, decline lead-time and backfill rates are tracked from the first deployment, so the business case is evidenced rather than asserted.

Read the governance detail

Run a free pilot in your service.

We are expanding the pilot programme with a small number of practices, health boards and trusts. Free for selected services, set up in days, no long-term commitment — so you can measure the effect on your own missed-appointment rate before you invest anything.