By Ethan Bechtel
Last updated: February 2026 | Reading time: ~14 minutes
Your front desk is drowning in calls they shouldn’t be answering. The fastest way to reduce patient call volume is to give patients a way to accomplish what they’re calling about without picking up the phone. That means call-to-text deflection, AI-powered call answering, digital intake forms, online self-scheduling, automated appointment reminders, secure texting for clinical follow-up, and broadcast messaging. Practices that implement these strategies report 50-68% fewer inbound calls within the first few months. Family Practice Associates of Lexington dropped from 554 to 348 weekly calls in four months. Coastline Orthopedics cut call volume by 68%. Heart & Vascular Care automated over 60% of routine calls without adding staff.
If you manage a medical practice, you already know the phone is the problem. What you might not know is exactly which calls are drowning your staff, which ones are deflectable, and what the realistic ROI looks like when you fix it. This guide covers all of that.
A study of 7,000 calls across 22 medical practices found that 42% of incoming calls go unanswered. Not because staff don’t care. Because they physically can’t answer them all. When a receptionist is checking in the patient in front of them, fielding a question from a nurse, and watching three lines blink simultaneously, something gives. Usually it’s the phone.
The costs compound in ways most practice managers underestimate:
The default solution – hiring more staff to answer more phones – doesn’t scale. At $3,500-$4,500 per month per FTE (salary plus benefits), it’s expensive. And each person you add handles one call at a time, which means your capacity grows linearly while your call volume grows exponentially during peak hours.
The practices that have actually solved this problem didn’t hire their way out of it. They changed the channel. Many have turned to a virtual medical receptionist model that combines AI with human backup.
Before you can reduce call volume, you need to understand what your patients are actually calling about. We’ve analyzed call patterns across hundreds of practices using OhMD, and the breakdown is remarkably consistent regardless of specialty or practice size:
| Call Type | % of Calls | Deflectable? | Best Alternative Channel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scheduling / rescheduling | 25-30% | Yes – fully | AI call answering, online self-scheduling, text-based scheduling |
| Prescription refills | 15-20% | Yes – fully | AI call handling, automated text workflow, patient portal |
| Appointment confirmations | 10-15% | Yes – fully | Automated text reminders with confirm/cancel reply |
| General questions (hours, directions, insurance) | 10-15% | Yes – fully | AI answering, website FAQ, web chat |
| Lab results / test follow-up | 8-12% | Yes – via text | HIPAA compliant secure texting with encrypted link |
| Referral status / coordination | 5-10% | Yes – via text | Secure texting, care coordination messaging |
| Billing / balance inquiries | 5-10% | Mostly | Text-to-pay, automated balance notifications |
| Clinical questions requiring provider input | 5-10% | Channel-shift | HIPAA compliant texting (faster resolution, no phone tag) |
| Urgent / emergent calls | 3-5% | No – needs human | Route to on-call staff via AI triage |
The critical insight: roughly 80-90% of patient calls are either fully deflectable to another channel or can be resolved faster outside the phone. The remaining 10-20% are genuine clinical or urgent calls that need a human voice – and those are the calls your staff should be spending their time on.
These are ordered by how much call volume they eliminate in practice, based on what we’ve seen across hundreds of implementations. Strategies 1-3 produce the biggest, fastest results. Strategies 4-7 compound the effect and close the remaining gaps.
Impact: 20-35% immediate call volume reduction
Targets: Scheduling, refills, general questions, billing – any call that doesn’t require a live voice
Call-to-text deflection is the single highest-impact change most practices can make. Here’s how it works: when a patient calls and all lines are busy (or during off-hours), instead of going to voicemail, the system sends the caller an automatic text message offering to help via text. The patient texts back their question or request, and staff handle it from a unified inbox alongside all other conversations.
This works because the vast majority of patient calls don’t actually need to be phone calls. The patient calls because calling is the only option they know about. Given a text option, most patients take it – especially younger demographics who would rather text than call for anything.
The operational advantage is multiplicative: one staff member on a phone call handles one patient. That same staff member texting handles five to twenty patients simultaneously. You don’t just reduce call volume – you dramatically increase throughput per staff member.
Impact: 30-60% of routine calls handled without staff involvement
Targets: Scheduling, refills, common questions, after-hours calls
Voice AI has reached the point where it can genuinely handle routine patient interactions. Not the clunky phone trees of five years ago – actual conversational AI that understands what the patient needs, accesses the schedule, books appointments, processes refill requests, and answers common questions about hours, directions, and accepted insurance.
The key is what happens at the boundary. The best AI systems don’t just answer calls – they know when to hand off to a human. A patient calling about chest pain should not be talking to a bot. A patient calling to reschedule a cleaning absolutely can. OhMD’s AI assistant, Nia, operates on this hybrid model: AI handles the routine, staff monitor from the same inbox and step in when needed with full context visible.
At Heart & Vascular Care, a cardiology group, AI now handles over 60% of routine calls without staff involvement. Their staff spends their time on the calls that actually need a clinical brain behind them.
Impact: Eliminates 10-15% of total inbound calls; reduces no-shows by 30-50%
Targets: Confirmation calls, day-before reminders, no-show follow-up
Confirmation calls are pure waste. Your staff calls to confirm. The patient doesn’t answer. Your staff leaves a voicemail. The patient calls back. Someone answers – or doesn’t. Multiply by every appointment, every day, every provider.
Automated text reminders eliminate this entirely. The patient receives a text: “You have an appointment with Dr. Smith on Thursday at 2:00 PM. Reply C to confirm, R to reschedule, or X to cancel.” The patient replies with one letter. Done. No staff time. No phone tag. And if the patient cancels, the system can automatically text the next person on the waitlist to fill the slot.
The no-show reduction alone pays for the platform. At $200 per missed appointment, cutting no-shows by even 30% at a practice with 10 no-shows per week saves $2,600 per month.
Impact: Eliminates 5-10% of calls (insurance verification, intake questions, pre-visit prep)
Targets: New patient paperwork calls, insurance questions, pre-visit instructions
A significant chunk of calls come from patients asking what they need to bring, what insurance you accept, whether they need to fast, or how to fill out paperwork. Digital intake solves this by sending forms via text before the appointment. Patients fill out demographics, insurance information, consent forms, and clinical questionnaires on their phone. The data flows into the EHR. When they arrive, check-in takes 30 seconds instead of 15 minutes.
The call reduction comes from two directions: patients stop calling to ask about pre-visit requirements because the text tells them everything, and staff stop calling patients to collect missing information because the forms already captured it.
Impact: Eliminates phone tag for lab results, referral coordination, post-visit questions
Targets: Outbound clinical calls that create inbound callback loops
This is the strategy that breaks the phone tag cycle. When a nurse calls a patient about lab results, reaches voicemail, and waits for a callback – that’s two calls that accomplish nothing. If the callback comes while the nurse is with another patient, it’s three calls. Sometimes four or five before the loop closes.
HIPAA compliant texting closes the loop in one interaction. The nurse sends a secure text with results. The patient reads it (text messages have near-universal open rates, far exceeding voicemail). If they have a question, they text back. The nurse responds between other tasks. The entire exchange is documented in the chart with one click. At Family Practice Associates of Lexington, this single change cut their weekly call volume from 554 to 348 – a 37% reduction – in four months.
Impact: Captures 5-10% of calls at the source (patients searching for your phone number)
Targets: Patients browsing your website looking for contact information
Many patients who call your practice were on your website moments before, looking for a phone number because they couldn’t find another way to reach you. A web chat widget intercepts those patients before they ever dial. The chat feeds into the same unified inbox as texts, AI conversations, and voicemails – so staff manage it without context switching.
Web chat is also an effective new-patient acquisition tool. A prospective patient browsing your site at 9 PM can start a conversation via chat. The system sends an auto-reply acknowledging the message and your staff responds the next morning. That’s a patient who would have bounced from your site and called a competitor instead.
Impact: Prevents 3-5% of calls by answering questions before patients ask them
Targets: Office closures, weather cancellations, seasonal reminders, policy changes
Reactive communication creates call volume. Proactive communication prevents it. When your office closes for a holiday, sends out a provider schedule change, or wants to push flu shot availability, broadcast messaging lets you reach your entire patient panel by text in minutes.
Without broadcast messaging, these events generate a wave of inbound calls: “Are you open Monday?” “Is Dr. Patel available next week?” “Do you have flu shots?” Broadcast preempts every one of those calls with a single message.
These aren’t projections. These are measured results from practices that implemented the strategies above.
| Practice | Specialty | Size | Call Reduction | Key Metric |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Family Practice Associates of Lexington | Family Medicine | 24 providers | 37% (554→348/week) | Phone tag eliminated for lab results and referrals |
| Coastline Orthopedics | Orthopedics | Multi-provider | 68% | 4+ hours/person/day reclaimed |
| Heart & Vascular Care | Cardiology | Group practice | 60%+ automated | Clinical staff freed for high-acuity work |
FPA’s Director of Clinical Education, Virginia Burberry, described their pre-OhMD state as “round robin phone tag.” Support staff were calling patients about lab results, referrals, billing, and returned mail. With 500+ patients per day, voicemails piled up and tasks sat open for weeks.
The shift to HIPAA compliant texting transformed the workflow. Staff texted lab results to patients instead of calling. Patients texted back questions instead of leaving voicemails. The near-universal text read rate meant results were actually seen, and the asynchronous nature of texting meant staff could manage multiple conversations between other tasks.
“Reaching those patients in a timely manner has been ultimately life-changing for our support staff,” Burberry said. “OhMD has taken a huge burden off of our support staff. They’re no longer overwhelmed with phone calls.”
Coastline Ortho’s 68% reduction is the highest we’ve documented. The practice leveraged call-to-text deflection, AI answering, and secure texting simultaneously. The result was a compounding effect: each strategy reduced a different segment of calls, and together they transformed an overwhelmed front desk into a manageable operation.
The 4+ hours per person per day that staff reclaimed is real time – time previously spent on hold, leaving voicemails, returning callbacks, and repeating information. That time is now spent on patients who are physically present in the office.
In cardiology, clinical staff time is among the most expensive in medicine. Having a nurse spend 20 minutes playing phone tag about a scheduling question is a misallocation of clinical resources. Heart & Vascular Care used OhMD’s AI and texting to automate the routine so their staff could focus on what actually requires clinical judgment.
“By automating over 60% of routine calls, our staff can finally focus on patients who need real attention,” said Larami Oliver at Heart & Vascular Care.
Practice managers want numbers. Here they are.
| Cost Factor | Status Quo (Hire More Staff) | Call Deflection + AI |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost per unit | $3,500-$4,500 per FTE | $250-$1,200 for platform |
| Calls handled simultaneously | 1 (one call at a time) | Unlimited (text) + concurrent AI |
| After-hours coverage | None or overtime ($25-$40/hr) | 24/7 AI + text auto-replies included |
| Time to productivity | 4-6 weeks (hire + train) | 1-2 weeks (setup + go-live) |
| Annual turnover cost | $3,000-$5,000 per replacement | $0 |
| Scalability | Linear (more volume = more hires) | Handles spikes without added cost |
| EHR documentation | Manual entry after each call | One-click push to patient chart |
Bottom line: The platform pays for itself in month one and saves $6,000-$8,000 per month ongoing.
A realistic scenario: a 10-provider practice averaging 400 calls per day implements call-to-text deflection and AI answering. Within three months, call volume drops 50%. The practice avoids hiring two additional front desk staff ($7,000-$9,000/month saved) and recovers revenue from missed appointments and no-shows. The platform costs $500-$1,200/month. The net savings are in the range of $6,000-$8,000 per month – and that’s before you account for improved patient retention and staff satisfaction.
OhMD integrates with 85+ EHR systems so documentation flows automatically into the patient chart.
You don’t have to implement all seven strategies at once. The practices that have the smoothest rollouts follow this sequence:
Track two weeks of calls: how many, what time of day, and what the patient needed. Categorize each call using the table above. This audit tells you exactly which strategies will have the biggest impact for your specific practice. Most practice managers are surprised by how much of their call volume is pure deflectable routine.
Simultaneously, set up your call-to-text deflection and HIPAA compliant texting. These require the least configuration and produce the fastest results.
Turn on AI call answering for your most common call types – typically scheduling, refills, and general questions. Configure automated appointment reminders. If your EHR integration is available, connect it so appointments, patient data, and chart documentation sync automatically.
Start with a subset of calls rather than flipping everything at once. Many practices begin with after-hours AI answering, then expand to daytime as they build confidence in the system.
Add digital intake forms, web chat, and broadcast messaging. Review your call volume metrics against your baseline audit. Adjust AI scripts and routing rules based on what you’re seeing. Set a 30-day check-in to review call logs, escalation rates, and patient feedback.
By month three, most practices have hit their 50%+ call reduction target and have identified the specific workflows where further automation would help.
For larger organizations with centralized communication needs, OhMD also offers call center solutions that scale across multiple locations.
Your phones are ringing because patients don’t have another way to reach you. Give them one.
OhMD combines HIPAA compliant texting, AI call answering, digital forms, and a unified inbox – all from your existing practice phone number.
Practices that switch see 50-68% fewer calls, shorter wait times, faster loop closure, and staff that don’t dread coming to work.
Practices using a combination of call-to-text deflection, AI call answering, and HIPAA compliant texting typically see 50-68% call volume reductions within the first three to four months. The exact number depends on your starting call volume, patient demographics, and how many strategies you implement. Even a single strategy like call-to-text deflection produces a 20-35% reduction on its own.
Yes. Text messages have significantly higher open rates than voicemail, and patients increasingly prefer texting for non-urgent communication. The practices we work with find that once patients discover they can text, many never call again for routine matters. Younger patient populations adopt fastest, but even older demographics respond well when the text comes from a familiar practice phone number.
Yes, when done through a HIPAA compliant platform. Standard SMS apps (iMessage, WhatsApp, Android Messages) are not compliant. A HIPAA compliant texting platform like OhMD provides encryption, access controls, audit trails, and an automatic Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Non-sensitive messages go out as standard SMS. Messages containing protected health information include a secure link for encrypted viewing.
Call reduction does not mean call elimination. Patients who prefer to call can still call, and they’ll actually get through more reliably because your lines aren’t saturated with routine calls that could have been texts. The goal is to give patients options and shift the deflectable calls to more efficient channels, not to force everyone onto text.
Most practices see measurable call volume reduction within the first two to four weeks. The reduction accelerates over the first three months as more patients discover and adopt the text channel. Family Practice Associates of Lexington achieved their 37% reduction in four months. Coastline Orthopedics hit 68% within a similar timeframe.
OhMD offers a free tier for care coordination and provider-to-provider messaging. Paid plans for patient communication, AI call answering, and advanced features range from $250 to $1,200 per month depending on practice size and feature set. Compare that to $3,500-$4,500 per month for a single additional front desk FTE. Full pricing is available on the plans page.
No. OhMD works with your existing practice phone number. Patients text the same number they already have saved in their contacts. This is critical for adoption – patients are far more likely to read and respond to a text from a recognized number than from an unfamiliar shortcode.
OhMD integrates with 85+ electronic health record systems including athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Nextech, DrChrono, ModMed, and more. Conversations can be pushed to the patient’s chart with one click, eliminating manual documentation. If your EHR isn’t on the list, OhMD’s team can evaluate custom integration options.
