Podiatry Surgical Calls

The Week-Before Calls Ahead of Foot and Ankle Surgery

Fasting times, blood thinners, the ride home, the knee scooter. Give the answers your practice published and route medication questions to the prescriber.

The week before foot surgery produces a predictable wave of calls, and nearly all of them are answered by something your practice already published: arrival time, the fasting window, what to wear, what to bring
Medication-hold questions are never answered on the call. Anticoagulants, diabetes medication and anything the patient is unsure about route to the prescriber or the surgical coordinator your protocol names
Captures the logistics a foot surgery day actually depends on, including who is driving, who will be at home afterward, whether the patient already has their post-op shoe, boot, crutches or knee scooter, and whether there are stairs at home
Records the questions patients are embarrassed to ask twice, covering showering, nail polish, eating, smoking and what happens if they are unwell that morning, answered only from the instruction sheet your practice supplies
Pre-operative clearance and testing calls from other offices are captured with the practice, the clinician, what they are sending and where it should go, then routed to your surgical coordinator
Every call leaves a structured pre-op note showing what the patient still does not have and exactly what was said to them, so the coordinator is not reconstructing a conversation at seven in the morning

How it pays back

The Same Six Questions From Every Patient

Pre-operative calls are high volume and low variance, and they land on the one staff member who is also preparing charts and confirming devices. Answering them from your own published instructions, every time, in under a second, gives that person their week back without anything new being invented.

Nothing About Medication Is Improvised

The most dangerous sentence in a pre-op call is a confident answer about whether to stop a blood thinner. The AI does not have that answer and does not attempt one. It captures the medication, the question and the caller, and routes it to the prescriber your protocol names, telling the patient that is what is happening.

Day-Of Surprises Are Almost Always Logistics

No ride home, no post-op shoe, a knee scooter never collected, a bathroom upstairs. These are discoverable a week out with four questions, and expensive to discover at six in the morning. Capturing them on inbound calls surfaces the gap while there is still time to close it.

Callers Reach the Coordinator's Queue, Not Her Voicemail

The surgical coordinator is frequently in a room, on another line, or at the hospital. Unlimited concurrency means every caller is answered anyway, and what reaches her is a structured item she can work through in order rather than a stack of return-call slips.

Under 1 second to answer

Pre-op callers are picked up immediately, including the week's busiest hours

Your instructions, verbatim

Answers come from your published pre-op material and nowhere else

Unlimited concurrent calls

Several patients preparing for the same surgical day are all handled at once

Frequently asked questions

Can the AI tell a patient whether to stop their blood thinner?

No, never, and this is a hard boundary rather than a configuration option. Any question about holding, stopping, restarting or adjusting a medication routes to the prescriber or coordinator your protocol names, and the patient is told that a member of the team will advise.

Where do the answers come from?

From the pre-operative instructions your practice supplies. Nothing is generated, inferred from other practices, or filled in from general knowledge. If your material does not cover a question, the call is captured and routed rather than answered.

What if the patient asks something outside the instruction sheet?

The AI says a staff member will follow up, captures the question in the patient's words, and routes it. It does not guess and does not offer a plausible-sounding answer, because a wrong pre-op answer can cost a cancelled surgical slot.

Does it handle calls from the surgery center or hospital?

Yes. The facility, the caller, the patient and the reason are captured, and the call routes to your surgical coordinator or whichever contact your protocol names for facility callers, including outside office hours.

Can it confirm the surgery date and arrival time?

Only where your practice has authorized it and the information is available to it. Where a supported integration exists, appointment details can be confirmed, available through API or FHIR. Otherwise the question is captured and routed rather than answered from memory.

What about the calls that come after the operation?

Post-operative questions run on separate branches, because device and dressing questions, weight-bearing questions and medication questions each go to different people in most practices.

Bring this to your practice

See how MedReception AI handles after-hours calls, scheduling, intake, and patient communication for medical practices like yours.

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Pre-Op Instruction Calls Before Foot Surgery | Medreception AI