How start.physio stopped sending patients to voicemail.
start.physio runs eight physiotherapy practices in western Switzerland. Its physios treat patients back to back, so the phone is staffed only a few hours a day. Outside those hours, and whenever all lines were busy, patients reached a voicemail. Today rednea answers those calls, takes each request completely and hands it to the team, ready to act on.
Download as PDF
«From the start it was a great fit. It already covered 90% of what we needed.»
The bottom line
- Challenge
- Short phone hours and busy lines sent patients to voicemail. Almost every message needed a call-back.
- Solution
- One rednea AI assistant per practice answers when the front desk is closed or busy, and collects every detail.
- Result
- Requests arrive complete. One in three needs no call-back, and the team saves about 15 hours a month.
Who is start.physio
Physiotherapy close to home, in eight towns
start.physio is a group of physiotherapy practices in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, founded in 2015. Its eight practices stretch from Lausanne along Lake Geneva to Martigny in the Rhône valley, run as two companies: one for Vaud and one for Valais.
About 40 people work there, more than 30 of them physiotherapists. Together they treat more than 1,000 patients a month, from children to patients in their nineties. Sergio Legrant, COO and co-founder, runs the operations.
Like most healthcare SMEs, start.physio must do three things at once: keep costs tight, give patients a good experience, and respect data protection law.
Eight practices, from Lake Geneva to the Rhône valley
Each practice has its own phone number and its own assistant, so every call arrives at the right team.
The challenge
When the phone rings during a treatment
A physiotherapist cannot stop a treatment to answer the phone. So start.physio staffs its phone lines only for short periods each day, and even then the lines are often busy.
Outside those periods, every practice had its own voicemail. The messages arrived as text by email, and then the real work started. Someone from the patient service team read each message and tried to understand what the patient wanted.
Most messages were incomplete: no date of birth, no clear reason, no time when the patient could take a call. So the team called back, and often called back again.
A voicemail only goes one way
It records what the patient says. It cannot ask for what is missing.
Every message costs 4 to 5 minutes
Read, interpret, call back, ask again, and only then book.
Patients wait too
They wait in the queue or leave a message, then wait for a call-back and repeat everything.
«Outside office hours, patients ended up on voicemail. Most of them just said: I need an appointment, please call me back. That was a waste of time for our patients and for our team.»
Sergio Legrant, COO and co-founder, start.physioWhy rednea
Why start.physio chose rednea
start.physio was looking for a Swiss AI solution to handle patient calls outside working hours and whenever its call queues overflow. Four things made the difference.
Swiss, with data in Switzerland
In healthcare, the first question is always where the data is. rednea is a Swiss company, and all call data is stored in Switzerland.
A fit from day one
The assistant covered 90% of what start.physio needed from the start. The rest was tuned in days, not months.
Made for Swiss French
Claire speaks the French of Romandie, with local numbers and place names, and changes language when a caller does.
One assistant per practice
Each practice keeps its own number, greeting and summary inbox, so every request lands with the right team.
«Because we work in healthcare, all our data has to be in Switzerland. The first thing people ask is: where is the data?»
Sergio Legrant, COO and co-founder, start.physio
The rollout
From one test line to eight practices in six weeks
start.physio did not switch everything on at once. It tested one practice, tuned the assistant with its own team, and then rolled it out.
June
Start with one practice
After the first test calls, rednea tuned the assistant to the way a physio practice works. It asks for the date of birth in a natural way, recognises the caller’s number, and asks new patients whether they have a medical prescription.
July
Live in Bex, then in all of Vaud
After a short briefing for the team, the first practice went live. Two weeks later, Clarens, La Tour-de-Peilz, Lausanne, Noville and Roche followed.
«This means I can now roll out rednea across all our practices.»
August
Valais joins
The second company, with the practices in Monthey and Martigny, followed with the same setup. Eight practices, eight phone numbers, one assistant for each practice.
Today
300+ calls a month, handled completely
The assistant answers more than 300 calls a month across the eight practices, outside opening hours and whenever all lines are busy. That is a good share of all incoming calls.
How it works today
A conversation instead of a recording
When the front desk is closed or all lines are busy, Claire answers. Claire is the rednea AI assistant, named by the start.physio team. She finds out why the patient is calling and asks every question a busy person often forgets: full name, date of birth, a call-back number (read back to confirm) and when the patient is available. Then she sends the team a summary.
Before: voicemail
- 1Patient leaves a message, often incomplete
- 2Email with a raw transcript
- 3Team guesses what the patient wants
- 4Call-back to collect the details, often twice
- 5Appointment booked
Now: rednea
- Claire asks for the reason and every detail
- Structured summary, with practice and urgency in the subject line
- The team sees at once what to do
- If a slot fits, they book it and confirm by SMS
- No call-back needed in many cases
What the team receives
start.physio - Clarens · Normal
From rednea to the patient service team
Patient asks to move Thursday’s appointment
- Patient
- Marie Example, date of birth given
- Call-back number
- 079 XXX XX XX, confirmed
- Available
- Tuesday or Thursday after 16:00
- Next step
- Offer a new slot and confirm by SMS
Example with invented patient details.
«It completely removes the need to call the patient back. We assign the slot and send an SMS. What took four to five minutes now takes one, and our team can focus on patients instead of admin.»
Sergio Legrant, COO and co-founder, start.physioWhat the numbers show
Patients call when nobody can pick up
Patients call before work, at lunch and after work: exactly when a practice is closed or every line is busy. 95% of the calls that rednea takes for start.physio arrive in these three windows.
Calls answered by hour of the day
What patients call about
One call can have more than one topic.
~1 in 3
requests need no call-back at all
A confirmation, a question about opening hours, a message for the physio. Claire, their rednea AI assistant, answers it or passes it on complete.
The impact
What this means every month
Minutes per request add up. Based on the requests rednea handles for start.physio every month:
~15 h
of staff time saved per month
About 250 requests a month, each taking 3 to 4 minutes less. That is about two working days.
~10 h
of waiting saved for patients
Each patient saves 2 to 3 minutes of waiting, call-backs and repeating details.
0 min
in the queue
Claire answers every call at once, even when all lines are busy. Nobody waits for a free line.
Estimates based on start.physio’s handling times and rednea call data.
The three goals
Costs, patient experience and data protection
The start.physio team set three conditions for any solution. This is how rednea meets each one.
1 · Keep costs tight
Less admin for every request
Swiss healthcare is under cost pressure. With rednea, the hours that used to end in voicemail are covered, and each request takes the team about one minute instead of four to five.
Human and AI together: Claire takes the repetitive calls, so the team has time for the patients who need them.
2 · A good patient experience
Patients talk to Claire, older ones too
Many start.physio patients are 50, 60 or older. Two in three callers tell Claire what they need, and some happily chat with her about the neighbourhood. Claire never rushes and asks every question, every time.
Patients save 2 to 3 minutes of waiting and repeating.
3 · Respect data protection
Patient data stays in Switzerland
For a healthcare provider this is not optional. rednea is a Swiss company. Recordings, transcripts and summaries are stored in Switzerland and are not used to train AI models.
start.physio chose automatic deletion: recordings and transcripts are deleted after 7 days.
«Our people are always scarce. Now we can focus them on complicated treatments, complicated patients and complicated bookings, and leave the basic interactions to AI.»
Sergio Legrant, COO and co-founder, start.physioIn his own words
“Couldn’t be more happy”
«I was looking for a Swiss-based AI solution to handle patient calls outside working hours and whenever our call queues overflow. We’re an SME, so we need to keep costs tight but still provide a good patient experience while respecting data protection laws. I’m very happy to have found rednea, as it ticks all the right boxes. On top of that, their team has been extremely supportive and even prioritised two or three suggestions we made to improve the solution. Couldn’t be more happy. And the patients? Getting used to it, some can’t tell the difference. It’s not perfect, but it’s extremely efficient. Our patient service representatives? Happy with the summaries of the calls. Taking care of patients and taking care of my team were my goals, both fulfilled. Keep up the good work, rednea team!»
Working together
A team that adapts the platform to its customers
start.physio describes the collaboration as open and fast. The rednea team first confirmed the business needs, then shaped the platform around them. When start.physio suggested an improvement, it was often live within days.
The practice team was part of it from day one. start.physio briefed its patient service team before the launch, and the team helped shape the call summaries. Today they are happy with what they receive.
Same-day changes
The feedback from the first test calls was live on all lines the same afternoon.
Summaries per practice
The practice name and the urgency appear in every subject line, and each practice can send its summaries to its own inbox.
Automatic deletion
Call data can be deleted automatically after a set number of days.
Access for the whole team
Team members get their own access to the calls in the dashboard.
«It was above my expectations. I always felt that the team was extremely responsive and listened to our needs. It is an open collaboration: we can discuss problems and even find solutions together.»
Sergio Legrant, COO and co-founder, start.physioEasy to scale
From one practice to eight, and what other businesses can learn
rednea grows with a business. What start.physio did works for any company with more than one location or a busy phone.
1.Start with one location
Switch the assistant on at one location outside opening hours. Test it with your own calls, tune the questions, then roll it out.
2.Copy what works
Once one location works, the same setup is copied to new locations in minutes. start.physio went from one to eight practices, in two companies, in six weeks.
3.One number per location
Each location keeps its own number, greeting and summary inbox, so growth never mixes up the teams.
4.Let your team shape it
The people who work with the summaries every day know best what they need to see first.
Does your phone ring while you work?
rednea answers when you cannot, in French, German, Swiss German, Italian and English. Call our demo line and talk to the assistant yourself.