AskTheDoc

AskTheDoc is a patient assistant for owner-operated chiropractic, physical therapy and allied-health clinics. It reads a clinic's public website and builds an assistant from the services, hours, locations and policies already published there. The assistant educates patients, screens for urgent concerns and routes people to the right next step, but it does not diagnose, interpret findings or make clinical decisions on behalf of the clinic.

Setup takes about a minute. The clinic pastes its website address, then reads what the assistant will say and where each answer came from, changes the wording, adds missing details, sets questions that must always be asked and marks topics to hand straight to a person. Turning it on means copying one line of code onto the clinic's website. Conversations arrive in the clinic's inbox with a plain-language summary.

AskTheDoc works in three places. On a clinic's website it runs as a chat assistant that answers questions about hours, services, insurance and policies and points people toward booking. On the phone line it picks up when staff cannot, answers in the clinic's own words, takes messages and routes urgent calls to a person. It can also connect to booking software such as Jane, ChiroTouch, WebPT, Athenahealth and Nookal.

Building and reviewing the assistant is free and needs no card. The on-site chat assistant costs $100/month per clinic, the phone assistant costs $100/month plus $0.19 per minute, and booking software integration costs $200 to set up plus $50/month, with depth that varies by platform. Contact details are stored apart from health information and are visible only to the practice team, and formal compliance work is still in progress.

Use cases

• Answering the routine questions a clinic front desk gets every day
• Answering clinic calls in the evening and at lunch instead of voicemail
• Pointing patients with urgent concerns to appropriate care or staff
• Fitting patient conversations into an existing scheduling workflow