AI phone assistant for physiotherapy practices
A prescription is a course, not one appointment. Tel-Agent takes the prescription details and books the whole series in one call.
- Prescription number
- How many sessions
- Series booking
Why a physiotherapy practice books six appointments, not one
A physiotherapy prescription is not a booking. It is a course - a number of sessions at a frequency - and the practice either takes all of it on the first call or takes six calls instead. The other half of the phone is people cancelling, often the same morning, and those calls have a shelf life measured in hours.
How the AI receptionist handles a physiotherapy call
It answers and asks whether there is a prescription or this is self-pay.
For a prescription it takes the number of sessions, the frequency and the referring doctor.
It asks which days and times actually work, because a course fails on availability.
It proposes the whole series at once rather than one appointment.
A cancellation is taken and flagged early enough that the slot can still be refilled.
What the agent is told to ask
Written by you, in your own words, as the assistant’s instructions.
What a physiotherapy phone assistant should and should not decide
What it does
- Takes prescription details on the first call
- Proposes a whole course rather than a single slot
- Catches cancellations while they are still refillable
- Records the referring doctor for billing
- Keeps everything on the practice's own machine
What it never does
- Decide what treatment is appropriate
- Change what is written on a prescription
- Write directly into a live therapist's diary
- Advise on exercises, pain or recovery
- Send prescription data to a third party
Questions
Why does a prescription change the call?
Because it turns one booking into a series with a frequency attached. Taking the prescription details on the first call is the difference between booking a course once and a patient ringing back six times.
Can it catch a cancelled slot early enough to refill it?
That is arguably the most valuable thing on this list. A slot given up at eight in the morning can still be filled; the same slot discovered when the patient does not arrive cannot.
Does it decide what treatment is needed?
No. The prescription says what the treatment is. The agent handles scheduling and details around it.
Can it book a whole course of appointments?
It proposes the series and confirms it, rather than booking one session and waiting for the next call. The number of sessions and the frequency are on the prescription, which is why they are taken on the first call.
What if the prescription details are wrong?
It reads them back before the booking is proposed. What it does not do is correct a prescription or decide that a different course is appropriate - that is a clinical decision and it belongs to the therapist.
Does it handle self-pay clients differently?
Prescription or self-pay is the first question, because it changes the price, the number of sessions and sometimes whether an appointment can be offered at all.
Does the EU AI Act allow an AI to answer a booking after a referral?
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 physiotherapy clinic says on the phone?
You are. A booking after a referral 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 physiotherapy clinic 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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