Cataract Surgery Scheduling and Clearance Call Handling

Handles cataract booking as a sequence rather than a pile: the measurement visit, the clearance your surgeon requires, the facility date, and the post-operative visit are each a step with an owner and a due date
Works from your surgical coordinator's own pre-operative checklist, capturing the items your practice asks about and nothing it invented, including which primary care office owes clearance and whether testing is complete
Answers the facility questions callers actually have: which surgery center or hospital, what time to arrive, how long to plan for, and what your practice tells patients to expect the day before
Flags a missing clearance ahead of the surgical date and routes it to your coordinator, rather than letting it surface on the morning of surgery when the block is already committed
Separates post-operative callers from pre-operative callers, so a day-one patient is never queued behind somebody booking a measurement visit three weeks out
A late cancellation on a surgical day is routed immediately to the person who can move another case up, because released block time is the one slot that cannot be recovered later

How it pays back

One Booking Generates a String of Calls

Cataract surgery is usually the only high-volume surgical pathway a comprehensive practice runs, and each case sets off measurement scheduling, a clearance request, a facility confirmation, drop instructions, and post-operative visits. The volume is not the consultation. It is everything the consultation triggers.

Clearance Falls Through in Predictable Places

It is nearly always the same handful of gaps: the primary care office never received the request, testing was booked but not done, or the patient assumed somebody else was handling it. Asking about those specific items on every call, in the order your coordinator would ask them, catches the gap while there is still time to fix it.

Your Surgical Coordinator Is a Bottleneck of One

In most practices a single person owns surgical scheduling, and every call to that person goes to voicemail while they are with a patient or on hold with a facility. Answering the routine questions and delivering only the real exceptions turns a queue of voicemails into a short, worked list.

Per-Surgeon Rules, Not a House Average

Surgeons differ on measurement timing, what clearance they want, arrival instructions, and how they want post-operative visits booked. Each surgeon's rules are configured separately, so the answer a caller gets matches the surgeon they are actually scheduled with.

24/7 coverage

Pre-operative questions get answered the night before surgery, not the next business morning

Unlimited concurrent calls

The whole post-operative call wave lands at once and is answered at once

HIPAA BAA included

Surgical dates, facility detail and clearance status encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit

Frequently asked questions

Can the AI book the surgery date itself?

That depends on where the block schedule lives. Clinic-side visits such as measurement appointments and post-operative visits can be booked directly against your templates. Facility dates usually sit in a surgery scheduling system or an ASC's calendar, so those calls are captured in full and routed to your coordinator rather than promised on the phone.

Does it ask patients clinical questions before surgery?

It asks only what is on the checklist your practice wrote, and it does not interpret any answer. If a patient reports something your checklist flags, the call is routed to the person you named. The AI does not assess surgical fitness, does not advise on medications, and does not tell a patient whether they are cleared.

Who actually chases the clearance from primary care?

Your staff do. What changes is that the outstanding item is a structured task with the referring office, the surgical date, and what is missing already attached, instead of a note someone has to reconstruct. Where you enable outbound calling, reminder calls to the patient about their outstanding clearance can be placed on your schedule.

What happens when a patient calls the night before surgery?

The call is answered rather than sent to voicemail, and it follows the after-hours branch your practice defined. Routine questions about arrival time or what to bring are answered from your own instructions. Anything your protocol treats as needing a clinician goes down the escalation path your clinical team authored, with the call logged.

We use a separate ASC with its own system. Does that matter?

It affects how deep the automation goes, not whether it works. Integration is available through API or FHIR for supported systems and custom integration is available elsewhere. Where no interface exists, the call still produces a complete structured handoff with everything your coordinator needs, which is usually the step that was being lost.

Can it handle the second eye as well?

Yes, and it is worth handling deliberately, because second-eye cases are the ones that quietly never get booked. Callers who have already had one eye done can be routed onto a separate path with your surgeon's preferred interval between eyes applied.

Run the Cataract Booking Chain Without the Phone Tag