Meet Andi: the receptionist who refers your booking request
Sandwich Medical Practice has introduced Andi, its new AI receptionist, to make telephone access easier and spare patients the traditional phone-queue endurance test.
The queue may have met its match. Whether the patient has is another matter.
The editor’s wife had been told by a GP, at the end of a telephone consultation, to book a blood test. So she rang the surgery to do precisely that.
This ought to have been one of Andi’s easier afternoons. Sandwich Medical Practice’s own website specifically says appointments for services including blood tests can still be booked by telephone.
Instead, she says Andi asked several questions that appeared irrelevant to making the appointment. Eventually the system told her that her request would be referred.
No blood-test appointment had been booked.
By then she was sufficiently exasperated to be shouting down the phone. Her verdict afterwards: “Thank God I don’t have high blood pressure.”
Does Andi work?
One furious caller does not prove that Andi doesn’t work. The system is new, and its maker, Anima, says 86% of patients would use Andi again. Its public product page, however, does not explain the sample size or survey methodology behind that figure.
There is also some illuminating evidence from elsewhere.
Anima promotes Magdalen Medical Practice in Norwich as an Andi success story, saying its reception team answered 5,000 fewer calls in the first month.
Healthwatch Norfolk subsequently visited the same practice. Fourteen patients gave the surgery an impressive overall score of 4.2 out of 5 — but Andi was the main source of dissatisfaction. Patients complained that it misunderstood requests, asked irrelevant questions and made booking appointments more complicated. Some said they ended up visiting the surgery in person.
Less queue, or just different frustration?
Both accounts can be true. Andi may save practices substantial staff time while making life considerably easier for many callers — and considerably harder for some others.
For Sandwich patients, that is the test that matters. Success isn’t simply how many calls no longer reach a human receptionist.
It’s whether the patient actually gets the simple thing they phoned for.
Sources
- Sandwich Medical Practice — current practice and appointment information.
- Sandwich Medical Practice — Andi information.
- Anima — AI Receptionist — product information and patient-use claim.
- Anima — Magdalen Medical Practice case study.
- Healthwatch Norfolk — Magdalen Medical Practice feedback report.
Reported from published sources and a disclosed first-hand patient account; research assisted by AI, checked before publication. Corrections: news@sandwichnews.co.uk