Voice phone assistant
Fertiligent includes an automated voice agent that can answer your clinic's phone line and handle common caller requests before — or instead of — routing to staff. This page covers what it does and how it fits into your day-to-day workflow.
What it handles
- General conversation. It greets callers naturally and can answer everyday, conversational questions, following the thread of the conversation from one question to the next.
- Clinic-information questions. It can answer questions like phone number, email, address, hours, and services from a curated knowledge base you provide for your clinic.
- Referral status lookups. A caller can ask about the status of their referral. Once verified (see below), the agent shares a safe, high-level status rather than raw record details.
- Messages and callbacks. If a request needs a person, or the caller simply wants a call back, the agent takes a callback number, reads it back to confirm, and queues it for staff to action.
- Escalation. For anything outside what it's built to handle, the agent hands off cleanly rather than guessing — leaving a message or callback request for staff.
Verifying who's calling
Before sharing anything about a referral, the agent confirms the caller's identity — typically by date of birth, which the caller can either say aloud or enter on the phone's keypad. It only shares status information after this check succeeds.
If the caller is calling from a phone number already on file, the agent may recognize them and streamline the check — a caller who has already verified isn't asked for their date of birth again. If the number isn't recognized, or the date of birth doesn't match, the agent doesn't share private details — it offers another way forward (such as keying in a different number to look up) instead of getting stuck or guessing at who it's speaking to.
Failed attempts are limited, and the limit follows the caller. After repeated failures the caller is locked out of verification for 24 hours. Hanging up and calling back does not give them a fresh set of attempts — a change from earlier behaviour, where the count reset with each new call.
Where the caller is already recognised but has not consented to receive personal health information, the agent says so at the start, without first asking for a date of birth. See Consent & patient privacy.
What it can do for a verified patient
Once the caller's identity is verified and consent is on file, the agent can also:
- Look up their upcoming appointments and the status of recent results.
- Confirm an appointment, or take a request to cancel or reschedule one.
- Book a nurse intake call on the spot — the one action it completes rather than drafting. See Intake nurse availability.
- Update a contact detail, or collect a missing referral detail.
- Text the caller public information they ask for, such as an address or how to prepare for a visit. Public material only, and capped per call so a conversation can't turn into a stream of texts.
- Share a summary of their own care, including current medications and recent labs.
For anything that touches a patient's record or the calendar — a reschedule, a contact-detail change, a missing referral field — the agent records a request or draft for your staff to review and apply. It never edits the record or moves the calendar on its own. Booking a nurse intake call is the one exception, and it is confirmed on the spot.
Appointment times are never guessed
The agent only offers times it can state unambiguously in your clinic's timezone, and refuses a time it can't — rather than reading it out in a zone the caller didn't expect. It also never offers or commits a slot that has already passed, and it books against the specific slot it offered, so a long conversation can't end with the caller booked into a different time than the one they agreed to.
If your clinic only takes nurse intake bookings, the agent can be set to stop offering physician consultations altogether, instead of mentioning a service you don't book.
Suspected medical emergencies
If a caller describes something that may be a medical emergency — or asks whether their symptoms warrant an emergency room — the agent recognises it before the conversation reaches the AI model, tells the caller to call 911, and stays on the line rather than hanging up on them.
This is deliberately separate from other kinds of escalation: a caller raising a legal or complaint matter is never told to call 911, and a suspected emergency is never answered with an ordinary "someone will call you back."
Collecting missing details
During a referral call, the agent may notice a detail is missing — for example an email address — and offer to collect it from the caller. Anything collected this way is never written to the record automatically: it's saved as a draft for a staff member to review and apply. A person always stays in the loop.
Where calls are reviewed
Every conversation the assistant handles is logged in the portal under Conversations — and it's not only phone calls. Voice, text, portal and email conversations appear together in one worklist, each tagged with its channel, so your team works from a single view instead of one inbox per channel.
From there your team opens a conversation for its transcript and outcome, resolves it once it's handled, and picks up anything the assistant escalated. See Conversations.
For how a collected detail or callback surfaces against a referral, see Referrals workflow.