A clinic misses calls all day. The front desk is with a patient, the line is busy, the caller hangs up and books nowhere. Meanwhile the patient who missed a diabetes review last quarter is not called at all, because nobody has time to work out who they are.

I built Arbol to do both jobs. The whole product is three verbs.

It knows who to call. It reads the schedule, the results inbox and the notes, and works out who needs contacting: who missed an appointment, whose review is overdue, who is on the waitlist for the slot that just opened. Ask it who missed their diabetes review this quarter and you get the list, with the lab result or the schedule entry attached to every name. Not a query you have to trust. A list you can check.

It calls them. Phone, SMS, WhatsApp and email, one thread per patient. The voice agent handles interruptions and accents, books, confirms, reschedules, backfills the waitlist when a cancellation lands, and knows when to hand off to a human. A front desk covers about forty-five hours a week. The phone rings for all hundred and sixty-eight.

It proves it happened. Every call leaves a recording, a transcript and an outcome, searchable from day one. In healthcare, an automated system that cannot show what it said to a patient is a liability, and every market Arbol runs in has rules that say so.

Two decisions

Almost everything in this product is recoverable. A misheard name gets fixed at the desk. A double booking gets a phone call. Two things are not recoverable, so they are decided in the product, not in the terms of service.

The agent does not practise medicine. The moment a caller starts describing a symptom it stops being helpful and hands off. No diagnosis, no triage, no “it is probably nothing”. After-hours emergencies escalate; they do not get handled. I wrote the long version in The line you draw before a voice agent answers.

And it does not migrate anything. Arbol writes into the practice system the clinic already runs. Owning the calendar would demo better, and it would give the receptionist two calendars that disagree by lunchtime. Nobody wins that fight, so I did not start it.

Where it runs

Twelve markets, eight of them in Spanish, from Argentina to Mexico, plus the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. A phone in Bogotá and a phone in Sydney have different rules about what an AI may say and how consent works, so each market gets its own compliance surface rather than one privacy page for everyone. Primary care, dentistry, prenatal, chronic disease, veterinary, optical, and small health plans.

What it costs

A flat monthly fee, never per minute. A per-minute price on a phone system punishes the practice for the thing the product is supposed to do. The number comes after a thirty-minute call where we read the clinic’s own call report together.