Healthcare Virtual Receptionist and Answering Service
Answered while you treat.
Frontly picks up when your hands are with a client, books the visit and takes the message.
The short answer
What is Frontly's healthcare virtual receptionist?
Frontly is an AI virtual receptionist and answering service for Australian healthcare clinics, including allied health, specialist rooms and NDIS providers. It answers every call 24/7, books and changes appointments, takes messages for practitioners and routes urgent calls to your team, and it never gives clinical advice. Every call lands in your Frontly dashboard with a full transcript, and standard inbound answering is live in about an hour.
THE PROBLEM
The Phone Rings While Every Practitioner Is With a Client
31%
of Australian psychologists surveyed said they could not take on new clients. Callers still ring to ask, and your front desk spends the day explaining capacity.
Source: Australian Psychological Society member poll, 2024
49%
of the same members reported waitlists of two to four months. Every cancellation is a slot to re-offer quickly, and every waiting caller wants an update.
Source: Australian Psychological Society member poll, 2024
26,282
registered NDIS providers in the Commission's Q2 2025-26 report. Each one takes calls from participants, families and support workers, often while the team is out with participants.
Source: NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, Q2 2025-26
HEAR IT FOR YOURSELF
Your AI Receptionist Is Ready to Book a Visit
Call our AI agent right now. It handles a new-client booking and a fees question the way 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
Live in About an Hour. No Disruption to Your Clinic.
Connect Your Phone
Forward your existing clinic line or use a dedicated AI number. No hardware changes, and your reception team keeps answering when they can.
We Help Set Up Your First Workflow
Our team helps set up your first workflow around your practitioners, appointment types, funding rules and the wording for urgent calls.
Go Live
Frontly answers every call, books and changes appointments, takes messages for practitioners, and passes urgent calls to the person you choose.
WHAT FRONTLY HANDLES
Every Clinic and Care Call, Handled
From a new physio booking to a support worker running late, this healthcare virtual receptionist answers the calls your team cannot reach. Dental practices and GP clinics have their own pages, and every call lands in your Frontly dashboard.
New-client bookings and intake
Takes the name, reason for visit, referral status and funding type (Medicare, NDIS, DVA, WorkCover or private health), then books the right practitioner and appointment length.
Fees, referrals and funding questions
Answers "Do I need a referral?", gap fees, HICAPS, parking, telehealth and what to bring, from the information you load. Anything it does not know goes to your team.
Waitlist and cancellations
Moves or cancels appointments, frees the slot for your team to re-offer, and takes a caller's name for your waitlist so they stop ringing to ask.
Practitioner messages and urgent calls
Takes messages for results queries, report requests and GP letters. Urgent calls go to your on-call person, or callers are directed to 000, with Lifeline 13 11 14 for a psychology crisis. No clinical advice.
NDIS participant and family calls
Answers questions about services, plan types and service agreements, books sessions, takes complaints for your complaints owner, and puts incident calls straight through to the person you choose, with every call transcribed in your dashboard.
NDIS support-worker calls
Takes shift-change, running-late and unavailability calls, logs each one against the participant, and puts urgent ones straight through to your coordinator.
OUTBOUND CAMPAIGNS
Outbound Campaigns Over Your Client Lists
Load a list and Frontly works through it, retrying unanswered numbers and logging every outcome. Do Not Call Register screening and legal calling windows are built in. Reminders and recalls go to your own clients.
Appointment reminder campaign
The day before, Frontly calls every client on tomorrow's list to confirm, change or cancel, so you learn who is not coming while there is time to re-offer the slot.
Recall campaign
Frontly rings clients who are due for a review, a progress check or a care-plan session, and books the next visit while it has them on the phone.
Waitlist call-back campaign
When appointments open up, load your waitlist and Frontly calls it in order, offers the time, and books the first client who says yes.
Post-appointment voice survey campaign
On Frontly Enterprise, Frontly phones clients after their visit with questions you design and records each answer against the call, so you can track patient experience over time.
Visual Workflow Builder
Script Your Front Desk, Never the Care
Your First Workflow, Built With You
Our team helps set up your first workflow around your practitioners, appointment types and funding rules: exactly what the AI asks before it books a client.
A Hard Clinical Boundary
Frontly books, changes and answers practice questions. It never gives clinical advice, and you set the words that send a call straight to a person.
Urgent and Crisis Wording You Set
You write the script for urgent calls: directing callers to 000, giving Lifeline 13 11 14 for a psychology crisis, or putting the call through to your on-call practitioner.
Practitioner Routing
Send a podiatry booking to one calendar, a report request to your admin and a funding question to your practice manager, each on its own path.
Change It Yourself
Update practitioner availability, fees and funding wording any time in the visual builder, without waiting on us.
Cross-Call Memory
Your AI Remembers Every Client
- Returning clients recognised the moment they call
- Previous calls and requests recalled automatically
- No asking a client to repeat their story to every new voice
- Full call history on every caller before your team picks up
Frontly Dashboard
Every Call Captured While Your Team Is With Clients
Every Booking in One Place
Bookings arrive with the reason for visit, referral status and funding type already captured, so reception actions them between clients.
Full Transcript on Every Call
Read exactly what the caller said, including a complaint or a shift change, before anyone rings back.
Messages Sent to the Right Person
Email or SMS the message to the practitioner, practice manager or NDIS coordinator the moment the call ends.
Outcomes You Can Count
Every call ends with a labelled outcome, so you see bookings, cancellations, messages and transfers across the week.
Live Status Across the Clinic
See what came in during clinic hours and overnight on one screen, and which calls were put through to staff.
Outbound Campaign Manager
Reduce No-Shows and Bring Clients Back With Campaigns
Reminder Campaigns at Scale
Frontly calls tomorrow's whole appointment list, so confirming clients is no longer a job for your front desk.
Recall and Waitlist Call-Backs
Bring back clients who are due for a review, and work down the waitlist you load to offer an opened slot to each person in turn.
Same Builder, No New Tool
Script each campaign in the same visual builder you used for inbound calls.
Post-Appointment Voice Surveys
On Enterprise, phone clients after a visit and track patient experience, designed with your team.
INTEGRATIONS
Works with the software healthcare 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
NDIS and care
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.
ANSWERING SERVICE OR AI
Answering service or AI receptionist for a healthcare clinic?
A medical answering service takes a message and passes it on. An AI receptionist books, changes and cancels the appointment on the call, and routes urgent calls to your team. For an allied health or specialist clinic, that turns a pile of callbacks into appointments already in the diary, with no clinical advice given.
Where a staffed answering service still wins
Judgement with a distressed or vulnerable caller. A person can hear that a participant, a carer or a worried family member needs reassurance before logistics, and can decide on the spot to pull a practitioner out of a session. Any sensible setup keeps a person in the path for urgent and sensitive calls, which is why every Frontly workflow transfers to your team on request.
Where Frontly wins
Routine clinic calls are bookings, reschedules, cancellations, fee and location questions, and NDIS participant enquiries. Those complete on the call at any hour, and your practitioners start the day with a full diary and a transcript of every call rather than a list of messages.
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 Frontly against a human receptionist.
Bigger organisation?
Hospital groups and multi-site health services
Enterprise builds post-appointment voice surveys and connects to your own booking and patient systems during the call, designed with your team. Own-cloud or on-premise deployment, SLA-backed uptime and a dedicated account manager.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Frontly works as a virtual receptionist for physio, chiropractic, osteopathy, psychology, podiatry, occupational therapy and speech pathology clinics, and for specialist rooms. It answers every call 24/7, books and changes appointments, takes messages for practitioners and hands urgent callers to your team.
Yes. Cliniko, Nookal, Halaxy and Zanda are marked Available: they connect with your permission and we set them up with you during onboarding. Halaxy needs its paid API add-on. Coreplus and Best Practice are Requires vendor approval, so the software company approves first. Your AI answers in about an hour either way.
Frontly follows the wording you set and never gives clinical advice. Typically that means directing the caller to 000 for an emergency, giving Lifeline 13 11 14 to a psychology client in crisis, or transferring the call to your on-call practitioner with a spoken briefing. Every urgent call is logged with its transcript.
Yes. Frontly takes a caller's name and preferred times for your waitlist, frees the slot when someone cancels, and can run a waitlist call-back campaign over the list you load. It offers the opened time to each person in order and books the first who says yes.
Call records are hosted in Australian data centres, and limited call content is processed overseas by speech and language providers under no-retention terms. Every plan keeps the full transcript and call history. Frontly is the front desk, not a clinical record system, so session notes stay in your practice software.
No. Frontly is the front desk: it answers the phone, books appointments, takes messages and routes calls, and it does not listen to consultations or write clinical notes. If you use a scribe for session notes, Frontly works alongside it by looking after the calls that come in around your sessions.
Practice-software add-ons mostly book inside their own appointment book. A clinic's phones also need reminder and recall campaigns, waitlist call-downs over the list you load, warm transfer for urgent calls, and NDIS calls logged against the participant. Frontly covers all of that, reports outcomes across every call, speaks more than 40 languages, and comes with a first workflow set up with you.
Frontly answers participants, families and support workers 24/7, books sessions, takes shift-change and running-late calls, and keeps a transcript of every call. Complaints and incidents go to your complaints owner. ShiftCare is marked Available, so it connects with your permission and we set it up during onboarding.
Yes. Run a reminder campaign and Frontly calls each client on tomorrow's list to confirm, change or cancel, then logs the outcome. A recall campaign rings clients who are due for a review and books them. Do Not Call Register screening and legal calling windows are built in.
Yes, on Frontly Enterprise. A post-appointment voice survey phones clients with questions you design, records each answer against the call and lets you track patient experience over time, built to measure with your team. Standard plans cover reminders, recalls and waitlist call-backs.
Yes. Dental practices have their own page with recall and chair-filling workflows, and GP clinics and medical centres have theirs with repeat-script and urgent-call workflows. This page covers allied health, specialist rooms and NDIS providers, and all three share the same clinical boundary: Frontly books and routes, it does not advise.
KEEP EXPLORING
Keep exploring Frontly for Healthcare
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
Clients ring after the clinic closes, and some calls are urgent. See how urgent calls reach the person on call.
See after-hoursVirtual receptionist cost in 2026
What human and AI receptionists actually cost in Australia, and where each wins.
Read the guideReady to Answer Every Call While You Treat?
Set up your AI clinic receptionist in about an hour. No commitment beyond the plan you pick. Flat monthly rate.