What an AI receptionist costs and how to work out payback on front-desk costs

After a conversation about what happens to the fourth call when three lines are busy, the same question comes up almost every time: fine, but what does it cost? I understand why. The trouble is that a single figure tells you nothing, because the same AI receptionist can pay for itself quickly in one clinic and never in another.

So this piece does not quote a price. It gives you a method to run on your own numbers: what answering the phone costs your front desk today, what a voice assistant's cost is made of, and how to put the two side by side to see whether there is any payback. Pricing for the AI receptionist for clinics is on medova.health. The point here is that you can judge any offer, ours included.

The examples below come from Poland, where we work, and the amounts are in Polish złoty (PLN). The method itself works in any country and any currency: swap in your own wages and employer costs.

In a private clinic the sums often start with an empty chair: the patient could not get through, the slot went unused, the revenue was lost. In many Polish clinics that argument does not hold. A large share of appointments is funded by the public payer, the NFZ (National Health Fund), under a contract with a fixed volume, and demand for those appointments is higher than supply. A freed slot fills itself. If someone shows you payback calculated on lost visits and you do not see that loss in your own clinic, you are right and they are not.

Here we count something else: front-desk working time. A voice assistant answers the call, books, informs and redirects. It does not assess anyone's health and does not decide urgency. In practice it takes two things off people: repetitive calls (booking, rescheduling, cancelling, questions about opening hours) and calling back the patients who could not get through.

One caveat before any sums, because without it the whole calculation is inflated. An hour of front-desk time saved only turns into money if something changes in your costs because of it. For example, you do not have to hire another person, overtime or temporary cover goes away, or one of your sites can run without someone sitting by the phone all day. If none of that happens, the gain is still real, but it sits elsewhere: patients get through, complaints drop, and the person at the desk can look after the patient standing in front of them. That is worth money too, it just does not belong in the same column.

Everything you need is already in the building. Your phone system records most of it, and the rest you can collect in a few days next to the phone. I described how to do that in a week in the comparison of IVR, callbacks and a voice assistant.

The gross salary in the contract is not what the position costs. In Poland the employer pays its own share of contributions on top of gross pay: pension 9.76%, disability 6.50%, accident insurance (1.67% for employers registering up to 9 people; larger ones have their own rate), the Labour Fund together with the Solidarity Fund 2.45%, and the Guaranteed Employee Benefits Fund 0.10%. With a 1.67% accident rate that comes to 20.48% on top of gross pay. Other countries have different percentages, but the principle is the same everywhere.

For scale: the Polish minimum wage from 1 January 2026 is PLN 4,806 gross a month. With employer contributions alone, a full-time job at minimum wage costs roughly PLN 5,790 a month. That is the floor below which nobody can be employed full time, and front-desk staff usually earn more.

On top of that come costs you do not see on the payroll: cover during holidays and sick leave, recruitment, a few weeks of getting a new person up to speed. Do not force them into the sum, but keep them in mind when the conversation turns to "why don't we just hire someone else".

The hourly rate is the monthly cost of the position divided by the hours the person actually works. Not by the contractual hours, because holidays and absences reduce the hours while the cost stays the same.

So that the method does not float in the air, here it is on numbers I made up for this piece. This is not a result from any clinic and not a promise, just a demonstration of the sums. Put in your own.

Assume a multi-doctor clinic with an NFZ contract and this situation:

Now the assumptions about the assistant, deliberately cautious:

Result: 180 plus 70 minus 30, which is 220 minutes a day, or about 3.7 hours. Over a month that is about 77 hours, roughly half a full-time job. At PLN 45 an hour, that is the equivalent of about PLN 3,500 a month.

And now the most important part: those PLN 3,500 are not profit. They are the upper limit of what the assistant can cost per month for payback to be possible at all. And as I said above, it is a real saving only if those 77 hours replace something you pay for or would have to pay for.

Offers look different, but underneath they nearly always contain the same parts. It is worth asking the supplier to list them separately, otherwise two proposals are hard to compare.

One-off, at rollout:

Every month:

The sums take three steps.

If step two gives zero or less, step three is pointless, because the rollout will never pay for itself, however cheap it is.

It is also worth putting the alternative next to it: one more person. Even at the Polish minimum wage that is about PLN 5,790 a month in employer cost, for a full-time job in fixed hours, without evenings and weekends. If the assistant costs clearly less than the part of a job it actually replaces, the sums hold up. If it costs the same or more, you are better off hiring a person, provided you can find one. In many of the clinics we talk to, that is exactly the problem.

I would rather be very specific here, because it will save you money.

The other way round: the sums usually hold up when the front desk is busy for most of the day, not just at peak, when at least half of the calls are repetitive requests, when a lot of people call before opening, in the evening and at weekends, and when the clinic knows it will not find or cannot afford another full-time person. With several sites there is one more question: could one of them run without a person sitting by the phone all day?

A voice assistant is not the only piece, either. It is part of the layer between the patient and the practice management system, alongside online booking, text reminders and reviews, which we describe on our page for healthcare providers. What the assistant does in a single call is covered in more detail in the piece on voicebots in a clinic.

If you already have the numbers from your phone system and a few days of tally marks, write to me and we will tell you what they point to and whether it is worth going further. I run the conversation about scope myself, and the integration and rollout are done by the team the clinic then deals with directly. If it turns out that a callback queue or one more person on the front desk at peak hours is enough, that is exactly what we will say.