echo
AI receptionist directly integratedwith MEDITECH
Every call, text, and web form answered in under a second and booked straight into MEDITECH, under the scheduling rules you already work by.
On this page
- 01What is MEDITECH?
- 02Key takeaways
- 03What does Echo read and write in MEDITECH?
- 04Why do MEDITECH hospitals miss patient calls?
- 05What does Echo do inside MEDITECH?
- 06How does Echo connect to MEDITECH?
- 07How Echo Booking compares
- 08How is Echo different from a generic AI receptionist?
- 09Everything on one phone
- 10Frequently asked questions
Hospital EHR integration guide
How Echo works with MEDITECH
Echo Booking is an AI receptionist for MEDITECH Expanse hospitals and health systems, covering the main number and department lines 24/7. It reads department schedules, resources, appointment types, and open slots through MEDITECH's FHIR Scheduling APIs, runs the modality's prep and safety screening, and books into Expanse with order and screening details attached, while the caller is on the line.
A MEDITECH Expanse hospital does not book appointments the way a practice does. The imaging exam a patient calls about is an order first, placed by a referring provider through Order Management, and the appointment in Imaging and Therapeutic Services sits downstream of that order, the modality's prep and safety screening, and often a prior authorization. The person answering the imaging line is the same person checking patients in, and the calls that reach that line at 4:45 on a Friday are the clinical ones: which exam, which body part, with or without contrast, any implants, is the authorization back. Echo answers every one of those calls and texts, day and night, reads the department schedules, resources, appointment types, and open slots out of Expanse through MEDITECH's FHIR Scheduling APIs, asks the screening questions your radiology department set, and books, reschedules, or cancels the appointment in Expanse in real time, with the order details, screening answers, and payer details written as notes for the team. What Expanse does not publish a scheduling API for, the order queue, the authorization, the signed report, Echo does not pretend to see: it captures what the caller knows and follows your rule.
Background
What is MEDITECH?
MEDITECH is a Hospital 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 MEDITECH: it answers every patient call and text 24/7, reads your department schedules and resources, appointment types with their durations, open slots, and patient records, through MEDITECH's published FHIR Scheduling APIs for Expanse, and books, reschedules, and cancels appointments in the right Expanse department for the length the appointment type needs, creates the patient record for a new caller, and attaches the order details, screening answers, and payer details it captured as notes, writing every result back into MEDITECH in real time.
MEDITECH is made by its own vendor and is not affiliated with Echo. See the official MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH hospitals 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 MEDITECH: Echo reads your department schedules and resources, appointment types with their durations, open slots, and patient records, through MEDITECH's published FHIR Scheduling APIs for Expanse and writes appointments, reschedules, and notes back in real time, not a message queue.
- Your MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH workflows, no migration.
Depth of integration
What does Echo read and write in MEDITECH?
Echo works inside MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH
- department schedules and resources
- appointment types with their durations
- open slots
- patient records
- through MEDITECH's published FHIR Scheduling APIs for Expanse
Writes
What Echo does back to MEDITECH
- books
- reschedules
- cancels appointments in the right Expanse department for the length the appointment type needs
- creates the patient record for a new caller
- attaches the order details
- screening answers
- payer details it captured as notes
Stays the same. Your Expanse departments, resources, appointment types, screening rules, Order Management workflow, and Expanse Patient Connect setup 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 an MRI' and writes it on a message pad. Echo reads the Imaging and Therapeutic Services schedule out of Expanse, captures the referring provider, the exam, and the contrast question, runs the implant screen, and books the slot with all of it attached, at 4:45 on a Friday while the imaging desk is checking patients in.
Three ways software connects to MEDITECH, and which one this is
- Message capture.
- The service never touches MEDITECH. 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 MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH.
The problem
Why do MEDITECH hospitals miss patient calls?
The solution
What does Echo do inside MEDITECH?
- The imaging line rings in the department, and the department is scanningA community hospital publishes one main number and a handful of department lines, and the radiology scheduling line usually rings at a desk that is also checking patients in for CT. Centralized scheduling, where it exists, keeps office hours. So the call from the patient whose primary care doctor ordered an MRI at 4:45 lands on hold, gets transferred twice, or goes to a mailbox that gets emptied the next morning.
- Answers every line before the second ring, 24/7Echo picks up the main number and the department lines you point at it in under a second, on calls, texts, emails, and web forms, and moves a caller between departments by rule rather than by transfer. It reads the Imaging and Therapeutic Services schedule out of Expanse and offers a real open slot at 4:45 on a Friday, which is when the imaging desk is least likely to have a person free to answer.
- An imaging exam is an order first, and the caller often doesn't have oneIn Expanse an exam in Imaging and Therapeutic Services sits downstream of an order placed through Order Management by a referring provider. Patients call to book a CT because their doctor said to get one, not because the order has landed. Whoever answers has to establish who ordered it, which exam and which body part, and with or without contrast, before a single slot can be discussed. That is a clinical conversation being had on a clerical phone line.
- Captures the order details, then books to your ruleEcho establishes the referring provider, the exam, the body part, and whether contrast is expected before it talks about times, and writes all of it as notes on the appointment it books in Expanse. Expanse does not publish a scheduling API for Order Management, so Echo does not claim to see the order queue: when the caller's order has not landed, it follows the rule your department set, book and flag, or hold and hand off, and your schedulers get a complete request either way.
- Every modality carries its own prep and safety screeningMRI needs an implant and metal screen. Contrast CT needs a recent creatinine and an allergy history. PET needs fasting and a blood glucose. Mammography wants prior images from the outside facility. Each of those is a set of questions that has to be asked before the appointment is booked, because the alternative is a patient who arrives, fails screening at the scanner, and gives back forty-five minutes of magnet time that nobody can resell that afternoon.
- Runs the modality's screening on the callEcho asks the prep and safety questions your radiology department set for each appointment type, implants and metal for MRI, allergy and kidney history for contrast, fasting for PET, prior images for mammography, and records the answers on the appointment in Expanse. A flagged answer is not booked around: Echo tells the patient the team will follow up and routes it to your technologist or scheduler for a decision.
- Advanced imaging waits on prior authorizationFor most commercial plans an MRI, CT, or PET cannot be scheduled with any confidence until the authorization is back from the payer, and that request is usually the referring office's job, not radiology's. The scheduler is left holding a slot for an exam that might not be approved, or telling the patient to call back when it is, which is the call that never comes. The scanner's calendar and the authorization queue are two lists that nobody has time to reconcile by phone.
- Follows your authorization rule before committing scanner timeEcho applies whatever your department decided about pending authorizations, hold a provisional time or capture and wait, collects the payer details either way, and writes them as notes so the patient is called back when it clears. It does not read the authorization queue, because Expanse does not publish one to a scheduling app, and it will not quietly book a scanner slot for an exam nobody has approved.
- A cancelled scanner slot is expensive and goes cold fastExpanse Patient Connect can text the reminder and take the cancellation, and that is genuinely useful, because it surfaces the hole earlier. But surfacing the hole is not filling it. The forty-five-minute MRI cancelled at 8:10 a.m. still needs someone to work back through the patients who were told the next opening was in three weeks, and the person who would do that is at the front desk with a line of check-ins.
- Refills the cancelled scanner slotWhen Echo takes a cancellation, or the slot opens in Expanse, it sees the opening in the department schedule and offers it to the patients your department has asked it to keep in line for that exam, in the order you choose, books the first who accepts, and writes the new appointment back into Expanse. The 8:10 a.m. MRI cancellation becomes a filled morning instead of forty-five minutes of idle magnet time.
- Referring offices and screening recalls share the same overloaded lineHalf the calls on an imaging line are not patients booking. They are referring practices asking whether the exam was done and whether the report is signed, and they compete with the outbound calls nobody makes: the annual screening mammogram that is due, the six-month follow-up ultrasound a radiologist recommended in a report. The recall list exists. The hours to call it do not, and every one of those exams booked late is revenue and a finding deferred.
- Handles referring offices and works the recall listA referring office calling for report status is answered by your rule and routed to the person who can read the report, so the imaging desk stops fielding it. On the outbound side, Echo calls and texts the screening recall and follow-up list your department gives it, in 70+ languages, books each patient into an open slot in Expanse, and records the outcome, on a cadence rather than on whichever afternoon happens to be quiet.
How it connects
How does Echo connect to MEDITECH?
Connect to MEDITECH
We link Echo to MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH.
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 MEDITECH, not whichever one happens to be open.
- Deep integrationsEcho reads and writes the fields your workflow actually runs on in MEDITECH, 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 | MEDITECH on its ownThe system you already run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom scheduling logic | Your providers, visit types, block rules, and how tightly the day packs, inside MEDITECH. 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 MEDITECH | Booked, moved, or cancelled in MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH: 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 MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH 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, Epic, Oracle Health, 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
MEDITECH documents US Core FHIR R4 patient-access APIs (view-only, patient-authorized, USCDI V1) and FHIR Scheduling APIs for user and patient workflows, the latter for Expanse customers only, alongside HL7v2 outbound interfaces such as SCH Appt Out and OM Orders Outbound. It states the Greenfield Workspace supports SMART on FHIR apps and APIs beyond USCDI. It does not publish an API fee schedule.
MEDITECH describes it as a testing ground where app developers execute APIs and test their applications against a real MEDITECH EHR, with interactive API documentation. Developers register through a form on MEDITECH's site and log in at greenfield.meditech.com; MEDITECH scopes eligibility to US customers on certified 2015 Edition software.
Both. MEDITECH as a Service (MaaS) is a subscription that delivers the full Expanse platform hosted on Google Cloud, and MEDITECH's Alliance lists hardware integrators and private hosting providers as Infrastructure Services, so the hosting model depends on how a given hospital licensed Expanse.
MEDITECH's partner program for organizations with proven, interoperable solutions that complement, enhance, or extend Expanse. It publishes five solution types: Innovator (resold by MEDITECH), Accelerator and Collaborator (licensed directly between the customer and the member), Consulting Services, and Infrastructure Services. MEDITECH does not publish membership fees on the page.
Yes. It is a direct, two-way integration built on the FHIR Scheduling APIs MEDITECH publishes for Expanse and tested through the Greenfield Workspace. Echo reads your department schedules, resources, appointment types with their durations, and open slots, looks up existing patients, and it books, reschedules, and cancels appointments in Expanse in real time, creates the patient record when the caller is new, and attaches the order details, screening answers, and payer details it captured as notes.
Order Management, the prior authorization queue, and report status. MEDITECH publishes scheduling APIs, not an order or results API for third-party scheduling apps, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise. Echo captures what the caller knows about the order and the authorization, writes it on the appointment, and follows the rule your department set for a missing order or a pending authorization.
Yes. Point the lines you choose at Echo and it answers each with that department's rules, radiology's screening questions are not the lab's, and moves a caller between departments without a transfer loop. It reads each department's schedule in Expanse separately, so an MRI request is offered MRI time and nothing else.
Echo does not book around it. If a caller reports a pacemaker, an implant, a contrast reaction, or anything else your protocol flags, Echo records the answer on the appointment, tells the patient the team will follow up before the exam, and routes it to your technologist or scheduler for a decision. The screening rules are yours; Echo asks them consistently and escalates the exceptions.
Nothing in Expanse changes. Your departments, resources, appointment types, screening rules, and Expanse Patient Connect setup stay exactly as they are, and patients keep calling the numbers you already publish. We register the connection with your organization under MEDITECH's API terms, map your appointment types, screening questions, and after-hours protocols, sign the BAA, and Echo starts answering. The MEDITECH integration is currently in beta: the two-way read and write is live for beta hospitals, and we onboard each one with a member of our team watching the first bookings land in Expanse. Echo is HIPAA-compliant throughout.
It writes. Echo reads your live MEDITECH schedule during the call, books the appointment while the patient is still on the line, and writes it back into MEDITECH in real time, along with the patient record and the notes from the call. Nothing lands in a queue for your team to re-key, and there is no message waiting to be deciphered in the morning.
A message-taking service never touches MEDITECH. 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 MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH. 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 MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH 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 MEDITECH, 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 MEDITECH connection itself follows MEDITECH'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 MEDITECH connection and a two-week trial with real patients. See /pricing for current plans.
No. MEDITECH stays your system of record. Echo is a layer on top that handles the calls, texts, and forms, then writes the result back into MEDITECH. There is no migration and no rebuild, and patients keep calling the number you already publish.
Ready when you are
Bring Echo to your MEDITECH practice.
See exactly how Echo answers every call, text, and form for a practice running on MEDITECH.