Never miss a dental patient again.
Frontline answers every patient call, day or night, and books, reschedules or confirms the appointment directly in Open Dental while the patient is still on the line. When a call needs a person, your team gets a summary.
- Writes directly to Open Dental
- Built for HIPAA, BAA available
- Answers 24/7, including holidays
Most missed calls happen when nobody's free to answer
Front desks fill up during morning check-in, close for lunch, and go home at five. Patients still call during those hours, and a patient who gets voicemail will often call the next practice on the list.
On a typical weekday, calls go unanswered from midnight to 8 AM, during the noon lunch hour and from 5 PM onward. The desk is busy with check-ins at 8 AM and 4 PM. Staff are free to answer from 9 to 11 AM and 1 to 4 PM. Frontline answers during all 24 hours.
- Staff available
- Desk busy (check-ins, insurance)
- Office closed / lunch
- Frontline coverage
Frontline: every hour, every day
From ringing phone to booked appointment in one call
Frontline does more than answer questions. It works inside your practice management system and finishes the task while the patient is still on the phone.
Step 1: Patient calls
Your existing number forwards to Frontline when the desk is busy, after hours, or for every call.
inbound · (555) 214-0187Step 2: Frontline understands
It works out who's calling and what they need, and answers questions from your practice's own policies.
intent: new_patient_bookingStep 3: Acts in Open Dental
Looks up the patient, checks real provider availability, and writes the appointment to your schedule.
POST /appointmentsStep 4: Done & logged
The patient gets a text confirmation, and your team gets a call summary and recording in the dashboard.
status: confirmed ✓
Watch Frontline handle real front-desk calls
Pick a scenario. The left side is the conversation; the right side shows each action Frontline takes in the practice management system as it happens.
Agent actionsfrontline-agent
Open Dental APISimulated call with a fictional practice and patients. No real patient data is shown.
The calls that fill your front desk's day
Trained on how dental offices actually run, and set up with your providers, procedures, insurance list and policies.
Books new patients
Collects demographics and insurance, finds an opening that fits the procedure length and provider, and creates the patient and appointment.
“Do you have anything Thursday morning for a cleaning?”
Reschedules & cancels
Verifies identity, moves the appointment to a new slot, and backfills the opening from your ASAP list so the chair doesn't sit empty.
“I need to move my crown appointment next week.”
Confirms appointments
Answers inbound confirmation callbacks and updates confirmation status in the schedule so your team doesn't have to.
“Calling back to confirm for tomorrow at 2.”
Answers insurance questions
Tells callers which plans you're in network with, what you accept, and what to bring. It follows your rules for discussing estimates.
“Do you take Delta Dental PPO?”
Handles common questions
Hours, location, parking, services, new-patient paperwork and payment options, answered the same way every time.
“Do you do Invisalign? Is there parking?”
Escalates what matters
Spots urgent and sensitive calls such as swelling, trauma, billing disputes or upset patients, and routes them to staff or on-call with a summary.
“My face is swollen and it really hurts.”
Your team sees everything Frontline did
Every call has a transcript, a summary and an outcome. Appointments Frontline books are flagged on the schedule, and escalations are queued for follow-up.
Illustrative dashboard with a fictional practice and sample data.
An agent that does the work, not just a voice bot
Most AI phone tools take a message and leave your team to do the actual work. Frontline finishes the task in your system.
Generic AI voice bot
An answering service with a nicer voice.
- Limitation: Takes a message and emails it to the front desk
- Limitation: Can't see your schedule, so it can't offer real openings
- Limitation: Staff still call every patient back the next morning
- Limitation: Generic answers that don't match your policies
- Limitation: No record of the call in your practice software
Frontline
A front desk agent connected to Open Dental.
- Books, reschedules and confirms in your schedule, live
- Offers real openings using your providers, ops and procedure lengths
- The patient hangs up booked, with nothing left for staff to do
- Answers from your fee schedule, insurance list and policies
- Writes a commlog note and call summary to the patient record
What are missed calls costing your practice?
Enter your own numbers. Every booking Frontline captures is a patient who might otherwise have called another practice.
Your practice
Use your phone system's reports or a rough estimate.
- Extra bookings per month
- 33
- Extra bookings per year
- 390
This is an estimate based only on the numbers you entered. It is not a guarantee of results.
Starting with Open Dental
Frontline connects through the Open Dental API and reads your real schedule rules, so it books the way your team would. Setup is handled by our engineers, and your staff keep using the system they already know.
Open Dental operations Frontline uses
GETPatient lookup & verifyGETProvider & op availabilityPOSTCreate patient & appointmentPUTReschedule / confirmPOSTCommlog call notesGETInsurance carriers on file
- LiveOpen DentalScheduling, patients, commlog, confirmations
- RoadmapDentrixPlanned integration
- RoadmapEaglesoftPlanned integration
- Any carrierKeep your existing phone numberForward all calls, overflow only, or after hours only.
Built for patient data from day one
Frontline is built by Makenzie, a team that builds HIPAA-compliant healthcare software. Patient data is handled the way it should be.
HIPAA & BAA
We sign a Business Associate Agreement with every practice before go-live.
Encrypted in transit and at rest
Call audio, transcripts and PHI are encrypted in transit and at rest.
Full audit trail
Every action Frontline takes in your PMS is logged with who, what and when.
Least-privilege access
Frontline gets only the Open Dental permissions it needs. Clinical notes and treatment plans stay out of scope.
Questions practices ask us
Yes. Frontline introduces itself as the practice's virtual assistant. It speaks naturally, and any caller can ask for a person at any time. During business hours it can transfer the call live, and after hours it takes a detailed message for your team.
No. You keep your number and phone provider. You choose when calls forward to Frontline: overflow when lines are busy, during lunch and after hours, or every call.
During onboarding we map your providers, operatories, procedure lengths, new-patient blocks and preferences such as "no crown preps after 3 PM." Frontline reads availability live from Open Dental and only offers slots your team would offer.
Frontline is configured with your triage rules. Symptoms like facial swelling, trauma or uncontrolled bleeding trigger an immediate escalation to on-call staff with a summary, and callers with trouble breathing or swallowing are told to call 911. It never gives clinical advice beyond what your practice approves.
Most practices go live within a couple of weeks: connect Open Dental, configure your knowledge base and rules, run test calls with your team, then turn on call forwarding.
Open Dental today. If you use Dentrix, Eaglesoft or another system, talk to us. Those integrations are on our roadmap.
Never miss a dental patient again.
See Frontline answer a live call and book into a test Open Dental schedule in a 20-minute demo.
No obligation · Works with your existing phone number