About This Study
Status: this study has not yet been conducted. This page documents the design and protocol so that the method is public before any data is collected. No calls in this study have been placed, and no results exist.
As designed, ClinicFlow will call the publicly listed phone line of a sample of independent and mid-size orthopedic and surgical practices during defined evening and weekend windows. Calls will not disclose their purpose in advance, following a standard mystery-shopping approach, so that each practice's after-hours phone handling is observed under ordinary conditions rather than a scenario prepared for in advance.
For each call the study will capture how the call was handled: answered by a live person, routed to an answering service, sent to voicemail, unanswered, or held in a phone tree. It will also capture basic timing, including time to pickup where a call is answered and time until voicemail where it is not.
Findings
There are no findings. No calls in this study have been placed. When the study runs, findings will be published here and in a companion report, and this page will be updated to link to it.
Why We Are Running This
ClinicFlow builds HIPAA-compliant voice AI phone coverage for orthopedic, spine, neurosurgery, and surgical practices, so how these practices actually handle after-hours calls today is directly relevant to the problem we are trying to solve. We want real, first-party data on that experience rather than general call-center benchmarks or anecdote.
Published industry benchmarks already indicate that 20-35% of calls are missed during business hours, and that figure climbs to nearly 100% after hours, with after-hours volume representing a third or more of total call volume for a typical practice. Those numbers describe the scale of the problem in general terms, but no comparable public dataset previously existed for this specific practice type: independent and mid-size orthopedic and surgical practices, tested directly on their own published phone lines. This study is intended to close that gap with our own data collection rather than a secondhand estimate.
ClinicFlow was founded by a practicing spine surgeon, and this study is designed in the same first-hand, operationally grounded way: understand the problem before proposing a fix.
Methodology Details
Call Timing
Calls will be placed in defined windows outside standard business hours: weekday evenings and weekend midday, in each practice's local time. The exact windows will be published with the findings.
What Was Recorded
| To be recorded | How the call was handled (live answer, answering service, voicemail, no answer, IVR/phone-tree routing), and operational timing metadata such as time to pickup or time until voicemail. |
|---|---|
| Not to be recorded | No patient data and no protected health information (PHI) of any kind. Only operational metadata about how the call itself was handled — nothing about any patient, caller, or clinical matter. |
Practice Selection
The sample will be drawn from independent and mid-size orthopedic and surgical practices. The sampling frame, sample size and selection criteria will be published with the findings.
This page describes study design only. The study has not been conducted. It does not contain or imply any results, percentages, or named-practice findings. If and when the study runs, findings will be published in a companion post and this page will be updated to link to it.