Physiotherapy enquiries arrive with a very particular shape. Someone has put up with a sore shoulder for three weeks, finally searched for a clinic at 10pm and wants to know two things before they commit: will you see them, and who is paying. They rarely want to wait until morning to find out.
The reception team knows the answers by heart. Self-referral is fine, this insurer needs an authorisation code, that one does not, an initial assessment is 45 minutes. The problem is that they give those answers dozens of times a week, in between checking patients in.
An AI receptionist for physiotherapy can handle that repetition from your own content. The discipline is in the one question every patient asks in some form, "can you help with my knee?", and making sure the answer never becomes clinical advice.
Four questions that fill the inbox
Watch a clinic inbox for a fortnight and nearly everything falls into one of these.
- "Do I need a referral?" Patients are genuinely unsure whether private physio needs a GP letter. The answer depends on your clinic and on their insurer, which is why it gets asked so often.
- "Will my insurance cover it?" They want to know whether you are registered with their insurer, whether they need a pre-authorisation number and whether there is an excess.
- "Can you help with my knee / back / shoulder?" This is part eligibility question, part reassurance-seeking. It needs care.
- "How much and when?" Price of an initial assessment and follow-ups, and whether there is anything this week.
The first two are pure information. The last one is information plus a request. The third is where setup matters.
Handling "can you help with my knee"
A patient describing their knee is not asking for a diagnosis, even if it reads that way. They are asking whether you are the right kind of clinic. The assistant can answer that honestly without assessing anything.
Visitor: I've had pain on the outside of my knee since I started running again, is that something you treat Assistant: We see a lot of running-related knee problems, and sports injuries are one of the main areas the team treats. I can't assess what's causing it, that's what the initial assessment is for. Would you like me to take a request for an assessment? I'll just need a few details.
What makes that reply safe is the source. "Sports injuries" comes from the clinic's conditions page. The assistant is repeating what the clinic treats, then routing to an assessment. It is not suggesting what the pain might be, recommending rest or ice, or offering exercises.
Set that boundary explicitly in the persona: the assistant gives information about services, prices and access; it does not interpret symptoms or suggest treatment; anything describing sudden, severe or worsening symptoms gets directed to a GP, urgent care or emergency services. Our post on guardrails in regulated industries covers how to word those instructions so they hold up.
Then test the edges. Try "is it safe to keep running on it", "should I use heat or ice" and "my back suddenly went and I can't feel my leg". The first two should get a polite refusal and an assessment offer. The last should get an urgent route, immediately.
Setting it up in five steps
- Write down your referral rules. Self-referral, GP referral, consultant referral, and which insurers need what. One short page, in plain words.
- List your insurer relationships. For each insurer, whether you are registered, whether authorisation is needed before the first session and what the patient should have ready.
- Publish your conditions and treatments. Areas you commonly treat, plus anything you do not (for example, if you do not offer women's health or paediatric physio, say so).
- Add prices and session lengths. Initial assessment and follow-up, and any package pricing.
- Decide what a request captures. Name, contact details, body area, how long it has been a problem, funding route (self-pay or insurer) and preferred times.
You can teach the assistant by crawling the pages once they exist, uploading a PDF of your insurer list or adding Q&A pairs. Pairs suit the referral rules, because precise wording matters. The documentation walks through each method.
Worked example: what capture saves on the phone
Treat these numbers as an example to replace with your own.
Say your clinic gets 30 new-patient enquiries a week through the website. At the moment each one needs a call back, and a typical first call runs about eight minutes: finding out the problem, the funding route, the insurer's rules and availability.
If the assistant has already answered the referral and insurance questions and captured body area, duration, funding route and preferred times, that first call becomes a confirmation. Say it drops to three minutes.
- Before: 30 calls x 8 minutes = 240 minutes a week
- After: 30 calls x 3 minutes = 90 minutes a week
- Difference: 150 minutes, two and a half hours of reception time
That time does not disappear; it goes back to patients at the desk. It also means someone enquiring at 10pm has their answers the same night, which is often what decides whether they wait for you or book elsewhere.
What it should never be asked to do
Be candid with your team about the limits. The assistant does not book directly into your diary. It captures the request, and a person confirms the slot. It does not see your practice system, so it cannot say whether Thursday at 4pm is free unless you have published that.
It should also refuse anything that touches clinical decisions: exercises, return-to-sport timelines, whether a scan is needed. The post on questions your assistant should refuse has a list worth adapting.
Your first week
Start with the referral and insurer page, because it answers the most repeated questions and does not exist on most clinic websites. Get a senior physio to read the conditions list for accuracy.
Then build ten test messages that describe symptoms in different ways, including two that should trigger an urgent route, and run them before the assistant goes near a real patient. Our physiotherapy page shows the kind of setup that comes out of this.