What a phone assistant needs from your interface.
This list comes from production, not from a whiteboard. Every point on it cost us money or trust once, in a real practice. If your interface covers these, the integration is a matter of weeks.
What we need
Per practitioner: the day's working hours, breaks, absences and blocked time — not just a list of free appointments. Otherwise the agent offers slots that are technically free but actually impossible. Also useful: “next free appointment from date X” with earliest/latest time filters.
There's a human waiting on the line. Slow availability lookups create exactly the conversational pauses that make callers hang up. Please size rate limits for call reality — several reads per minute per conversation is normal.
Phone speech recognition reliably mangles names. Search by caller ID first, then fuzzy and phonetically tolerant on the name. Return a candidate list with a disambiguating field (date of birth, say) — never exact-match only.
Appointment creation with a real patient link, not a free-text workaround. An idempotency key per request so a network retry never double-books. Server-side conflict checking with a clean error plus alternatives when the slot has gone.
Cancelling must mark the appointment cancelled — billing and prescription linkage survive, the slot frees up. Rescheduling ideally atomic, so the state “patient now has no appointment at all” can never occur.
For cancellations and reschedules: “appointments for patient X on day Y”, findable via caller ID or a name match. Without that read the agent has to guess; with it, reading the appointment back becomes a clean identity check.
When the practice moves or cancels something itself, the agent needs to know before the patient rings. Push, not polling.
Per-practice scoped credentials; every write attributed visibly on the appointment; a retrievable audit log. That protects you, us and the practice: in a data incident a clean write-ledger is worth its weight — we speak from experience.
Processing-agreement chain practice → you → us, EU processing, data minimisation in responses (the agent needs no diagnoses) and defined deletion paths. We supply the drafts.
What we bring
- ✓The entire integration — built and maintained at our cost.
- ✓Realtime voice agent in German and English, including switching mid-conversation.
- ✓Email confirmations, a daily digest to the practice, escalation to the team.
- ✓Monitoring, model tuning and incident handling in live operation.
- ✓DPA draft, sub-processor list and deletion concept for your customers.
What if we don't have an open API?
Then it isn't a blocker. Our first production integration ran against a closed system with no official interface at all — reverse-engineered, with genuine read and write access to the calendar. With your cooperation the path is far shorter: a calendar layer, an internal API or a documented data model is enough for a plan measured in weeks rather than months.
Next step
Send us your interface documentation or give us access to a test system — or book 20 minutes and we'll walk through what you already have. Terms go in writing before anything is built.