AI virtual receptionist for medical practices and healthcare facilities

Run2AI Virtual Reception is an AI virtual receptionist for medical practices and healthcare facilities: it answers patients on the phone, on WhatsApp, in your website chat and by email, gives information, books, moves and cancels appointments in your practice management system, and hands the conversation to a person when needed.

Patients speak naturally, with no keypad menu. The assistant understands the request, checks the facility's real calendars and completes the task; when a request goes beyond what it can handle, it transfers the call during opening hours or logs a callback request with a summary of the conversation.

Run2AI works only in healthcare: it is the brand of Run 2 Cloud S.r.l., a Milan company active in the sector since 2016, and the Virtual Reception flow has been refined for about two years with facilities that use it every day.

You decide which calls reach the virtual receptionist through your switchboard rules: Virtual Reception only sees the calls the switchboard passes to it.

Most facilities start with two cases:

• after hours: evenings, nights, weekends and public holidays, when nobody answers today;
• all operators busy: a call that would hit a busy line goes to the assistant instead of being lost.

Healthcare calls come in peaks, for example between 8 and 10 a.m. or on Monday mornings, and staffing for the peaks is not sustainable; the assistant absorbs the extra volume on its own. After the run-in period many facilities make it the first point of contact 24/7, leaving operators only the calls that really need a person.

Yes, Virtual Reception connects to the switchboard you already use, VoIP or traditional, and patients keep calling the same number.

With a VoIP switchboard a SIP trunk is set up with an extension dedicated to the assistant (it already runs, for example, with 3CX); with an analog switchboard a dedicated number and call forwarding when nobody answers are enough. If your switchboard is a closed proprietary system, you can move to VoIP or a cloud switchboard, or start with call forwarding as a trial. All the options are explained on the inbound call management page.

Yes: with an integrated practice management system, Virtual Reception reads availability in real time, offers the actual open slots and writes the appointment straight into the calendar, with no double entry for reception.

If the patient asks for a clinician by name, the assistant searches only that person's calendars; otherwise it combines the availability of every clinician who provides that service. The practice management system stays the master: services, prices, price lists and clinicians are imported with a "sync" button, and after booking, the SMS or email reminders your system already sends go out as usual.

Active integrations include Doctolib Vettore, Caremed (Innogea), Alfadocs, DBMedica, Medinformatica Medistudio, Multimedia Medica Siomed, Bollino IT, BCS, RB Software Center Ges.La.An., Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, plus Snoots and Alcyon Dr.Vet for veterinary practices. With Doctolib without Vettore there is currently no real-time reading or writing of calendars: the assistant answers questions, collects the booking request for an operator or sends the patient to the online booking page. Some platforms are closed ecosystems, and there the assistant collects the request for your staff. With no management system at all, even a paper diary, you can start from Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar.

Virtual Reception answers only from two sources your facility controls: documentation organized into cards and chapters, and the services synced from your practice management system.

• Documentation: opening hours, sites, parking, payments, insurance agreements, report turnaround times, even different for each site.
• Services: they come from the management system with description and preparation instructions, and the assistant also recognizes synonyms and everyday names.

On day one the documentation is pre-filled by automatically extracting content from your website and from documents such as your service charter. The information applies to every channel; for a temporary campaign you add a chapter and delete it when the campaign ends.

When it doesn't have the information, Virtual Reception does not make it up: it tells the patient and hands the conversation to an operator or, when the facility is closed, logs a callback request.

An orchestrator designed for healthcare workflows keeps it bound to the information your facility has entered. Every unanswered question goes into the panel's "suggested additions": every two weeks or once a month you review them and add them to the documentation, so the assistant covers more cases over time.

In our experience there is always a core of 20–30% of requests so specific that they rightly go to a person. The realistic goal is different: your front desk should no longer be interrupted to give out opening hours or an email address.

Yes: during opening hours Virtual Reception transfers the call to an operator when the patient asks for one or when the request needs a person.

When the facility is closed it logs a callback request that reception finds in the panel with name, number and a summary. Requests work like a small ticketing system: yellow for those to handle, green for those already called back, with a record of who handled them and when.

If the patient asks for a doctor by name or for an office such as administration or billing, the assistant routes the call to the right extension, respecting each person's hours.

Yes: Virtual Reception is also used by facilities with a very elderly patient base and, in our experience, it works as well with them as with younger patients.

One of our first clients is an eye clinic specializing in cataract surgery; other facilities are in Veneto, Sicily and Sardinia, and the assistant handles local accents well. There is no "press 1" menu, patients can interrupt and change topic, and the speaking speed is tuned to be clear even for the oldest callers. It also recognizes the caller's language and answers in the same one, which helps with foreign patients.

We estimate you can count on 95–98% of conversations: in the 1–2% of difficult calls, which would be hard for an operator too, the assistant notices that the conversation is not moving forward and hands it to a person.

When it recognizes signs of an emergency, Virtual Reception stops the routine booking and tells the patient to call the emergency services (118 in Italy) or go to the emergency department.

Phrases like "I need to come in within half an hour, something serious has happened" are recognized by their meaning, not by fixed keywords. If the facility has set it up, the assistant can also trigger an alert or transfer the call straight to an operator. It gives no clinical advice and, like an operator, it cannot guess an emergency the patient does not express.

Yes: data handled by Virtual Reception is stored on Google Cloud Platform in Europe, the AI models run in Europe and no model is trained on patient conversations.

• The assistant always introduces itself as a virtual assistant and refers to the facility's privacy notice.
• Data is encrypted at rest and readable in clear only by people who log into the panel with their own credentials.
• Your facility decides how long data is kept, with automatic deletion after the chosen period (for example one, two or three months).
• Call audio recordings are used only for technical checks, kept for 7 days at most and accessible only to the authorized technical lead.

Run2AI signs the data processor appointment and provides your DPO with a dedicated notice and documentation on server compliance.

Yes, Virtual Reception is built for multiple sites: for each one you set opening hours, address, exceptional closures, information and services.

If every site has its own number, the assistant already knows where the call is coming from; with a single central booking number, like an Italian CUP, it asks the patient which site they want. Operators have an admin or user profile and are linked to one or more sites, so each person sees their own requests. The Pro plan adds unlimited users, advanced statistics and call routing to people or teams.

The cost per site goes down as the number of sites grows, and a second site that is only a blood-draw point on the same number can start as a single-site setup.

No: Virtual Reception does not replace your front-desk team, it frees them from the calls that can be standardized.

Reception staff also handle check-in, payments and paperwork, and they are interrupted constantly; many facilities end up silencing the phone at peak times. The assistant takes opening hours, directions and simple bookings, while people keep complex bookings, personalized questions and the face-to-face welcome. Some facilities keep the same headcount for the first 6–8 months of the run-in period.

It also helps when growth gets awkward, with three people too few and four too many: by our estimate an extra hire costs around €40,000 a year, while the assistant absorbs the extra volume without that step change in cost.

The Virtual Reception voice bot, the phone channel, starts from €224 a month, which is an annual fee of €2,690 excluding VAT.

Pricing is modular and has three parts:

• one-off activation: setup, testing and staff training on documentation and the panel;
• subscription, annual or quarterly, for the channels and modules you activate;
• usage, only above the threshold included in the subscription.

You switch on only what you need: you can start with one site or a single channel and extend later. The practice management integration is a flat fee, so the price is certain, and you get the full quote in the first call. All prices exclude VAT.

The voice channel subscription includes 500 minutes of actual conversation a month, about 350 calls; above that threshold you pay per minute, and only the traffic that actually reaches the assistant counts.

In our experience 30–40% of clients pay nothing for usage because they use the assistant after hours and at peak times and stay within the threshold; about 40% spend a few tens of euros a month; those who send it tens of thousands of calls reach a few hundred euros, against thousands of bookings.

An indicative example: 3,000 calls a month with a 15% conversion rate give about 450 bookings; at an average value of €80 that is about €36,000 booked a month and, with a 10% margin, about €3,600 of margin. Usage costs stay in the order of a tenth of the margin generated.

Virtual Reception is usually live in 2–3 weeks; the fastest activations went live in 5–6 days.

Work runs on three tracks in parallel:

• telephony: call transfer set up with whoever manages your switchboard, plus testing;
• management system: calendar integration and service sync;
• content: documentation from your website, service charter and files, preparation instructions included.

Content takes the longest, but you don't start from scratch: there is a base already tested in similar facilities. Staff training is included.

Yes, and the first step is free: the demo number 02 3055 1707 answers the way it would answer your patients, and colleagues and partners can call it at any time too.

After the demo you work in a test environment, with test calls visible in real time in the panel. In production you can start with a pilot on a single site or on the voice channel only, even just after hours, and there is a paid three-month trial to check the results, usually with the voice channel and callback requests. During the run-in period the documentation grows and the scope widens until the assistant becomes the first point of contact. More answers on activation and contracts are in the virtual receptionist FAQ.

Because in healthcare the hard part is not turning speech into text but guiding the patient to the right booking, and a generic assistant ends up passing almost everything to an operator.

A request like "an MRI of the right knee, high-field, without contrast" means handling ambiguous names, national health service (SSN), private or insured coverage, preparation instructions, several sites and several clinicians. Virtual Reception asks for clarification against the price list ("a standard dermatology visit or one with dermoscopy?"), reads the preparation before offering dates and stays bound to the facility's information. Compared with an IVR, patients speak naturally instead of pressing keys.

Several facilities came to Run2AI after trying generic answering services or outsourced call centers, where inaccurate information and wrong bookings were common.

The Virtual Reception panel shows every call, chat and WhatsApp conversation handled, with the outcome by channel: bookings, callback requests, cancellations.

Each conversation has a full transcript, which is also useful if a dispute arises. You see the calls that did not end in a booking and the questions left unanswered, the starting point for improving the documentation. From the panel you manage admin and user profiles, which can be limited by site, choose the assistant's voice and, with a cloud switchboard, call the patient back with one click.