Virtual front desk and intake for therapy practices

Answering service, virtual receptionist or intake team?

An answering service, a virtual receptionist and an intake team all answer the phone, but they finish different amounts of the work. An answering service takes a message and sends it to you. You still call back, ask about insurance, work out which clinician fits and book the appointment. A virtual receptionist answers as your practice and, depending on the service, may book into a calendar you share or ask a few screening questions. An intake team carries the inquiry to a booked consultation. It checks insurance eligibility, matches the caller to clinicians who fit the practice's criteria, sends the paperwork and follows up with people who don't book. For a therapy group, the difference shows up after the call ends. Someone has to explain the deductible, find a clinician with room for a new client on that plan and chase the intake forms.

When an answering service is enough

An answering service is enough for a solo clinician with a full caseload who only needs messages taken after hours. It's also enough for a practice whose in-house intake coordinator only needs someone to cover lunch and evenings. In both cases the practice already has someone who returns the call, checks the insurance and books the appointment, and the answering service covers the hours when that person is away. An intake team makes sense when the calls turn into work nobody has time for between sessions. That work is the callbacks, the insurance questions, deciding which clinician has room for a new client, sending the intake forms and following up with people who inquire and never book. An answering service passes each of those back to you as a message.

Our guide to answering services, virtual receptionists and intake teams compares the options and their published prices.

Answering and callbacks

We answer your practice's phone line and return voicemails and missed calls. We also respond to email, website-form and directory inquiries, for example from Psychology Today, on your practice's behalf. Your phone number stays your practice's.

Cortexa's own team answers your calls, working from a written playbook of your services, clinicians, fees and policies. Some are W-2 employees and some are 1099 contractors, and all of them work under our direction, on our systems and under the same confidentiality and HIPAA terms. We don't hand reception to another company.

Matching and booking the consultation

We record every inquiry. Prospective clients then see clinician options matched on your practice's own criteria, and the client chooses the clinician. We book the consultation.

Matching never routes by revenue or fee level. Higher-acuity inquiries go to your clinical director for human review. You set and approve the matching criteria, which can include:

• Presenting concern
• Modality
• Insurance
• License and supervision
• State
• Age
• Availability

Insurance eligibility and cost estimates

We verify insurance eligibility and in-network status at intake. A plan that's inactive or out of network with your practice affects whether the first claim gets paid.

For out-of-network and self-pay clients, we calculate deductible status, coinsurance and the estimated out-of-pocket cost. Where the No Surprises Act requires a Good Faith Estimate, we prepare it. According to CMS, a provider usually must give a good faith estimate to a client who isn't using insurance, if the client asks for one or schedules at least 3 business days ahead.

Paperwork and reminders

We send your intake paperwork, chase the forms that haven't come back and send reminders. We track each inquiry's stage from consultation to intake to first session, and Practice Analytics shows you where each inquiry is in the pipeline.

Follow-up and the waitlist

Some people inquire and don't book. We follow up with them, and we keep a waitlist for your practice.

We track every inquiry until it reaches a first session or is marked lost or transferred.

Clinical questions and crisis calls

Reception staff don't give clinical advice. Clinical questions go to the clinician or clinical contact your practice names.

When a caller is in crisis, we follow your practice's safety protocol. We direct the caller to emergency resources and escalate the call to your practice's clinical director.

After the first session

The same membership can cover billing, so intake and billing sit with one team. We file claims after sessions, follow up on pending and denied claims, and rebill claims rejected for correctable reasons. Our billing page covers that work.

What you can see in Practice Analytics

Practice Analytics is included with Full Service Partner. In it you can see sessions, revenue, attendance, caseloads, capacity and clinician performance, and where each inquiry is in the pipeline.

To read the pipeline, follow the same group of inquiries through each stage. For example, if 80 people inquire, 40 book a first appointment and 32 attend, half became bookings (40 ÷ 80) and 40% became attended first sessions (32 ÷ 80). Comparing each stage with the one before shows where people drop out. The intake conversion calculator runs the same arithmetic on your numbers.

HIPAA and your BAA

We sign a business associate agreement (BAA) with your practice. Section 3 of our BAA promises that patient information is never used to train AI models. Patient information is stored on US servers at AWS.

HHS explains that the HIPAA Rules let a practice share patient information with a business associate if the practice gets satisfactory assurances, in a written agreement, that the information will be safeguarded. That agreement is the BAA. Our HIPAA page explains what ours covers.

How pricing works

Billing runs about 3% of what you collect, and the front desk, intake and billing together about 6%. We agree the exact scope and rate before you start. You can start with only the work you need most, such as the front desk and intake.

Practice Analytics is included at no extra cost. On its own it costs $50 a month. The pricing page has the details.

There's no long-term contract, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Does it pay for itself?

At 6%, a practice collecting $100,000 a month pays $6,000. What you stop paying for a biller, a billing company or an answering service comes off that first.

With Cortexa running the front desk, replies to new inquiries went from 4 hours to 5 minutes, and inquiries booking a consultation went from 30% to 54%. Kerrie Mohr at A Good Place Therapy saw first inquiries that become first sessions go from 22% to 47% in her first three months. See whether it pays for itself with your numbers.