For years, the job of patient communication software was to get messages out of voicemail and into one shared inbox. Now the inbox fills faster than staff can clear it, and the phone keeps ringing.

That is the gap between organizing patient communication and resolving it.

What Klara is

Klara is a patient communication platform. It pulls texts, web chat and voicemail into one conversation thread, and helps staff route and answer those messages from a shared inbox. It also handles digital intake and uses AI to help route messages. Klara connects to several EHRs (electronic health records), but its deepest integration is with ModMed, which mainly supports specialty practices such as dermatology, ophthalmology and orthopedics.

Why now: Klara's future is tied to ModMed

ModMed acquired Klara in February 2022. Since then, Klara has been built more and more around ModMed's EMA electronic health record. That works for ModMed practices. Everyone else gets a product whose direction is set by an EHR they don't use.

That direction got clearer in April 2026, when ModMed acquired Bonsai Health, an AI patient engagement platform. ModMed describes Bonsai as complementing its Klara-powered engagement suite, with plans to bring it to the nearly 50,000 providers on ModMed.

If your practice runs on athenaOne or another EHR, your next contract renewal is the time to compare.

Where OhMD is the better fit

ModMed now sells Klara as ModMed Patient Engagement. With Bonsai's AI outreach added, the suite gives practices on ModMed's EHR a shared inbox, online scheduling, reminders and automated recall.

It has two limits:

• Its key features, like intake and AI retention, are limited to ModMed's own EHR.

• It doesn't answer the phone. Calls and voicemails become text chats for staff to work through.

OhMD solves both.

Get more from the EHR you already run

Klara’s roadmap now follows ModMed’s. ModMed is adding Bonsai’s AI outreach to its Klara-powered engagement suite and plans to roll it out to the providers on its own EHR. For practices on athenaOne or another system, it’s unclear when, or whether, those new features will reach them.

OhMD is built around the EHR you already run. It connects to more than 290 systems, including EHR and practice management systems, and its deepest integration is with athenaOne. Patients sync from athenaOne into OhMD, and each conversation goes back to the patient’s chart. OhMD has been an athenahealth partner since 2017, and 230 athena practices and has an average 4.9 (out of 5) star review from 70 clients.

Keep every patient relationship moving, at any volume

A practice with thousands of patients is managing thousands of ongoing communications, each with a refill that needs a follow-up or a question that comes back a week later. When every one of them depends on a staff member picking up a thread, relationships slip as volume grows.

Text chats still leave staff working through every call. That's why several voice AI vendors sell add-ons to ModMed and Klara practices.

OhMD is built to manage those relationships at scale in a single platform.

OhMD AI answers the call on the practice's own number, resolves routine requests, and follows up by text when there is more to do. Every exchange stays in one conversation per patient, going back as far as the relationship does. When a patient needs a person, staff step in with one click.

A practice that tried Klara and came back

In April 2026, a practice on ModMed's EHR, seeing about 8,500 patients a month, moved its appointment reminders from OhMD to Klara. Over the next six months, its no-show rate more than doubled, from an average of 2.5% to 5.1%.

The practice estimates that meant more than 1,300 extra missed visits in six months, or over $30,000 in lost revenue a month at a $150 average visit. In October 2026, they came back to OhMD, and their no-show rate for the month so far is 1.7%.

The reminders also didn't read like a normal text from the office. In the practice's words, "It doesn't feel like SMS," and patients found them easier to ignore.

OhMD overview

OhMD is AI voice and text for ambulatory medical organizations. It runs on the organization's existing phone number and keeps each patient's calls and texts in one continuous conversation that staff can see and join at any time.

What switching looks like

Moving to OhMD doesn't change how patients reach you. OhMD runs on your existing practice number, so patients keep calling and texting the number they already know.

Setup starts with the EHR integration, so your patient list is in OhMD from day one. Most practices start with the requests that take the most staff time, often refills or scheduling, and expand once the team has seen it work.

See the difference on your own workflows

If you are on Klara and the phones are still the bottleneck, we'd like to show you what your phones look like when AI resolves routine calls. Book a demo and bring the requests that eat up most of your team's day.