Medical answering service pricing: what a UK clinic actually pays

There is no single price for a medical answering service, and any supplier who gives you one before seeing your call pattern is guessing. Nearly all of them bill the same shape — a monthly minimum that includes an allowance, plus a charge per call or per minute beyond it — so what you pay is decided by how many people ring, how long they talk, and how much of that happens outside clinic hours.

Which means the useful question is not “what does it cost”. It is “what does it cost for my calls” — and that is a number you can work out yourself in about twenty minutes.

Scope, so there is no ambiguity. This page is about private UK practices — dental, physiotherapy, aesthetics, private GP, veterinary and similar — and about administrative call handling only. Nothing here concerns clinical work, and nothing an answering supplier does should either.

How much does a medical answering service cost?

Take the quote apart into the two lines that matter and fill in your own numbers:

Monthly cost = the monthly minimum + (chargeable calls beyond the allowance × the per-call rate)

or, if they bill by time:

Monthly cost = the monthly minimum + (billable minutes beyond the allowance × the per-minute rate) + VAT

To fill that in you need four figures, and your phone provider or system can give you all four:

1. How many inbound calls you get in a month.
2. How many currently go unanswered or to voicemail.
3. Roughly how long a call your reception handles actually runs.
4. What share arrives outside opening hours, and how many need putting through to a person rather than messaging.

Then run the sum for a normal month and for your busiest month. The busy month is the one that tells you whether the plan is right, because that is when the overage lands. The figure practices routinely underestimate is the third: a patient explaining why they need to be seen does not talk like someone ordering a part, and on a per-minute contract that difference is the whole bill.

What drives the cost of answering for a clinic?

• Call length. The biggest lever, and the one specific to healthcare. Rounding up to the next whole minute is a different proposition on a four-minute call than a ninety-second one.
• The shape of the day. Monday morning after a weekend of voicemail, and the hour after evening clinic. Peaks decide whether you are paying for capacity you use for six hours a week.
• Out of hours. Evenings, weekends and bank holidays are usually a surcharge or a separate plan — and for most private practices they are the whole reason for buying.
• Patching. Putting a caller through to a clinician’s mobile is often billed as its own minutes, on top of the minutes already spent answering. Ask whether the talk time is counted twice.
• Handling rules. A clinic almost never wants “take a message”. It wants cancellations handled one way, new enquiries another, results queries not handled at all, and anything urgent signposted immediately. Building and maintaining those rules is either a setup fee, a professional-services line, or your own team’s time.
• Sites and lines. A second location or second number is usually a second charge.
• Data handling. A supplier who will sign a processor agreement, keep recordings and transcripts in the UK and delete them on a schedule may quote higher than one who will not. That is a difference worth paying for.
• VAT. Quotes in this category are frequently net. Compare inclusive totals or you are comparing nothing.

Per minute, per call or a flat licence?

None of these is inherently cheaper. The right one is whichever matches your call shape, which is why the arithmetic above matters more than any published rate card.

What an answering supplier must never do on a clinic’s line

This section matters more than the price, and it is the one to settle before you discuss money.

Whoever answers is performing administration. They are not assessing anyone, not advising on symptoms, not deciding who should be seen first, not interpreting results and not discussing medication. That line has to exist in writing, in the script, signed off by the practice, before a single call is taken — not agreed informally after go-live.

And one instruction overrides everything else: when a caller describes an emergency they are signposted exactly as the practice has specified, immediately, with no attempt to assess them. In the UK that normally means 999 for an emergency and 111 for urgent advice out of hours, but the wording is the practice’s to set, not the supplier’s to improvise.

Odette works this way by design. The emergency wording is configured by the practice and spoken as instructed — it does not form a view about how unwell a caller is, because that is not its job. It tells every caller that it is an AI, on every call. And where the practice wants nothing confirmed about an existing patient, True Receptionist mode does exactly that: acknowledge, connect or take a message, discuss no detail.

Twelve questions to ask before you sign

1. Do you bill per call or per minute, and what do you round to?
2. What is the monthly minimum, what does it include, and does an unused allowance roll over?
3. Which calls are chargeable — spam, wrong numbers, hang-ups, calls we have asked you to block?
4. Is out-of-hours cover included or a surcharge? What about bank holidays?
5. Is patching a caller to a clinician billed on top of the answered minutes?
6. What exact words will you say to a caller who describes an emergency, and who at our practice signs that off?
7. What may you confirm about an existing patient, and what must you never confirm?
8. A cancellation comes in at 22:00 — where does it land, and who acts on it before the morning?
9. Can you write into our practice management diary, or do you hand us a request to confirm? Show me it working on our system, not a demo one.
10. Where are recordings and transcripts stored, for how long, and who can access them?
11. Will you sign a data processing agreement under UK GDPR?
12. What is the minimum term and the notice period?

Where Odette fits, and where it does not

Odette is a flat monthly licence rather than a metered service: Solo £19/month (list £29), Pro £49 (list £79), Business £99 (list £149). There is an optional one-off concierge setup if you would rather we configured it for you — a flat £99 +VAT, on the pricing page.

The honest counterweight, because a flat licence is easy to misread: running it is not free. The practice brings its own Twilio number and its own ElevenLabs account and pays those two providers directly, at cost. There is no marked-up per-minute meter from us — but usage is real money, so when you set this against a bureau’s quote, compare all-in against all-in.

What Odette does for a practice: answers every call 24/7 in natural speech and opens as an AI; answers administrative questions from the practice’s own knowledge base — opening hours, prices, where to park, what to bring, how to prepare; takes a structured message with the caller’s name, number, email and reason, and emails it the moment the call ends with a transcript; emails the caller their own copy if they ask; flags sales and spam calls silently; and logs anything it could not answer so the practice can fill the gap. On Pro and Business it puts a caller through to a named colleague, announced — they press 1 to take the call, 2 to have a message taken, or 3 to have the caller told you will ring back shortly. Solo takes messages and does not transfer.

What it does not do, said plainly: it does not write into your diary. In this vertical that is a genuine gap, because diary integration is precisely what several suppliers in the category sell. Odette captures the appointment request and emails it; your team confirms it. It also makes no outbound calls, takes no payments, sends no texts, and gives no clinical advice of any kind.

So Odette suits a practice whose problem is unanswered enquiry calls and after-hours cancellations, with a front desk that copes fine during clinic. It does not suit a practice that wants the answering layer to own the diary. If that is you, ask the suppliers who integrate to demonstrate it on your own system before you sign anything.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• What is an AI receptionist?
• AI Receptionist vs Answering Service: Which Is Right for Your Business?
• AI receptionist for small businesses in the UK