AI phone assistant for general practices
Monday morning is sick notes and repeat prescriptions, two hundred times. Tel-Agent takes those so a person gets the urgent calls.
- Sick note
- Repeat prescription
- Monday peak
Why a general practice phone peaks on Monday morning
A general practice takes most of its weekly call volume in the first ninety minutes of Monday, and most of that is sick notes, repeat prescriptions and results. None of those needs a clinician to hear the request - they need a clinician to act on it afterwards. An AI phone assistant for a general practice is a sorting problem, not a medical one.
How the AI receptionist handles a GP surgery call
It answers and asks which of four things this is: sick note, prescription, appointment or result.
It takes the date of birth, which is the identifier a practice can actually match on.
For a sick note it takes the dates; for a repeat it takes the medication name and strength, read back to confirm.
Anything the practice marked urgent is transferred to a person before any of that.
The request lands complete on a doctor's list, ready to be acted on.
What the agent is told to ask
Written by you, in your own words, as the assistant’s instructions.
What a GP phone assistant should and should not decide
What it does
- Takes sick note and repeat prescription requests
- Sorts the Monday peak into four clean lists
- Reads medication names back to the caller to confirm
- Transfers on any wording the practice marked urgent
- Keeps everything on the surgery's own machine
What it never does
- Issue a sick note or approve a repeat prescription
- Give a test result or interpret one
- Decide that a symptom can wait for a routine slot
- Advise on medication or dosage
- Send patient data to a third-party server
Questions
Can it issue a sick note or a repeat prescription?
No. It takes the request and the details a doctor needs to act on it, and the doctor decides. Nothing leaves the practice without a person, which is both the law and the only version worth having.
What happens to a call that turns out to be urgent?
The practice sets the words that mean transfer, and routing runs before the model. Chest pain does not become a callback because the caller opened with a prescription request.
Does it help with the Monday peak specifically?
That is the whole case for it. Volume is not spread evenly - it lands in the first ninety minutes of the week, and most of it is three requests that need no clinical judgement to record.
Does it work with our appointment system?
It reaches other systems through a generic HTTP tool and webhooks, so a system with an API can be wired to it. It proposes appointments rather than writing into a live book.
What about test results?
It records that a patient is asking and takes their date of birth. Results are given by a clinician, and nothing about that changes.
Can it handle the repeat prescription list?
It takes the medication name and strength and reads them back to confirm. Approving the repeat is the doctor's decision, and the request simply arrives complete rather than half-remembered.
Does the EU AI Act allow an AI to answer a Monday morning call?
Yes, under Article 50 of Regulation 2024/1689, which asks that the caller be told they are speaking to a machine - that line belongs in the greeting you configure. Annex III names emergency healthcare triage, so anything that ranked callers by how ill they sound would be a high-risk system. The distinction the Act draws is between assisting and deciding, and this agent assists: it never judges how urgent a symptom is. Austria's KI-Servicestelle at RTR publishes the same reading of the transparency duty.
Who is the data controller for what a caller to a GP surgery says on the phone?
You are. A Monday morning call is health data, which Article 9 treats as a special category, and Tel-Agent is self-hosted with your own model keys, so the recording, the transcript and the record it writes stay on your server and never reach Dpro GmbH. There is no processor agreement to sign with us because we never receive the data, and the source is AGPL-3.0, so you can check that rather than take our word for it.
Can a GP surgery run this in the United States?
There is no single federal AI statute to comply with, but a phone line carries older rules. A US practice is under HIPAA, and HIPAA is where self-hosting pays: there is no business associate agreement to sign with us, because no call reaches us. Consent to record is set state by state, and California and Illinois among others want every party to agree. Running the software yourself makes you the caller of record, so the disclosure and the recording switch are yours to set.
Not usable yet. The day it answers a real call will be a release, not a newsletter.
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