Always-On Front Desk handles patient messages any hour. It books straight into Open Dental, Dentrix or Eaglesoft, answers insurance questions from your real fee schedule, and pages you when it is a true emergency. It costs $890 a month.
No contract. 30-day pilot alongside your current front desk. Cancel any time.
A new patient who cannot reach you does not leave a message and wait. They hit back and call the next practice on the map. You never see the loss, because the loss never becomes a record in your system.
Your front desk eats from 12 to 1. So do the patients calling on their own lunch break. That is your single highest-volume hour and nobody is on the phone.
People call a dentist when the tooth hurts, and teeth hurt at 9pm on a Sunday. The practice that answers gets the patient. That is the whole competition.
Calls arrive in bursts. A human front desk is serial by definition. Caller two hears hold music, caller three hears voicemail, and neither of them calls back.
Front desk turnover in dental runs high. Every replacement is another 90 days of someone learning your PPO fee schedule while quoting patients wrong.
Move the sliders. The math updates live.
Recovering even a quarter of those calls pays for Always-On Front Desk roughly 2.3 times over.
It runs beside your existing front desk first. Nothing gets ripped out, and the first thing you will notice is that the after-hours voicemail box stops filling up.
Your hours, operatories, providers, appointment lengths, in-network carriers, fee schedule and emergency protocol go in once. That is the two-hour session and it is the only real work you do.
Your carrier forwards on no-answer, after hours, or both, your call. Existing number stays the same. Day one it only picks up the calls that were already going to voicemail.
It reads live availability from your schedule, writes the appointment back, texts the confirmation and the intake forms, queues insurance verification, and pages the on-call doctor when triage says this is not a booking.
Every inbound call and text is picked up on the first ring, at any hour, in parallel. Ten people can call at once and all ten get a real conversation instead of hold music.
It reads open operatory time from your PMS, respects appointment length, provider, lunch and block scheduling, then writes the appointment back. It cannot offer a slot that does not exist, because it only picks from what your scheduler returned.
Avulsed tooth, facial swelling with fever, uncontrolled bleeding, facial trauma. Those never get booked into a Tuesday slot. Triage runs before scheduling and pages the on-call doctor with the transcript attached.
The live console is the real engine, not a video. Play a 9:40pm new patient call, a knocked-out tooth at 11pm, or type your own. Watch the schedule fill in as it books.
No per-minute billing, no per-booking fee, no surprise overage on the month a flu wave doubles your call volume.
One location, up to 4 providers
Plus $2,500 one-time setup and configuration
2 to 15 locations, shared routing
Plus $1,800 one-time setup per location
| Monthly cost | Full-time receptionist | Always-On Front Desk |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | $3,300 | included |
| Payroll tax and benefits | $900 | $0 |
| PTO, sick days, coverage | $300 | $0 |
| Turnover and retraining, amortized | $200 | $0 |
| Hours actually covered | ~40 of 168 | 168 of 168 |
| Total per month | $4,700 | $890 |
This is not an argument for firing your front desk. Most practices keep the person and stop paying them to be a switchboard. The software takes the overflow, the after-hours, and the repetitive insurance questions, and your human handles the patients standing in front of them.
Some will, and it says so if asked directly. What matters more is that the call gets answered. The alternative you are comparing against is not a warm human voice, it is a voicemail beep at 9pm. If a caller asks for a person, it stops selling, logs the full transcript, and either transfers during office hours or puts them at the top of the 8am callback list so they never repeat themselves.
It cannot freelance. In-network status, coverage percentages, annual maximums and deductibles come out of a table you sign off on during setup, not out of a language model. If a caller names a carrier that is not on your list, it says you are not a provider for that plan and offers the self-pay fee instead of booking someone into a surprise bill. Same design for scheduling: it can only offer times your scheduler actually returned.
Appointment length, provider, operatory and block rules come from your setup, and it checks live availability before it offers anything, so double-booking is structurally prevented rather than corrected afterward. Every booking sends you a notification and shows the full transcript. For the first 30 days you can run it in review mode, where bookings land in a holding column and your front desk approves them with one click.
An answering service takes a message. That is a callback task for tomorrow morning, and the patient has already booked somewhere else by then. Weave and similar tools are great at texting and reminders for patients you already have, but they do not hold a booking conversation with a stranger at 9pm and write the appointment into your schedule. This finishes the job on the call. It also runs alongside both.
Triage runs before scheduling, not after. Knocked-out permanent tooth, facial swelling with fever or trouble swallowing, uncontrolled bleeding, and facial trauma all page the on-call doctor immediately and give the caller the standard first-aid instruction for that situation. Those calls never get quietly booked into a slot next Tuesday. You approve the exact rule set in writing during setup.
One two-hour session, then about a week of us configuring and testing against your schedule before a single live call is routed. We need read and write access to your PMS, your in-network carrier list and fee schedule, your hours and provider templates, and your emergency protocol. You approve everything before it answers a real patient.
Month to month, no contract, cancel with 30 days notice. The 30-day pilot runs on after-hours and overflow only, so the downside is bounded to calls that were going to voicemail anyway. If it is not booking patients by day 30, turn off the forwarding and you are back exactly where you started.
Twelve minutes. I will pull your call data with you, do the arithmetic on your actual numbers, and tell you honestly whether this is worth it for your practice.