echo
AI receptionist directly integratedwith Epic
Every call, text, and web form answered in under a second and booked straight into Epic, under the scheduling rules you already work by.
On this page
- 01What is Epic?
- 02Key takeaways
- 03What does Echo read and write in Epic?
- 04Why do Epic health systems miss patient calls?
- 05What does Echo do inside Epic?
- 06How does Echo connect to Epic?
- 07How Echo Booking compares
- 08How is Echo different from a generic AI receptionist?
- 09Everything on one phone
- 10Frequently asked questions
Enterprise EHR integration guide
How Echo works with Epic
Echo Booking is an AI receptionist for Epic, built for hospital radiology departments and imaging centers. It answers every call 24/7, reads the imaging order, the Cadence schedule, and visit type durations, then books the exam onto the right room for the right length in Cadence, with screening asked and prep given, while the caller is on the line.
Radiology on Epic is Radiant sitting on top of Cadence and the same chart the rest of the hospital uses. An exam starts as an order from a referring provider, needs an authorization, has to land as the right protocol on a room that runs it for the length that protocol takes, and cannot be performed if the patient shows up unfasted or with an implant nobody asked about. That is why the imaging scheduling line is expensive. The patient calling at 6 p.m. to book the MRI their orthopedist ordered, or the referring office asking whether Thursday's CT with contrast can move, is asking about an order, a modality, a department, and a prep sheet at once, and answering well takes someone who can see all four. Echo answers that phone, every call and text, day and night, reads the order, the Cadence schedule, and the visit types out of Epic, and books the exam onto a real slot in the right department while the patient is still on the line.
Background
What is Epic?
Epic is an Enterprise EHR (electronic health record system) that hospitals and health systems use to manage patient records, scheduling, and billing.
Echo is the AI receptionist that integrates directly with Epic: it answers every patient call and text 24/7, reads your radiology departments and locations, the visit types and durations built in Cadence, open slots and existing appointments, imaging orders and their referring providers, patient records, and coverage, and books the ordered exam into Cadence on a room that runs it for the block that visit type needs, reschedules and cancels, creates the patient record when the caller is new, and writes screening answers and call notes back to the chart, writing every result back into Epic in real time.
Epic is made by its own vendor and is not affiliated with Echo. See the official Epic site for their product details.
Hear it for yourself
A real call from inquiry to booked appointment.
Echo in action
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What Epic health systems see
- Fewer front desk labor hours
- 50–80%Fewer front desk labor hours
- More appointments booked
- 20–30%More appointments booked
- To full ROI
- 1 monthTo full ROI
- After-hours calls answered
- 100%After-hours calls answered
- Pickup time
- < 1 secPickup time
- Always answering
- 24/7Always answering
In a live practice, Vanguard Interventional Pain Specialists runs reminders, intake forms, and after-hours calls through Echo across three locations, in English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese.
In short
Key takeaways
- A direct, 100% two-way integration with Epic: Echo reads your radiology departments and locations, the visit types and durations built in Cadence, open slots and existing appointments, imaging orders and their referring providers, patient records, and coverage and writes appointments, reschedules, and notes back in real time, not a message queue.
- Your Epic scheduling logic is Echo's: which provider, which exam types, how blocks are grouped and sequenced, how tightly the day packs. It books the slot your staff would have chosen, not simply the next open one.
- Insurance eligibility and benefits are checked before the visit, so patients arrive verified rather than surprised at check-in.
- Practices book 20–30% more appointments and cut front desk labor hours by 50–80%, and most reach full ROI within the first month.
- 100% of after-hours calls are answered, triaged against your protocols, and booked or escalated, nothing goes to voicemail.
- Up to 80% of inbound referrals are booked automatically, so referrals stop expiring in a fax tray while the patient books elsewhere.
- About 2 hours of your team's time to configure booking rules with Echo's team; activating the Epic connection follows your IT team's own approval process.
- HIPAA-compliant by design and covered by a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Keep your number and your Epic workflows, no migration.
Depth of integration
What does Echo read and write in Epic?
Echo works inside Epic rather than alongside it. It reads the schedule before it answers, books while the patient is still on the line, and writes the result back to the chart in real time. Nothing waits in a queue for your front desk to re-key in the morning.
Reads
What Echo can see in Epic
- radiology departments and locations
- the visit types and durations built in Cadence
- open slots and existing appointments
- imaging orders and their referring providers
- patient records
- coverage
Writes
What Echo does back to Epic
- books the ordered exam into Cadence on a room that runs it for the block that visit type needs
- reschedules and cancels
- creates the patient record when the caller is new
- writes screening answers and call notes back to the chart
Stays the same. Your Cadence departments, visit types, templates, Radiant protocols, and screening rules stay exactly as they are. There is no migration and no rebuild, and patients keep calling the number you already publish.
A generic answering service hears 'my doctor ordered a scan' and writes it on a message pad. Echo matches the caller to their chart, reads the imaging order and who signed it, and books the brain MRI with and without contrast into the right department for the block it needs, with the implant questions asked and the fasting instruction given, on a 6 p.m. call.
Three ways software connects to Epic, and which one this is
- Message capture.
- The service never touches Epic. It collects the patient’s details and hands your team a message to enter. The work is recorded, not removed, and the appointment does not exist until somebody types it.
- Scheduled sync.
- Data moves between Epic and the tool on an interval. It is a real integration, but the tool is quoting a schedule as it stood at the last sync, so two callers can be offered the same slot and double-bookings surface after the fact.
- Real-time read and write.
- The tool queries Epic live during the call and writes back before the call ends. The slot it offers is open at that moment, and the booking is in the chart by the time the patient hangs up. This is how Echo connects to Epic.
The problem
Why do Epic health systems miss patient calls?
The solution
What does Echo do inside Epic?
- The scheduling line is where imaging capacity leaksA hospital radiology department can have a central scheduling team, Cadence templates tuned to the minute, and a scanner running late into the evening, and still lose the exam because the call arrived at 12:15 when the queue was nine deep. Referring offices ring in batches after their own morning clinic, patients ring back after work, and the ones who reach voicemail tend to book at the freestanding imaging center that picked up. The MRI slot is still there on Monday. The patient is not.
- Answers before the second ring, 24/7Echo picks up in under a second on every call, and handles texts, emails, and web forms on the same footing. The 12:15 queue, the after-clinic batch from referring offices, evenings, and weekends are all covered, and every one of those calls ends with an exam booked into Cadence or a complete request routed to your team, so the phone stops capping how many ordered exams get onto a scanner in a day.
- Every exam starts with an order, and the caller does not have itOn Epic an imaging exam is booked against an order from a referring provider, and the caller rarely knows what it says. They know their doctor said scan, or MRI, or the thing with the dye. Whoever answers has to find the order in the chart, confirm it is signed, work out whether the exam that was ordered is the exam the patient is describing, and only then start looking at the schedule. When the order came from an outside practice on paper or fax, that search happens somewhere else first, while the caller waits.
- Books the exam the order calls forEcho matches the caller to their Epic patient record, reads the imaging order and the referring provider on it, and confirms the exam, the laterality, and the contrast with the caller against what was ordered before it books. A patient sent for a CT does not get scheduled for an ultrasound because that is the word they used. When there is no order in the chart yet, Echo captures the referring provider and the requested exam and routes it to your team rather than booking an exam nobody ordered.
- The right protocol on the right scanner for the right lengthA knee MRI without contrast, a knee MRI with contrast, and a brain MRI with and without are different protocols with different durations, and not every scanner in the system runs every one of them. Radiant and Cadence know this. The person on the phone has to translate a caller's description into a protocol, pick a room that can run it, and take a slot long enough for it, under time pressure, with a second line ringing. Get the protocol wrong and the exam is either rebooked on the day or run on a slot that was too short for it, and the whole afternoon slides.
- Books the right room, visit type, and length in CadenceEcho reads your radiology departments, the visit types and durations you have built in Cadence, and the rooms and scanners each department schedules against, then searches open slots on that basis. A brain MRI with and without contrast takes the block that visit type needs on a scanner that runs it, and nothing is booked onto equipment that cannot perform the exam or into a slot too short to finish it. The booking Echo writes is the one your schedulers would have made, on the template you already maintain.
- Prep and safety screening happen at booking, or not at allFasting before a contrast CT, holding metformin, a creatinine on file, a pacemaker or an aneurysm clip before anyone goes near the MRI magnet, a pregnancy question before X-ray or fluoroscopy, an implant card the patient cannot find. These have to be asked and recorded when the exam is scheduled, because a patient who learns about the six-hour fast on arrival is a patient who is sent home and a slot that ran empty. A scheduler working a queue asks the questions they have time for.
- Asks the screening questions and gives the prep on the callEcho runs the safety screening your department requires for the modality being booked, implants and devices before MRI, contrast history and kidney function before a contrast study, pregnancy before radiation, in your wording, and delivers the fasting and arrival instructions before the patient hangs up. Every answer is written back to Epic as a note on the booking. A flagged answer is not booked around: Echo records it, tells the patient the team will follow up, and hands it to your technologist or scheduler.
- Prior authorization sits between the booking and the examAdvanced imaging on most commercial plans needs an authorization before the scan, and the authorization is tied to the specific CPT code and site. The department books, then chases the referring office and the payer, then discovers on the day before that the auth covers a CT and the order was changed to a CT with contrast. The front desk ends up as the place where an insurance problem, a referring office problem, and a scheduling problem meet, and the phone is how all three of them arrive.
- Puts the authorization problem in front of a person earlyEcho reads the patient's coverage in Epic and captures the ordering provider, the exact exam, and the insurance on the call, so the authorization team has what it needs the same day rather than the day before the scan. When the requested exam differs from the ordered one, or the caller cannot say who ordered it, Echo does not guess at a CPT code. It books nothing it cannot match to the order and routes the call, with a note in the chart, to the people who resolve it.
- Scanner no-shows and follow-up recalls are two lists nobody has time to workA no-show on a 45-minute MRI slot is the most expensive empty chair in the hospital, and the way to prevent it is a confirmation call and a prep reminder that a queue-bound scheduling team rarely completes. At the other end, Radiant tracks actionable findings and the follow-up imaging they call for, and those patients have to be reached, scheduled, and reminded too. Both lists are real, both are visible in Epic, and both grow whenever the phone is busier than the people answering it.
- Confirms, reminds, and works the follow-up list without anyone deciding toEcho reads upcoming appointments in Cadence and confirms each scanner slot by call or text with the prep instruction attached, reschedules the ones that cannot make it while the slot is still worth refilling, and records the outcome. It calls and texts the patients your radiologists have flagged in Radiant for follow-up imaging, in 70+ languages, and books them into the right department. It runs on a cadence rather than on whichever afternoon happens to be quiet.
How it connects
How does Echo connect to Epic?
Connect to Epic
We link Echo to Epic and map your providers, exam types, and scheduling rules during onboarding.
Configure your front desk
Tell Echo how you greet patients, book, work recall, and handle after-hours. It learns your setup, so you don't rebuild around it.
Go live
After a dry run and the signed BAA, Echo starts answering calls and texts and writing every result back into Epic.
How Echo Booking compares
Don't buy another tool. Buy less work.
One patient request
Turn calls, texts, and emails into booked appointments
Incoming call, text, email, or fax
Deep integrations, so Echo knows the patient before saying "Hello"
Custom scheduling rules, so no patient lands in the wrong slot
Booked on autopilot
Echo finishes
How does Echo handle an imaging order from fax to follow-up?
- Calls, texts, emails and faxes all land in one place
- Answered 24/7, including nights and weekends
- Speaks with each patient in their own language
- Identifies who it is and what they need
- Picks up the thread instead of leaving a message to return
Step 1 of 7
Incoming call, text, email, or fax
- Calls, texts, emails and faxes all land in one place
- Answered 24/7, including nights and weekends
- Speaks with each patient in their own language
- Identifies who it is and what they need
- Picks up the thread instead of leaving a message to return
Why practices choose Echo
How is Echo different from a generic AI receptionist?
Only three things matter: whether it knows your booking logic, whether it completes the work inside your system, and what it costs your front desk to adopt.
- Scheduling rules engineEcho lands the slot your front desk would have picked, inside Epic, not whichever one happens to be open.
- Deep integrationsEcho reads and writes the fields your workflow actually runs on in Epic, so the work leaves your desk instead of coming back as a task.
- Mobile firstOne light app that pings your team only when a person is genuinely needed. No dashboard to check each morning.
| Capability | Echo BookingCarries the work to done | Generic AI voice botAnswers, then hands it back | Epic on its ownThe system you already run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom scheduling logic | Your providers, visit types, block rules, and how tightly the day packs, inside Epic. Echo lands the slot your staff would have chosen. | Reads out any open slot, with no way to know your preference | Holds your rules; someone still has to apply them on the call |
| Books directly in Epic | Booked, moved, or cancelled in Epic in real time, under your rules. | Read-only at best, so the request stops at a person who can enter it | Staff, by hand, once someone answers |
| Proactively reminds, recalls, and backfills cancellations | Works reminders, recall, and the waitlist on a schedule and books the result on the spot. | Inbound only. It waits to be called | Report only: it lists who's due, it doesn't call them |
| 70+ languages, spoken naturally | Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Tagalog and 70+ more, on the same number, switching automatically. | Usually one or two, often a separate number | |
| Writes back without transcription errors | Structured fields into Epic: patient, visit type, provider, time. Nothing is re-typed. | Hands over a transcript for someone to key in | Only as accurate as what your staff type in |
| Verifies insurance before the visit | Checks eligibility and benefits as part of booking, and flags what the patient will owe. | Can discuss coverage, but not confirm it | A place to record coverage, not a way to check it |
Done, start to finishPartly. Someone at the practice still finishes itDoesn’t do it at all
Mobile first, light by design
AI receptionist, in the palm of your hands.
Everything Echo does inside Epic reaches you the same way: one app, on the phone already in your pocket. There is no second dashboard to watch and no queue to work through in the morning, because the work is finished in Epic before it would have reached one.
Ask an Echo a question or complete an outstanding task
- Ask it to call a patient back, from your palm.
- Pull today's numbers without opening a report.
- No extra tab to monitor or workflow to change.
- Built to stay hidden and work for you.
- Get push notification when a human needs to step in.
Incoming messages
Patients reach you
Booking requests
New patients and reschedules booked straight into the schedule, by your rules.
After-hours calls
Nights, weekends, lunch, and every busy moment in between, answered, never voicemail.
Patient messages
Texts, emails, and web forms answered on their own, handed to your team when it matters.
Outgoing messages
Echo reaches patients
Related reading
Keep exploring
Runs on another system? Echo reads and writes in real time, verifying insurance and booking, confirming, and logging every result directly in MedInformatix, AbbaDox, Exa RIS, RamSoft, Karisma, Aura, Visage, Synapse RIS, Oracle Health, MEDITECH, eClinicalWorks, Athena, PrognoCIS, Practice Fusion, NextGen Office, Prompt, Acuity Scheduling, WebPT, Open Dental, Dentrix Ascend, Curve Dental, Oryx, Dentrix, Eaglesoft, and Denticon, with no separate queue to reconcile and no migration.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Epic on FHIR describes itself as a free resource for developers, and open.epic states that its public APIs are open to everyone and available free to app developers. Epic's specifications state that no purchase is necessary to access them or to work with an Epic customer that licenses API technology and services. The optional Vendor Services membership is separate and priced at $1,900 a year.
Epic announced in late 2022 that Connection Hub, a place for vendors to share their ability to interoperate with Epic software, would open on January 9, 2023, alongside Vendor Services. Vendors in the App Market automatically transitioned to Vendor Services. Today Connection Hub listings appear on Showroom, where Epic customers discover products that work with Epic.
Both. open.epic's FHIR catalog lists Appointment, Schedule, and Slot resources in STU3 and R4, including $find and $book operations, alongside Patient create and search. On the HL7v2 side Epic publishes incoming and outgoing external appointments interfaces and, for Radiant, an Outgoing Imaging Results and Orders interface triggered when an order reaches scheduled or arrived status, on status changes, on results, and when the linked appointment is canceled.
Epic's developer guidelines describe the customer side as signing the open.epic API Subscription Agreement, then having a user with the "Able to Purchase Apps?" security point download the vendor's client record using the Production Client ID the vendor supplies. The vendor cannot be used in any of your environments until it has marked its app ready for production on Epic on FHIR.
Yes. It is a direct, two-way integration built on the FHIR APIs Epic publishes on open.epic and Epic on FHIR. Echo reads your radiology departments, the visit types and durations in Cadence, open slots and existing appointments, locations, imaging orders and their referring providers, patient records, and coverage. It books, reschedules, and cancels appointments in Cadence in real time, creates the patient record when the caller is new, and writes screening answers and call notes back to the chart. Radiant's protocols, templates, and results workflow are untouched.
Echo does not book an exam it cannot match to an order. It captures the caller's details, the referring provider they name, the exam they were told to have, and their preferred times, writes that as a note in the chart or a request to your team, and tells the patient what happens next. When the order lands, your schedulers, or Echo on a follow-up call, book it against the real order rather than the patient's memory of it.
Alongside it. MyChart handles the patient who is comfortable online and whose exam you have opened for self-scheduling. Echo handles everyone else: the patient who calls because the order is confusing, the referring office that cannot use MyChart, the caller in another language, and every exam you keep off self-scheduling because it needs screening first. An exam Echo books lands in Cadence like any other appointment, so the patient sees it in MyChart the same way.
It stops and escalates. If a caller reports a pacemaker, an implant, a contrast reaction, a possible pregnancy, or anything else your department flags, Echo records the answer, tells the patient a member of the team will follow up before the exam, and routes it to your technologist or scheduler for the decision. The screening rules and their wording are yours; Echo asks them the same way every time and never clears an exception on its own.
It means the two-way read and write is live for beta departments and we onboard each one with a member of our team watching the first bookings land. Nothing in Epic changes: your Cadence departments, visit types, templates, Radiant protocols, and screening rules stay as they are, and patients keep calling the number you already publish. Your Epic team signs the open.epic API Subscription Agreement if it has not already and downloads our client record, we test in your non-production environment first, sign the BAA, and Echo starts answering. Echo is HIPAA-compliant throughout.
A message-taking service never touches Epic. It collects the patient's details and hands your team something to enter, so the appointment does not exist until somebody types it. A scheduled sync moves data on an interval, so it quotes the schedule as of the last sync and two callers can be offered the same slot. Echo queries Epic live during the call and writes back before the call ends, so the time it offers is genuinely open at that moment and the booking is in the chart by the time the patient hangs up.
Echo verifies insurance for Epic imaging centers as part of booking. It checks the patient's eligibility and benefits before the visit and flags what they are likely to owe, so the appointment is confirmed with coverage already established rather than leaving a verification task on your front desk's list. Most AI receptionists can discuss insurance but cannot check it.
Echo books to the scheduling rules you configure, not to the next open gap in Epic. It applies which provider or room an exam type belongs to, how long that exam really takes, how appointments are grouped and sequenced through the day, and how tightly the day should pack, so the slot it lands is the one your staff would have chosen.
Yes, and most imaging centers bring Echo in to replace the after-hours service and the daytime overflow line at once. A traditional answering service cannot see your Epic schedule, so the best it can do is take a message your front desk re-keys the next morning, and it usually only picks up after hours. Echo answers every call and text in under a second, day or night, reads your live Epic schedule, and books, reschedules, and confirms directly in it. Out of hours it triages against your protocols and escalates true emergencies to your on-call contact with the patient's details already attached. The patient leaves the call with a real appointment rather than a callback.
Yes. A self-service booking link only reaches the patients who go to your website, already know what they need, and never abandon the form, which is a small slice of demand. Most patients call, and they call to check insurance, reschedule, or describe a problem before they will book. Echo answers every one of those calls and texts, handles the questions and exceptions a form cannot, and books straight into Epic, so you capture the patients an online link never reaches.
About two hours of your team's time with Echo's, configuring your booking rules, providers, exam types, and after-hours protocols. Activating the Epic connection itself follows Epic's own vendor process, which your IT team controls, so its timing is set by your organization's approval rather than by Echo. There is no migration and no rebuild.
Echo is one flat monthly fee, from $499, with unlimited AI calls, sized by providers and locations and quoted in writing before you sign. Texting, online booking, and insurance verification come with the Pro plan, and a one-time onboarding fee covers the Epic connection and a two-week trial with real patients. See /pricing for current plans.
No. Epic stays your system of record. Echo is a layer on top that handles the calls, texts, and forms, then writes the result back into Epic. There is no migration and no rebuild, and patients keep calling the number you already publish.
Ready when you are
Bring Echo to your Epic practice.
See exactly how Echo answers every call, text, and form for a practice running on Epic.