Patients Can't Get Through to Your Practice, and They're Calling Someone Else

On October 24, 2026, Forbes ran a piece with a title that doubles as a diagnosis: Healthcare Practices Turn To AI As Patients Struggle To Get Through. Read that last part again. Not struggle to get well. Struggle to get through. The simple act of reaching a practice, by phone, to make an appointment, has become hard enough that it is now a business problem worth writing about in Forbes.

We see it every week. A practice is not losing patients because the care is bad or the prices are wrong. It is losing them in the ten seconds between a phone ringing and nobody answering. The patient was ready. The practice just was not reachable.

The wait got longer, and patients got less patient

Start with the appointment itself. AMN Healthcare's 2025 Survey of Physician Appointment Wait Times, the long running study formerly run under the Merritt Hawkins name, found the average wait to see a physician across six specialties reached 31 days, as reported by Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare. That is a 19% jump since 2022 and a 48% jump since the survey began in 2004. In Boston the typical wait stretched past two months. For obstetrics and gynecology the national average was close to 42 days.

So patients are already stretched thin before they ever dial. They are anxious, they want to be seen, and their tolerance for friction is gone. Now picture what happens when that person finally picks up the phone to book, and gets hold music. Or a phone tree. Or a voicemail box at 5:10pm. They do not leave a message and wait for a callback three days later. They hang up and try the next name on Google.

The part nobody measures: the call that never connected

Here is the trap. Your front desk is not lazy. They are buried. One person is checking in a patient, another line is a prescription question, a third is an insurance company on hold, and the fourth ring, the new patient ready to book a thousand dollar course of care, rolls to voicemail. Nobody did anything wrong. The call was just lost. And because it was never answered, it never shows up anywhere. You cannot miss what you never knew called.

We put real numbers on that invisible leak in how much a missed call actually costs a practice, and it is worse than most owners guess once you follow a single new patient across their lifetime with you. The after hours version is even sharper. We walked through it in why you are losing patients after hours: more than half of patient calls can come in when the office is closed or slammed, and those are the ones a competitor happily catches.

This is the real reason practices are, as Forbes put it, turning to AI. Not because AI is trendy. Because the phone has quietly become the biggest hole in the bucket, and the front desk cannot plug it by working harder. There are only so many hands.

What the AI front door actually does

Let us be precise, because the hype gets this wrong in both directions. An AI receptionist does not shorten the 31 day clinical wait. It cannot conjure appointment slots that do not exist. What it does is make sure that every patient who wants to reach you, can, on the first ring, at any hour. That is the access problem that is actually in your control.

• It answers instantly, every time. No hold queue, no phone tree, no voicemail. The call that used to drop now gets picked up before the second ring.
• It books, reschedules and cancels. The single most common reason patients call, handled in the moment, including filling a slot the second a cancellation opens.
• It covers nights and weekends. The after hours caller who would have hit voicemail gets booked or taken care of, instead of becoming someone else's patient.
• It answers the fifty daily repeats. Hours, directions, parking, which insurances you accept. The questions that eat your team's day.
• It knows its limits. A symptom question, a worried caller, anything urgent, it recognizes and routes straight to a human, with the details already gathered.

The Forbes piece described practices starting exactly here, with scheduling and calls first, and keeping a human firmly in the loop for the clinical side. That is the right order. It also lines up with what patients told researchers this year, which we broke down in which patient calls AI should handle: people are happy to let software book an appointment, and they want a real person for anything about their actual health.

The honest caveats, because they matter

We are not going to pretend this is free of risk. If you put AI on your phones, do it right or do not do it. Any vendor that touches patient information should sign a business associate agreement, full stop. Patients should be told plainly, at the start of the call, that they are speaking with an automated assistant and can reach a person anytime, and in a growing number of states that disclosure is becoming law, not just courtesy. And the AI should never pretend to be a clinician or trap someone who needs help. We went deep on the trust and safety side in whether it is safe to let AI talk to patients. Get those guardrails right and patients barely notice the technology. Get them wrong and you have built the thing everyone hates.

How EtherealMinds sets this up

We are a growth agency built only for US healthcare, so here is the straight version. The phone is usually the fastest fix we find in a practice, because the patients are already calling. They are just not getting through. You do not need more leads. You need to stop dropping the ones you have.

You can hear ours answer a call right now at our AI receptionist, Emma. Inside a full patient acquisition system, she is tuned to your practice: your services, your insurances, your scheduling rules, and your exact line for what counts as urgent and goes straight to a person. She answers the calls your front desk cannot get to, books what should be booked, and hands your team a short list of the ones that need a human, notes already taken. We only work with healthcare practices in the United States, and if your call volume is low enough that your front desk already catches every ring, we will tell you to keep your money.

Our honest take

The Forbes headline is a warning, not a trend to admire from a distance. Patients struggling to get through is not a tech story, it is a patients walking out the back door story. The wait for care is long and getting longer, which means every patient who finally picks up the phone is more motivated and less patient than ever. If you answer, you win them. If they get hold music and voicemail, your competitor wins them, and you never even learn it happened. AI will not fix the national wait time. It will fix the one thing you can actually control, which is whether the phone gets answered. In 2026, that is the whole game.