does your phone log this?

Hey there! Chris here from Aeva AI Receptionist for Healthcare.

Last week Luke, our clinic success partner, and I ran a live session with Jack O'Brien from Clinic Mastery.

We weren’t sure what to expect. We thought a handful of people might turn up.

It ended up being one of the biggest turnouts they'd ever had for one of these. The room was full. The chat never stopped moving the whole hour.

And here's what struck me most. A year ago, a session like this would have been half curiosity, half folded arms. This time it was different. Owners weren't asking whether AI was coming. They were asking how quickly they needed to move before the clinic down the road did.

That shift is real. You can feel it in a room now.

We opened the floor and the questions poured in. Two of them I still haven't shaken.

The first was from Rhonda. Halfway through, she typed something quietly devastating:

"Realised that our phone provider doesn't keep a record of the amount of calls we miss each month."

I read it and felt a small, cold drop in my stomach.

Not because it surprised me. Because of how calm it was. She wasn't upset. She had just, in one quiet sentence, described a clinic she'd poured years into, with a hole in the floor she had never once been able to see.

And she isn't unusual. She is, a lot of owners.

Here's the part that got under my skin. You'd never run a practice where the till didn't record what it took. You'd spot it inside a day. Yet the front door, the actual way a lot of new patients try to reach you, can drop them silently, and nothing anywhere says a word.

You can measure a no-show. You can measure a refund. But the new patient who rang at 7pm, got nothing, and quietly booked with the clinic down the road? That one leaves no trace at all.

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The second came from Mark. He'd been impressed with the voice, and then asked the question that actually made me stop for a second:

"I'm wondering if AI is trained to respond to situations where a caller might be distressed."

I sat with that one longer than anything else in the room.

Because it's the question underneath all of this. Strip away the bookings and the integrations, and what Mark was really asking is, are you making care more human, or less? That's a heavy thing to have put to you live, about the thing you've given the last two years of your life to.

And honestly, I'm glad he asked it. The lazy response is to get defensive. The honest one is harder to sit with.

Here it is. The worry quietly assumes the comparison is AI versus a warm receptionist with all the time and empathy in the world. It almost never is. At 8pm, mid-consult, or when the team just can’t answer calls, the real alternative is a voicemail, or a message sending the patient off to your website's booking page. It's nobody who can actually help.

And for someone calling at their lowest, reaching nobody is the cruellest outcome there is.

So the job of good AI in that moment isn't to play counsellor. It's the opposite. It's to be the reliable voice that's actually there, to stay calm, listen, help where it can, and recognise when it needs to flag a priority to get a real person on the line.

Not replacing humans at the hardest moment. Making sure there's a listening voice when there usually isn't one.

I told them if they remembered nothing else from the hour, remember to do this.

Pull one month of your phone logs. Count two numbers. Your total inbound calls, and how many went unanswered. After hours, mid-consult, lunch cover, overflow, all of it.

Take the missed ones, assume a third would have booked (up to a third of missed calls can be turned to bookings), multiply by what a new patient is worth to you, then by twelve.

Monthly missed calls × 0.3 × patient $ value × 12 = annual revenue lost

That's the number quietly walking out the door each year. For most owners, it's far bigger than they guess.

I’d love to hear what your number is. Hit reply below, I read every reply.

Every call counts,

Chris Baxter
founder, Aeva AI Receptionist for healthcare

www.aevaai.com

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