THE PHONE
No lost calls — because every call becomes a line in the record
The phone is the first contact with a patient and at the same time the clinic’s blindest channel. Odontia has its own phone system, built into the patient record.
Running in the founder’s practice since late June 2026. It works by diversion from your own telephony provider — set up together when the practice is opened.
THE PHONE · HOW IT WORKS
The phone rings. Nobody writes anything down.
This is how a call travels through the founder’s own practice on Paros, every day. You change nothing with your telecom provider, your number or your handsets.
The journey of one call, in six steps
- 01 the patient
The patient calls the number they know
The same number the practice has had for years.
- 02 your provider
The line is diverted to Odontia
A plain call diversion at your provider. Contract, carrier and handsets stay as they are.
- 03 Odontia
Odontia answers and routes
The patient’s name on the handset before you pick up. Menus with AI voices, opening hours, voicemail.
- 04 AI
Transcribed and summarised
One click on a call or a voicemail, and it comes back as text with a summary. That summary waits as a Proposal.
- 05 a person
It lands on the patient’s record
One tap by a person, and the summary becomes a line in the record.
- 06 the front desk
The staff see it
Who called, what they wanted, what happened. Calls that need action go to their own list.
And when you call out
Tap the number inside the patient card. The patient sees your practice’s number — not an unknown one.
The diversion is set up with you when the practice is opened. Incoming calls are recorded and the caller is told before recording starts.
A missed call while you are working in someone’s mouth is, literally, a patient lost that nobody ever heard about. The phone in a dental practice leaves no trace: you do not know how many people called, who never called back, or what they wanted.
This part is, we think, the most interesting — because no other dental program in Greece does it. It is not “a connection to your phone system”: the phone system is inside Odontia, and a call is patient data in the same way an appointment or a payment is.
The volume — measured, not assumed
In the founder’s practice the system carries the entire phone line since late June 2026. That is 800 to 900 calls a month, in a single-dentist practice.
calls in the first full month: 724 inbound (590 answered, 125 to voicemail, 9 missed) and 161 outbound
July 2026 · founder’s practice
calls in the first 21 days of August: 419 inbound and 135 outbound
01–21.08.2026 · founder’s practice
calls in total, each with a line of its own in the record
21.08.2026 · since late June 2026
voicemails — none of them outside the record
21.08.2026 · founder’s practice
Every call that goes through the system is written into the record — the missed ones, the voicemails and the outbound calls included.
Measured in production on 21 August 2026.
- 01
It shows who is calling — by name
As the phone rings, the system asks Odontia “who has this number?” and puts the patient’s name on the handset, before you even pick up. The front desk answers “good morning Mrs Maria” instead of “yes, hello?”.
The lookup takes about a second and is time-boxed: if it does not answer in time, or no name is found, the number simply appears and the call proceeds as normal.
- 02
It answers for you when you cannot
Opening hours, greeting, a menu in Greek and English, a ring group, voicemail and closure periods — holidays, public holidays — all declared as data.
Which means nobody has to remember to change the greeting before going on holiday: you say it once in the system’s calendar and it holds. Every voicemail sends a notification to the staff.
The recorded greeting uses a synthetic voice and does not pretend to be a person.
- 03
It separates the calls that need action
Not all calls are the same. The ones that need something go to a separate list, split into “pending” and “handled”.
The system filters the noise: a call that ended within the first eight seconds, over the greeting, does not enter the list — but stays in the log. So the front desk sees ten things to do, not three hundred rows.
From one row of the list, with one click: you write a note linked to the patient (or to a new lead if they are unknown), you start a booking by offering times, or you call back. A call closes only when somebody says what happened with it.
- 04
You dial with one click
You tap the patient’s phone number inside Odontia; your own handset rings and, as soon as you pick up, it connects you to the patient.
No wrong digit, no copying from a screen to a keypad — and the outbound call is logged in the record like every other.
- 05
It transcribes and summarises — and then waits
One click on a call transcribes it and produces a summary, which lands as a draft note marked “pending”. A person accepts or rejects it.
It is never written into the record on its own, and everything the AI writes is marked as AI-written — on screen and in the data.
- 06
And then it forgets — on purpose
Inbound calls are recorded and the caller is told in the greeting, before recording starts. Outbound calls are not recorded.
The phone system exposes no port to the internet: traffic runs only through your provider.
How long each part is kept
A call archive that keeps everything forever is not a feature — it is a burden, and a risk. The retention windows are explicit and enforced automatically.
- The audio
- is deleted automatically at 30 days.
- The transcript
- is deleted at 180 days.
- The metadata line
- who called, when, how long — is kept for 5 years.
HOW A PRACTICE GETS IN
Would you like to see it?
A short tour of the real system, with no commitment at all — and, if you like, a test practice with your own data sitting quietly to one side.
- 1 A short tour of the real system
- 2 A test practice with your own data
- 3 Signatures before the first patient goes in