Most comparisons of AI medical receptionists are written by one of the vendors in the list, and the numbers in them are rarely traceable to anything. This one ranks eight platforms against five criteria that actually decide whether a deployment works, and every figure below is taken from the vendor's own published material and linked so you can check it.

Where a vendor does not publish something, whether pricing, a compliance certification or a named integration, we say so rather than filling the gap.

Key Takeaways

• Only two of the eight publish enough pricing to calculate a monthly bill. MedReception.ai lists plans from $299 to $1,495 a month; Retell AI lists 0.07–0.31 per minute. The other six require a sales conversation before you can compare anything.
  
  

• "HIPAA compliant" on a marketing page is not a BAA. Four of the eight publish a specific security certification such as SOC 2 Type II; one names no compliance certification on its site at all.
  
  

• EHR integration depth is the real differentiator, not voice quality. Every platform claims integration. The number that matters is how many systems are named, and whether booking is written back in real time.
  
  

• Match the platform to your size, not to a feature list. The right answer for a two-provider practice and a 40-location health system are different products, and several vendors here only serve one end.

How we ranked these

Five criteria, weighted toward the things that cause deployments to fail rather than the things that demo well:

Ranking reflects breadth of fit for medical practices against those five criteria. Disclosure: this guide is published by Sully.ai, which appears at number one. Every claim about every platform, including ours, is sourced to the vendor's own site and linked, so you can disagree with the ordering and still trust the inputs.

Quick comparison

1. Sully.ai: best for practices that want more than a phone agent

Sully.ai positions the receptionist as one agent inside a wider clinical workforce rather than a standalone phone product. Its own page states the agent syncs provider schedules, visit types and locations, verifies insurance automatically, books and reschedules, sends confirmations and reminders by SMS, email or phone, records outcomes in the EHR and flags edge cases, manages waitlists, and auto-triages patients to the appropriate provider.

Published figures: 20% more appointments booked, 50% fewer drop-offs, 2x more revenue and a 14x return on investment, across more than 100,000 providers. Pilot timeline is stated as 2–3 weeks. Escalation is described as "clear redlines; instant transfer to staff", which, as discussed below, is the right shape of answer.

Evidence beyond the marketing page: the Hillside Medical customer story reports an 85% reduction in clinician onboarding time (12 weeks to 2), 4 hours of daily admin saved per clinician and 100% clinician adoption. Dr. Derin Patel, MD, Founder and CMO, is quoted directly: "It's been a game-changer. I've never in my life heard the words 'game-changer' as much as I have in the last month and a half from my team."

Where it fits: practices that expect to automate documentation, coding or triage as well as the phone line, and would rather not run four vendors. Multilingual support with live switching is relevant if your patient population needs it.

Limitations: pricing is not published, so you cannot model cost before talking to sales. The site states HIPAA compliance but does not publish a SOC 2 or HITRUST certification, so ask for the current attestation.

2. Assort Health: best for specialty groups

Assort has gone deeper on specialty than anyone else here. Its site states the platform is trained on 250M+ interactions across 23+ specialties, and lists 18 by name including orthopedics, dermatology, ophthalmology, ENT and allergy, pain management, gastroenterology, oncology and behavioral health.

That matters for the reason covered in our guide to AI medical receptionists: specialty vocabulary is where generic voice AI produces booking errors.

Published figures: 4.3/5 across 344,000 patient reviews; $4.3M annual revenue per 100 providers. Named customer outcomes include $2.3M new revenue captured at Michigan Orthopedic Surgeons, $1.3M additional appointment revenue at SENTA, an 89% reduction in hold times at Chesapeake Health Care and an 81% decrease in abandonment rate at Peninsula Orthopaedic. Integration spans 15+ platforms, with Athena described as the industry's most robust.

Limitations: notably, no compliance certification is stated anywhere on the site: no SOC 2, no HITRUST, no explicit HIPAA statement in the material reviewed. For a platform handling patient calls this is the first thing to raise, in writing, before a pilot.

3. Luma Health: best for Epic health systems

Luma is the enterprise option, and its integration list is the broadest verified here: Epic, Oracle Health, MEDITECH, eClinicalWorks, athenahealth, NextGen and Greenway, across 1,000+ healthcare organizations. Its Conversational Agent handles after-hours voicemail and call-centre functions, cancellations and appointment requests, with two-way AI translation.

Published figures: 61 days average reduction in time to care, 2–3 hours saved on manual calls daily and a 47% average revenue increase. UAMS is cited saving 800+ hours annually from after-hours cancellations alone. Named customers include Banner Health, DENT Neurologic Institute and Phelps Memorial Health Center.

Compliance is the strongest in this list: ISO 27001, SOC 2 and HITRUST.

Limitations: no published pricing, and the product is scaled for health systems. A three-provider practice is unlikely to be the right buyer, and should expect enterprise implementation timelines.

4. MedReception.ai: best for solo and small practices

The only platform here that publishes a complete price list, which is worth something on its own. Plans run $299/month for self-managed Studio, $495 for Essential (500 AI minutes, daytime only), $995 for Professional (1,000 minutes, after-hours and voicemail included) and $1,495 for Elite (2,000 minutes, all features). Overage is 0.95–1.25 per minute depending on tier.

It routes calls by provider, location, language and insurance rules, transcribes and summarises voicemail, covers after-hours and weekends, and prepares charts pre-visit.

Published figures: 37% of calls removed at a Texas family clinic, 33% fewer inbound at a urology office, and ninefold growth in active clients during the first half of 2026. The company states nearly 9 in 10 of its clients are solo or single-group practices, which tells you exactly who it is built for.

Integrations: 15+ EMRs named, including athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Elation, ModMed, Tebra, Office Ally, SimplePractice, Practice Fusion and Azalea Health. HIPAA and SOC 2 monitored certification are stated.

Limitations: minute allowances are modest. A busy multi-provider clinic running 3,000+ minutes a month will be into overage quickly, and the economics change.

5. Simbie AI: best for high call volume

Simbie is built for practices drowning in calls. Its site claims hundreds of simultaneous phone calls with zero hold time and 24/7 coverage with no missed calls, alongside 60% cost savings on administrative staff.

Scope extends past reception into registration and scheduling, medication refills, pre-visit intake and education, chart documentation and medication reconciliation. Integration covers 15+ systems including Epic, Cerner, eClinicalWorks, Elation, ModMed, Nextech, PointClickCare, Availity, LabCorp and CVS Pharmacy.

Pricing is utilisation-based, described as "you're only paying for direct value adds", but no rates are published, so you cannot model it.

Limitations: HIPAA compliance is stated in the FAQ with no additional certification named. Concurrency claims are easy to make and hard to verify; ask for a load test against your peak hour during a pilot.

6. OmniMD: best for all-in-one practice operations

OmniMD's pitch is that the phone line, intake, eligibility, coding and billing share one patient record. The platform adds real-time insurance eligibility verification, copay collection, post-visit follow-up, sentiment analysis to flag at-risk patients, and call transcription with AI summaries.

It is live-integrated with Athena EHR and built on FHIR and HL7 APIs, with other vendors supported through API integration. Trusted by 12,000+ providers across 600+ clinics, and it publishes HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II.

Limitations: no published pricing. Athena is the only EHR named as live-integrated, so if you run something else, establish what "API integration" means in practice and who builds it.

7. Zocdoc Zo: best for practices already on Zocdoc

If you already take bookings through Zocdoc, Zo is the least disruptive option. It answers unlimited concurrent calls 24/7, books into EHR systems, collects insurance information, follows custom scheduling rules and produces call summaries for staff transfers, with multi-language support.

Compliance is stated as HIPAA-compliant with SOC 2 certification and enterprise-grade encryption. Zocdoc cites a Liine 2025 AI phone agent benchmarking study ranking it first for call-to-appointment conversions, a 90+ patient satisfaction score, and a 30% booking conversion increase at Next Level Urgent Care.

Limitations: the page names no specific EHRs, referring only to "leading EHRs", so confirm yours explicitly. No published pricing. And the strategic question: this deepens your dependence on a patient-acquisition marketplace, which may or may not be what you want.

8. Retell AI: best for building your own at the lowest per-minute cost

Retell is not a healthcare product. It is a voice AI platform you build on, and it earns its place because it is the cheapest way to run an AI receptionist if you have the technical capacity, and because it publishes its pricing openly.

Rates are 0.07–0.31 per minute for voice agents, driven mostly by which text-to-speech and language model you choose, plus $0.015/minute telephony. The breakdown is itemised down to the component: voice infrastructure at $0.055/minute, TTS 0.015–0.10, LLM 0.0016–0.38. Pay-as-you-go starts with $10 in credits, no contract, and 20 concurrent calls. Enterprise adds dedicated servers, custom compliance terms, SSO and unlimited concurrency.

Limitations: everything healthcare-specific is your problem. No EHR integration ships with it, HIPAA posture requires the enterprise tier and your own diligence, and clinical escalation logic is something you design and test yourself. Budget engineering time, and do not treat the per-minute rate as the total cost.

The five questions that decide the best platform for you

Feature lists will not separate these platforms. These questions will.

1. "Will you sign a BAA, and do you hold BAAs with every subcontractor that processes call audio?" Our HIPAA guide explains why this is the question that matters. Voice AI chains together speech-to-text, a language model, a voice and a carrier. HHS requires that a business associate establish a BAA with its subcontractor before disclosing PHI, and all downstream subcontractors are business associates too. A vendor that cannot name its subcontractors has not done this work.
   
   

2. "Show me real-time booking into our EHR version, in a sandbox." Not a recorded demo on the vendor's instance. The difference between writing a booking live and queueing a request for staff is the difference between removing work and moving it.
   
   

3. "What happens when a patient describes chest pain, including at 2am?" Ask them to demonstrate the intercept. If the after-hours answer is "it takes a message," that is a clinical risk.
   
   

4. "What is the all-in monthly cost at our actual call volume?" Including telephony, integration, and per-minute add-ons like PII redaction and guardrails.
   
   

5. "Can we export our transcripts and configuration if we leave?" Ask before you sign, not after.

Run a two-week pilot on overflow calls, the ones currently going unanswered. The baseline is zero, so the downside is capped and the data is real.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who has the best AI receptionist for a medical practice?

There is no single winner, which is why this list is organised by fit. Specialty groups should look hardest at Assort Health for its specialty training depth; Epic health systems at Luma Health for integration breadth and certifications; solo practices at MedReception.ai because it publishes prices; and practices planning to automate beyond the phone line at Sully.ai. If you have engineering capacity and want the lowest per-minute cost, Retell AI.

Is an AI receptionist HIPAA compliant?

Only if it is contractually bound to be. HHS explicitly lists a third-party AI chatbot providing appointment scheduling among its examples of a business associate, so a signed BAA is required before any PHI is disclosed. Of the eight here, Luma Health publishes the most (ISO 27001, SOC 2, HITRUST); MedReception.ai, OmniMD and Zocdoc publish SOC 2; Assort Health states no certification on its site at all. Treat a "HIPAA compliant" badge as a starting point, not evidence.

How much does an AI medical receptionist cost?

Where published: 0.07–0.31 per minute (Retell AI) or 299–1,495 per month by tier (MedReception.ai). Six of the eight do not publish pricing. Expect usage-based vendors to quote per minute and platform vendors to quote per provider, and insist on an all-in number modelled on your real call volume.

Will AI replace medical receptionists?

Not wholesale. BLS projects receptionist employment declining 2% between 2025 and 2035: gradual contraction, not elimination. In practice these systems are deployed first against unanswered and after-hours calls, which adds coverage rather than removing a person.

How long does implementation take?

Sully.ai states a 2–3 week pilot timeline. Platforms with a pre-built integration for your specific EHR are typically measured in days to weeks; anything requiring custom development should come with a written timeline and a named owner for maintenance when the EHR updates.

What happens if the AI cannot understand a patient?

The system should transfer to a human or take a callback number after a set number of failed attempts. Ask how many attempts, and whether the threshold is configurable. An AI that loops without an exit is the failure mode patients complain about most.

Can an AI receptionist do triage?

Reception and triage are different products with different risk profiles. Several vendors here mention triage or routing, with Assort Health listing "intelligent routing and triage" and Sully.ai listing auto-triage to the appropriate provider, but deciding clinical urgency is not the same as routing a call. If you need clinical triage, buy it deliberately and confirm the clinical oversight model.

Sources

1. Sully.ai: AI Receptionist and Hillside Medical customer story.
   
   

2. Assort Health: product site. Specialty coverage, integration count, patient review score and named customer outcomes.
   
   

3. Luma Health: product site. EHR integrations, certifications, customer outcomes.
   
   

4. MedReception.ai: product and pricing. Published plan pricing and overage rates, EMR list, client mix.
   
   

5. Simbie AI: product site. Capabilities, integrations, utilisation-based pricing statement.
   
   

6. OmniMD: AI Front Desk. Capabilities, Athena integration, SOC 2 Type II, provider and clinic counts.
   
   

7. Zocdoc: Zo AI phone assistant. Capabilities, certifications, Liine 2025 benchmark reference.
   
   

8. Retell AI: Pricing. Published per-minute rates and component breakdown.
   
   

9. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Outlook Handbook: Receptionists. Median pay $38,010/year, projected −2% employment change 2025–2035.
   
   

10. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services: Business Associates guidance. BAA and subcontractor requirements.

All vendor claims checked against the vendor's own published material on 13 October 2026.