Cost estimator
A phone call that isn't answered is a booking that doesn't happen. A referral that sits for a week is a patient who may go somewhere else. Put your own numbers in and see how much it costs your practice.
Midpoint assumes more missed bookings and more successful referral follow-up. See assumptions below.
All inbound calls to the practice line, not just after hours.
Medicare pays $95.19 for a level 3 established visit and $177.36 for a level 4 new patient in 2026. Commercial payers run higher. Use your own blended number if you have it.
Leave at zero if your practice does not take referrals.
The estimate accounts for the cost of providing each visit and includes the value of future visits from new patients. That value may be realized over several years. Samantha’s fees have not been deducted.
Samantha is priced per provider per month. Or email info@samantha-medical.com with the numbers above, and we will work out the payback against a real quote instead of a made-up one.
Every multiplier the estimator uses, where it came from, and how much weight it deserves. solid means peer-reviewed, government, or a named dataset with a stated method. fair means a vendor's own platform data with a real sample size. ours means we made it up and are telling you so. The three ours rows are the same in both sets, so the toggle only ever moves figures that have a source. Those three are yours to dial: type over them and the estimate above updates.
| Assumption | Conservative | Midpoint | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calls that never reach a person | 20% | 30% | fair 31% of 11,552,668 patient calls across 8,280 dental and DSO locations disconnected before reaching an agent (Patient Prism, 2025). That is the largest dataset we found, but it is dental, so the healthcare-wide corroboration carries the weight here: Invoca reports about 29% of inbound calls missed even at well-run healthcare organizations, from its own platform. The only peer-reviewed anchor is narrower: in-queue abandonment across 285 VA facilities fell from 12.0% to 8.3% (AJMC, 2020), which excludes busy signals and after-hours rollover. We start below all of them. |
| Of those, real booking opportunities | 34% | 34% | fair Of every 100 calls in the Patient Prism dataset, 34 were booking opportunities and 21 became appointments. We assume unanswered calls contain the same share as answered ones. |
| Callers who never try again | 15% | 21% | fair 21% of consumers say they immediately call another business when a call goes unanswered (CallRail, 2025, n=1,000). Midpoint uses exactly that measured figure and nothing above it; conservative sits below it. The better-known numbers from the same survey measure something else and we do not use them: 58% describes people who do not leave a voicemail, which is not the same as never calling back, and the 78% who have abandoned a business is lifetime behaviour, not the odds on any one call. General consumers, not patients. There is no healthcare-specific study of this. |
| Share of lost bookings that are new patients | % | ours Change it right here. No dataset splits missed calls into new and established patients. Set it to whatever your front desk would say. | |
| Contribution margin per visit | 55% | 75% | solid Overhead runs about 60% of practice revenue (MGMA), but for a slot that would otherwise sit empty almost all of it is already spent. The peer-reviewed VA no-show study counted the full encounter as loss for exactly this reason, because staff costs stayed constant (BMC Health Services Research, 2016). A purely marginal view supports 90%. We use 55% and 75%. |
| Visits per patient per year | ours Change it right here. Planning assumption. Specialty and dental run higher. | ||
| Years a new patient stays | ours Change it right here. There is no current national figure. 30% of consumers picked a new provider in a single year and 25% switched out of dissatisfaction (Accenture, 2022, n=10,000), which implies three to four years, not the seven to ten that lifetime-value pages like to use. The default is two years in both sets; adjust it to match your practice. | ||
| Referral completion lift from same-day outreach | +10 pts | +20 pts | solid Only 34.8% of 103,737 referral scheduling attempts reached a documented completed appointment (Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2018). Removing friction between the referral and the booking took scheduling from 54% to 83%, a 29-point lift across 40,487 referrals (JGIM, 2009). Lighter automated outreach in comparable completion problems moves 9 to 14 points. We claim 10 and 20. |
The referral you booked and the referral you lost are separated mostly by time. Across 103,737 scheduling attempts, completed referrals had a mean wait of 20.1 days and incomplete ones 41.7 days. Distance barely mattered: 8.1 miles against 8.6 (JGIM, 2018). Delay does most of its damage in the first week and then levels off (Psychiatric Services, 2005). And the further out the appointment lands, the less likely the patient is to arrive: no-shows run 9.1% when the visit is inside two weeks and 38.3% when it is six months out, across 46,655 appointments (Clinical Ophthalmology, 2015). Meanwhile the average wait for a new-patient appointment across 15 metros is 31 days, up 48% since 2004 (AMN Healthcare, 2025).
What we cannot show you is a clean curve of referral conversion against days-to-first-contact. Several vendors publish one. None of them cite anything, and no such study exists in the US literature. The honest version is the three findings above: the referrals that convert are the ones contacted and booked quickly. How Samantha works a referral list.
These are real, but the evidence is thinner or the value depends too much on your setup to put a number on it for you. We would rather leave them out of the headline than pad it.
Only 27% of canceled visits were rebooked within 30 days in 2024, down from about 62% (MGMA, 2026), so this problem got materially worse. The honest number for waitlist backfill is modest: 11% of 60,660 automated offers were accepted. But those offers produced 5,399 completed visits, about $3M in professional fees over nine months at one system, and patients were seen a median 14 days sooner (JMIR, 2024). It is a volume game. Thousands of cheap offers is exactly what a caller who does not get tired can do and a staffed phone list cannot.
This one is a straight cost offset and it is the most verifiable figure on the page, because it is a published price rather than a claim. A live US receptionist service charges $7 to $10 per answered call with appointment booking a $1.50 upcharge on top (Smith.ai). A medical answering service runs $1.75 to $2.25 a minute, plus 10% to 30% for HIPAA handling. A front-desk hire costs about $65,600 fully loaded: the BLS median wage for medical secretaries is $45,930 (BLS, May 2025) and benefits add 30% of total compensation (BLS ECEC), and that buys 40 hours a week, none of them at night. A human answering service sits in between at $1.75 to $2.25 a minute, plus a 10% to 30% surcharge for HIPAA handling, and its operator cannot see your calendar, so it takes a message rather than booking the visit.
Median cost per lead on search is $62.80 for family medicine, $84.77 for general dentistry, and $66.02 across healthcare, from 3,542 campaigns (LocaliQ, 2025). A lead is a form fill or a phone call, not a patient. So the practice has already spent the money to make the phone ring before anyone decides whether to pick it up. This is not extra revenue, it is waste you stop.
In a review of closed malpractice claims arising from telephone medicine, documentation failure appeared in 88% of cases and average indemnity was $518,932 (Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2008). Samantha records, transcribes, and timestamps every call, and files it for the morning. We are making a claim about the record, not about clinical judgement: Samantha never triages, never gives medical advice, and directs every emergency to hang up and dial 911.
Or email info@samantha-medical.com, or call the demo line at (360) 726-2645 and hear Samantha handle an after-hours call yourself.