3 Questions to Ask Before You Sign an AI Answering Vendor for Your Ortho Practice
By ClinicFlow Team
Every AI answering vendor's comparison page tells you the same story: we're better, they're worse, sign here. None of them tell you what to actually ask before you sign.
Here are three questions. Ask them of anyone you're evaluating, including us.
1. What happens when a call gets escalated?
"Escalation" sounds like a feature until you ask what it actually produces. Some systems route the call into your existing on-call workflow, the same way your front desk would. Others just dump a raw transcript into an inbox and call it done.
Ask for a written triage summary, not a transcript. Something the on-call surgeon can read in 10 seconds and act on: what the patient said, what it might mean, what needs to happen next. If the vendor can't show you one, that's your answer.
2. Who designed the clinical triage logic?
This is the question comparison pages never answer, because most vendors can't. A voice AI company can build a system that transcribes, routes, and schedules. Whether it knows what a surgical site infection sounds like versus normal post-op soreness is a different problem, and it takes a clinician to build that logic, not a product team guessing at edge cases.
Ask the vendor to name the person. Not "our clinical advisory board." A name, a specialty, and what they actually built. If nobody can answer that in one sentence, ask why.
3. What's live today, for your EMR, versus what's still being built?
Every vendor's site lists integrations. Not every listed integration does what the site implies. The gap between "we support X" and "X is fully live in production" is where a lot of practices get burned three months into a contract.
Ask for a live demo against your own system, not a deck. Watch the AI actually talk to your EMR in real time. If they can only show you a mockup or a roadmap slide, you're being sold a plan, not a product.
How we'd answer these about ourselves
Our triage and escalation logic was built by a practicing spine surgeon co-founder, not handed to an engineering team to guess at. That's not a claim unique to us. It's a question worth asking anyone.
We keep a comparison page against Assort Health up to date and stand behind what's on it: https://clinicflowai.com/compare/assort-health
If you're comparing vendors, ask us these same three questions. We'll show you the demo, name the surgeon, and walk you through what's actually running today. Request a demo: https://clinicflowai.com/demo