Medical Answering Service and Virtual Receptionist for GP Clinics
Your reception line rings out. Patients don't call back.
Frontly answers every call and books the appointment, no hold, no voicemail.
The short answer
What is Frontly's medical answering service?
Frontly is an AI medical answering service and virtual receptionist for Australian GP clinics, medical centres and doctors. It answers every patient call 24/7, books appointments, and handles repeat-script and recall requests, capturing every message in your Frontly dashboard for your reception team. Flat monthly rate, no commitment beyond the plan you pick.
THE PROBLEM
A Missed Call Is a Missed Patient
51%
of online bookings on HotDoc, an Australian booking platform, are made between 5pm and 9am, when reception is closed.
Source: HotDoc, 2019
21x
better odds of qualifying an enquiry when you respond within 5 minutes rather than 30. The patient who cannot get through rings the next clinic.
Source: MIT / InsideSales Lead Response Study, 2007
Instant
Frontly answers the moment the call comes in. Every patient call answered before they hang up.
HEAR IT FOR YOURSELF
Your AI Agent Is Ready to Talk
Call our AI agent right now. It'll handle a patient appointment request, just like it would for your clinic. No signup required.
Test Call
Talk to the AI agent right now from your browser. Hear exactly how Frontly will sound for your business.
HOW IT WORKS
No Disruption to Your Clinic.
Connect Your Phone
Forward your existing clinic line or get a dedicated AI number. No hardware changes needed.
Customise the Prebuilt Workflow
Start from the prebuilt receptionist workflow and add your appointment types, practitioner schedules and clinic protocols in the visual builder, including how you handle urgent versus routine calls. Test it before going live.
Go Live
Frontly answers every call, books patients into your schedule, handles repeat script requests, and routes urgent calls to the right person automatically.
WHAT FRONTLY HANDLES
Every Patient Call, Handled
Frontly answers the calls your front desk can't get to at peak times and, on the Pro plan, makes the recall calls no one has time for. Every message captured in your Frontly dashboard, and your existing software connected during onboarding.
Appointment booking
Captures the patient's name, contact details, and reason for the visit, then books the first suitable slot straight into your Frontly dashboard.
Repeat-script requests
Takes repeat prescription requests, confirms the patient's details, and logs each one for your reception team to action without tying up the phone.
Recall reminders (outbound, on Pro)
Calls your recall list to book patients in for their next check-up or follow-up, and logs every outcome.
Message and triage capture
Records the caller's symptoms and request, flags anything urgent, and routes it to the nurse or GP so the right calls reach the right person quickly.
After-hours and overflow
Answers nights, weekends, and the calls that ring out when reception is at capacity, so patients aren't left on hold or sent to voicemail.
Visual Workflow Builder
Script the Administration, Never the Medicine
Start With a Prebuilt Receptionist Workflow
Every plan includes a prebuilt receptionist workflow. You add your appointment types, your practitioners, your billing rules and your triage policy, and decide exactly where the AI stops.
A Hard Clinical Boundary
The AI books, reschedules and answers practice questions. It does not assess symptoms or give advice, and that line is set by your practice, not by us.
Urgent Calls Go to People
You define the words and situations that must reach a human immediately rather than continue through an automated flow.
New Patient Versus Existing
The script separates a first-time caller who needs registration details from an existing patient moving an appointment.
Change It Yourself
Adjust practitioner availability, billing commentary or triage rules as the roster changes, without waiting on us.
Cross-Call Memory
Your AI Remembers Every Patient Call
- Existing patients recognised the moment they call
- Previous appointment conversations recalled automatically
- No patient repeating their booking history to a machine
- Full call record ready for reception before they pick up
Frontly Dashboard
Every Appointment and Enquiry, Captured
Bookings In One Place
Appointments and changes land in your Frontly dashboard with the patient details and reason captured, ready for reception to action.
Full Transcript on Every Call
Exactly what the patient said, which matters when the question was borderline clinical and the AI escalated it.
Escalations Clearly Marked
See which calls the AI handed to a person and why, so you can audit the boundary rather than assume it held.
Cross-call History at a Glance
Every previous call from that patient, with the outcome already recorded.
Live Status Across the Clinic
See what came in overnight and over the weekend before the doors open.
Outbound Campaign Manager
Reach the Patients Who Need to Come Back
Recall and Screening Reminders
Call patients due for a review, a screening or a care-plan appointment, and book them while you have them on the phone.
Appointment Reminders
Reduce non-attendance by calling ahead and capturing whether the patient still intends to come.
Same Builder, No New Tool
Script the campaign with the same drag-and-drop builder you used for inbound.
See What Landed
Track which recall lists actually converted into booked appointments.
INTEGRATIONS
Works with the software general practice already runs on
Connect your AI receptionist to the software your team already uses, so Frontly can check availability, manage bookings and capture caller details as part of your reception workflow.
Health, dental and allied health
Zanda
Cliniko
Nookal
Halaxy
Needs the Halaxy API subscription, a paid add-on
Coreplus
Best Practice
Healthengine
Team messaging
Integrations support Frontly's reception and caller follow-up workflows. Available actions depend on the connected software and your setup.
Integration allowances vary by plan. See Pricing for what's included.
Not on the list, or need a specific workflow? Tell us what you use and what you'd like Frontly to handle. We'll check what's possible.
WHAT USUALLY DECIDES IT
The three questions that come up every time
A real person, whenever the caller wants one
Every workflow can hand the call to your practice nurse or on-call clinician. The transfer carries a spoken briefing, so your team picks up already knowing who is calling and why. The caller never has to explain themselves twice, which is usually the moment a good call turns into a complaint.
More than one language, on the same number
Frontly answers in more than one language on the same clinic number. Patients explaining a symptom are far more likely to do it accurately in their first language, and far more likely to book at all.
A four-person Sydney physio and massage clinic runs Frontly in English and Mandarin today. They had been trying to hire a receptionist fluent in both, at a wage the clinic could justify. Instead of hiring, they went live with Frontly connected to their practice software.
Flat monthly rate, and knowledge that costs nothing to grow
Your plan is a flat monthly rate covering a set number of call minutes, and there is no cap on how many questions the AI is allowed to answer. Adding another topic to its knowledge never adds a line to the bill, and every rate we do meter is published up front. See pricing for the current rates.
ANSWERING SERVICE OR AI
Answering service or AI receptionist for a GP clinic?
A medical answering service takes a message and pages someone. An AI receptionist completes the booking, the reschedule or the repeat-script request during the call. For a clinic that changes the Monday morning queue from a list of callbacks into work that is already done.
Where a staffed answering service still wins
Triage judgement. A patient describing chest pain needs a human decision immediately, and a medical answering bureau exists precisely to make that call. Any sensible setup keeps a person in that path, which is why every Frontly workflow can transfer straight to your nurse or on-call clinician.
Where Frontly wins
The other ninety-odd percent of calls are appointments, script requests, results enquiries and opening hours. Those complete on the call, day or night, and land in your dashboard as structured records rather than a pile of message slips.
Most businesses end up running one or the other rather than both. If you are weighing it up properly, the full cost and capability breakdown is in AI or human receptionist: which fits.
Bigger organisation?
Hospital groups and multi-site medical centres
Enterprise can run post-appointment voice surveys and connect to your own systems during the call, built to measure with your team. Own-cloud or on-premise deployment, SLA-backed uptime and a dedicated account manager.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
You set your appointment types, durations and practitioner availability, and the AI checks availability in real time and books the patient on the call. Once your practice management software is connected (Zanda, Cliniko, Coreplus and the other systems listed on this page), the appointment goes straight into your appointment book. Every booking also lands in your Frontly dashboard with the patient details and the full call transcript.
You define what counts as urgent during setup, and Frontly routes those calls immediately to your on-call nurse or GP. It does not assess symptoms itself. Standard bookings and enquiries are handled automatically.
Yes. Frontly can take repeat script requests, confirm patient identity, and log the request in your Frontly dashboard, freeing your reception team from repetitive inbound calls.
Call data is stored in Australia on encrypted, Australian-hosted infrastructure, and Frontly collects only a caller's name and phone number to book appointments. It does not handle clinical records. To deliver real-time conversation, limited call content is processed by specialist speech and language providers, some located overseas, under no-retention terms. Our privacy page sets out the full data flow.
Setup time depends on verification, workflow complexity and integrations. You start from a prebuilt receptionist workflow, so most of the setup is adding your appointment types, your triage and repeat-script rules, and who a transfer should reach. You test the flow before it goes live. Clinics with unusual protocols need scoping first, and we will tell you upfront if yours is one of them.
Frontly is a flat monthly rate with a monthly call-minute allowance, not a meter running from the first call. Plans are month to month, with outbound campaigns on the Pro plan, and the current rates are on our pricing page. The rate is set for the clinic, not per practitioner, so adding a doctor to the roster does not change it.
Yes. Frontly answers the clinic line overnight, on weekends and on public holidays. Patients can book or change an appointment and leave a repeat-script request, and anything touching symptoms is escalated to your on-call doctor or nurse under rules your practice sets. It never gives medical advice, and every after-hours call is logged with a full transcript for the morning team.
No, and the boundary is set by your practice during setup, not by us. Frontly books, reschedules and answers practice questions such as hours, location and preparation instructions. Anything that touches symptoms or clinical judgement is escalated to your team, and every escalation is logged so you can audit that the boundary held.
Yes. You choose which calls go to a person, and Frontly warm-transfers them to reception, a nurse or the practice manager with a short spoken briefing, so the patient does not repeat their details. It tries the number you set first and then a backup. When nobody is free, it takes a message and sends it to your team straight away.
Frontly does not guess. It answers practice questions such as hours, billing and what to bring from the information you approve, and anything else becomes a message for your team or a transfer, never an improvised answer. Each unanswered question appears in your dashboard with the transcript, so you can add the answer yourself in the visual builder.
Yes. Each Frontly agent speaks the language you set, so you can run a dedicated line in Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic or Vietnamese, out of more than 40 languages, and booking an appointment does not depend on a patient's English. Clinical questions still go to your team, and every call lands in your dashboard with a transcript.
KEEP EXPLORING
Keep exploring Frontly for General Practice
Go deeper on the capabilities, comparisons, and guides that matter most.
24/7 inbound answering
How Frontly answers every call, qualifies the caller, and books the job in your dashboard.
How inbound worksOutbound campaigns
Recalls, follow-ups, arrears, and lead reactivation dialled automatically at scale.
Run outboundAfter-hours answering
After-hours calls are the ones with clinical risk attached. See how triage and escalation are handled overnight.
See after-hoursWhat an AI receptionist costs
Flat-rate, per-minute, per-call, and credit models compared, with the ROI maths.
Read the guideReady to Make Every Patient Feel Heard?
Set up your AI front desk. No commitment beyond the plan you pick. Flat monthly rate.