An AI receptionist that followsyour rules, not a template.

No. Echo's AI handles the conversation and collects the facts: who the patient is, why they're calling, their insurance, and which location suits them. A deterministic rules engine turns those facts into the only slots that pass every rule you set. The AI can offer those slots and nothing else, and the booking is re-checked against the same rules before it's written.

It's the layer that makes an AI receptionist schedule the way your practice does instead of the way a vendor guessed. It encodes which provider sees which visit type, which hours each type may use, the rooms and linked visits it needs, where each provider works, and which patients qualify, then enforces all of it on every call, text, and web form.

Yes. Schedule templates control which visit types may book into which blocks for each provider, such as new patients only before noon, surgical consults only on Tuesday afternoons, or emergencies held for the first slot after lunch. Outside those blocks the visit type simply has no offerable slots, however open the calendar looks.

Yes. A visit type can carry linked visits that must book with it, placed before or after the main appointment, such as a hygiene visit followed by a doctor exam, or imaging before a consult. Echo only offers a time when every linked step fits too, so the patient never ends up with half a visit booked.

Yes. In Echo Booking each imaging exam is its own visit type with its real protocol duration, the modality and room or scanner it needs, and the hours it may book, so a contrast MRI is only offered where the scanner, the time, and any linked prep fit. The booking is written to your RIS and re-checked before it's saved.

Yes. Visit types can require specific rooms or operatories, and a slot is only offered when both the provider and a qualifying room are free. Where your EHR tracks operatories, Echo reads them there. You can also choose whether a provider sees one patient at a time or works across several rooms at once.

Each visit type lists the providers qualified to see it, and the reasons for visit that lead to it. When a caller describes their problem, Echo resolves it to the visit type your rules map it to, and only that visit type's providers are searched. A knee injury goes to the provider you've set up for knees, not whoever is free first.

Yes. Per visit type you can require insurance to be collected and set which plans and patient types qualify, for example new patients on a plan you don't accept routed to a self-pay conversation or to staff. Echo asks those questions before searching for slots. Real-time eligibility checks are a separate feature, covered on the insurance verification page.

Yes. Each provider's schedule is assigned by location and date range, so a doctor who covers the north office on Tuesdays and the main office the rest of the week is only offered where they'll actually be. Callers can be steered to the nearest office, or to whichever location has the right provider soonest.

Yes. Existing appointments and blocked time from your EHR, along with time off entered in Echo, are removed from the provider's templates every time availability is calculated. Lunch blocks, meetings, and half-days off are never offered, and the rules are checked again at booking in case something changed during the call.

Yes. A template block can hold more than one patient at a time, so a 9:00 block can take three patients who arrive together and are worked up in parallel. Echo tracks how many seats each block has left and stops offering it when it's full, separately for each block even when blocks overlap.

Yes. Once the hard rules have produced the legal slots, Echo can rank them by how well they compact the day: next to an existing booking, filling the hole between two bookings, or at the edge of the day. You set how much each preference counts. Preferences only reorder legal options and never override a rule.

Echo says so plainly and follows the path you choose: offer the next date that works, add the patient to the waitlist, or hand off to your team with the conversation summarized. It will not bend a rule to create a slot, because a booking your staff has to undo is worse than no booking at all.

Yes. Every rule can vary by location and provider: visit types, templates, rooms, start-time spacing, and which patients qualify. One office can run fixed 15-minute starts while another books back-to-back, and one provider can take same-day add-ons while another never does.

Same day. When a provider joins, hours change, or a protocol moves a visit type to a different block, your team edits the rule in plain language and it applies to the next call. There's no vendor ticket, and bookings are always checked against the current rules at the moment they're made.

Yes. Echo Booking's rules engine reads availability, appointments, and blocked time from your RIS or EHR and writes the booking back into the chart, with systems like MedInformatix, eClinicalWorks, Athena, and Open Dental. The integrations directory lists each system and what it supports. Without a supported system, Echo's own calendar runs the same rules.

It's included. The rules engine is the core of how Echo schedules, not an upsell: every booking on every plan runs through it. See the pricing page for current plans, and book a demo to watch your own rules run against your real calendar.