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Inside The Children's Clinic, a Sydney paediatric practice of 22 specialists, where every call gets answered, bookings land straight in Genie, and reception keeps only what needs a person.
The Children's Clinic is a paediatric practice in Sydney, with 22 specialists and a full reception team on the front desk. On a busy clinic day the phones do not stop, and almost every caller is a parent.
The reception team was fully staffed and good at the job, but call volume kept climbing while capacity stayed the same. Calls spiked precisely when staff were busiest with the patients in front of them, so calls rang out at the worst points of the day and voicemails banked up, turning each unanswered call into two pieces of work instead of one. And a large share of those calls were bookings: a new appointment, a reschedule, a confirmation. Each one needed someone free to pick up the phone and work through the diary, at exactly the moments nobody was free.
Parents also call, and then call again. Anxiety produces follow-up questions, and most of them were the same twenty questions the practice answers every day: what to bring, where to go, what happens at a first appointment, how the referral process works. Answerable in under a minute by anyone who knew how the clinic ran, and consuming exactly the same reception capacity as a genuinely complex call. Meanwhile a parent ringing about pain after a procedure queued identically to a parent ringing about parking, because sorting the urgent from the routine could only happen after the fact, one returned call at a time.
The Children's Clinic was not a prospect Medow went looking for. The practice got in touch to ask whether Medow could do anything about the volume of calls landing on its front desk. What they wanted was not a replacement for their reception team, because good front-desk staff are hard to find and slow to train. They wanted the calls their team was never going to get to.
The part that made AI Front Desk work here is the part that does not generalise. A paediatric clinic and a cardiology clinic take different calls, but so do two paediatric clinics. Appointment types, referral rules, what counts as urgent and who it goes to are all particular to how a given practice runs.
Solveigh, the clinic's Customer Success Manager, configured and onboarded AI Front Desk before it took a single call, working through it with the reception staff who knew what parents actually ask and how they wanted it answered. The answers are the practice's own answers, in the practice's own words. In paediatrics that matters more than most, because the wrong answer to a worried parent is worse than no answer at all. Because AI Front Desk connects directly to Genie, the practice management system the clinic already runs, nothing else had to change. Appointment types and booking rules came from how the clinic already uses Genie, so going live meant configuring it with the reception team. The clinic's systems stayed as they were.
Medow handles multiple calls at once, so no parent waits and no call rings out. A parent who cannot get through may delay care, or look elsewhere. Now the call is answered, and the reception team is still there and still fully staffed.
The practice decides what AI Front Desk resolves on the call and what goes to a person, and can change it at any time. The routine is handled end to end, so those calls finish when the call finishes rather than becoming a voicemail, a callback and a note on someone's desk. Everything else reaches reception complete, with the caller, the child, the reason and the urgency already captured. Pain after a procedure is escalated. Parking is not.
AI Front Desk is integrated with Genie. A parent ringing to book, move or confirm an appointment is dealt with on the call, against the clinic's live Genie diary and the appointment types and rules it has set. The appointment is in Genie by the time the call ends: nothing re-keyed. The practice keeps final control over every booking AI Front Desk makes, with the option to accept or decline each one, and reception sees it exactly where they'd expect to.
Resolved calls are logged, flagged calls queued with the reason they were escalated, and full transcripts available at any time. Changes to how AI Front Desk handles calls are tested in a separate environment before they reach a patient. For the practice manager, what reaches her is closer to a list of decisions than a list of messages.
The clinic frames it as capacity and staffing rather than technology. The call volume did not fall; what changed was the practice's ability to meet it. Answering the phone used to be the job, and now it is part of the job. Nobody was replaced. The work was sorted.
Medow's AI receptionist has allowed us to handle a volume of calls that wasn't previously possible, and with staffing being the hardest thing in managing a busy specialist clinic, the AI receptionist has been an invaluable member of our team.
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