About this study
ClinicFlow called the publicly listed phone line of n=75 independent and mid-size orthopedic and surgical practices after standard business hours. Calls were placed without disclosing the purpose of the call in advance, using a mystery-shopping methodology, so that each practice's after-hours phone system was observed under normal, everyday conditions rather than a scenario the practice knew to prepare for.
For each call, we recorded what happened: whether the call was answered by a live person, routed to an answering service, sent to voicemail, or went unanswered entirely. We also captured basic timing data, including time to pickup where a call was answered and time until the call reached voicemail where it was not.
Findings
Findings from this study will be published here once the full analysis is complete.
[PLACEHOLDER — findings not yet available as of this page's creation]
Why we ran this
ClinicFlow builds HIPAA-compliant voice AI phone coverage for orthopedic, spine, 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 wanted real, first-party data on that experience rather than relying on 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 our attempt to close that gap with our own data collection rather than a secondhand estimate.
ClinicFlow was founded by a practicing spine surgeon, Comron Saifi, MD, and this study reflects the same first-hand, operationally grounded approach to understanding the problem before proposing a fix.
Methodology details
Call timing
Calls were placed after standard business hours. Specific hours of day tested: [specific hours tested — TBD by research team].
What was recorded
| 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 recorded | No patient data and no protected health information (PHI) of any kind. Only operational metadata about how the call itself was handled was captured — nothing about any patient, caller, or clinical matter. |
Practice selection
Selection criteria for the n=75 independent and mid-size orthopedic and surgical practices included in this study: [selection criteria — TBD].
This page describes study design only. It does not contain or imply any results, percentages, or named-practice findings. Full findings will be published in a companion post once analysis is complete, and this page will be updated to link to it.