Companion & communication
Practice FAQ & first-contact assistant
When are you open? Do I need an appointment for a repeat prescription? Are you taking on new patients? – Every question is fair and easy to answer, and every one ties up the phone while patients wait in the practice.
You'll get …
- 1
Answers in your practice's tone
The assistant knows your opening hours and how prescriptions and referrals work, and answers organisational questions around the clock.
- 2
Less pressure on reception
The website deals with recurring questions; requests such as appointments or prescriptions reach reception as a clear, structured message.
- 3
A clear line on anything medical
With symptoms or questions about a diagnosis, the assistant refers people straight to the team or the emergency number – enforced both technically and in its behaviour rules.
01Intro
The practice FAQ assistant answers the recurring organisational questions directly on the website – around the clock, in your practice's tone: opening hours including holiday exceptions, how prescriptions and referrals work, directions, information for new patients. As soon as symptoms, diagnoses or a medical assessment come up, it hands over to the team straight away – with the right phone numbers. The phone still rings, but for the things that need a person.
Worth knowing: the assistant gives no medical information – no assessment of symptoms, no diagnosis, no treatment advice. This limit is firmly built into both its technical set-up and its behaviour rules; whenever symptoms come up, it always directs people to the team or the emergency number. It needs a well-kept knowledge base (if opening hours change and nobody updates it, it loses credibility), and patient data is not part of it.
02How it works
- 01
Collect the questions patients ask most
What does reception get asked every day, what turns up in emails, what comes in by phone? That gives us the list of questions the assistant has to handle – and a clear list of those it must never answer.
- 02
Build the knowledge base – without patient data
Opening hours and exceptions, prescriptions and referrals, services, directions, information for new patients: we structure the practice's organisational knowledge. Patient data is deliberately left out.
- 03
Set the tone and limits
How does the assistant speak, when does it refer people to the team, and above all: where does it stop immediately on anything medical? The handover rules are settled before it says a word.
- 04
Build it in where your patients are
The assistant becomes part of the website – mobile first, because that's where patients check opening hours and procedures. In your practice's design, not as a third-party widget.
- 05
Review and refine
The conversations show what patients ask – which leads to better answers, new FAQ entries and pointers to what's missing from the website. Month by month, the assistant takes more pressure off reception.
03Stages
The starting point is deliberately limited – in a practice especially, the assistant above all has to be dependable and have clear boundaries.
Starter: the FAQ assistant
Curated knowledge on opening hours, prescriptions, referrals and common organisational questions, tight guardrails, and a clean handover to the team. Reliable rather than all-knowing.
Next step: first contact with handover
The assistant sorts requests and passes them on in a structured form: appointment requests to reception, prescription requests prepared, anything medical to a person – as a usable message.
Full build: the assistant that takes action
The assistant books free slots straight into the practice calendar, passes prescription requests to reception for approval and recommends the right page or form. All within the strict limits a practice needs: nothing medical, and only the actions the practice has approved.
04Try it yourself
The assistant of the fictional “Dr Winter Practice”. Pick a question – on the right you see where each answer comes from and when it hands over to the practice team.
A simulation with fixed answers from the knowledge base on the right. With a real language model you can try it with Neo, the companion of this website – bottom right.
The companion invents nothing: it answers from a curated knowledge base built from your content. And for anything that needs judgement or expertise, there's the built-in switch to a human.
The most important part is the least conspicuous: the maintained knowledge base on the left. It decides whether the companion is useful or merely polite.
05Technical implementation
- At its core is a language model with your practice's curated knowledge base as context – opening hours, procedures, services; at typical volumes it's cached rather than run through a vector database.
- The medical limit is enforced twice: as a behaviour rule in the prompt and as a topic filter in the back end – questions about symptoms or diagnoses always trigger a handover to a person, and in an emergency a pointer to 112 / 116 117.
- The assistant runs as a component of the website with its own small back end – no third-party branding, no external widget window.
- Patient data is not part of the knowledge base; what gets stored is decided in advance with data protection in mind – data is kept on EU servers.
- Handovers to suit your process: a message to reception, a prescription/referral form, clearly visible phone numbers.
- Running costs stay manageable: an answer typically costs a few cents – we measure that rather than guess.
for context · This shows how something like this usually gets built – not how it has to be built for you. What actually fits is worked out in the project: around your existing setup, your team, and what stays easy to maintain.