SimplePractice Call Routing

Who calls a behavioral health practice

A therapy or psychiatry practice gets a wider mix of callers than most people expect. Prospective clients, current clients, parents of minors, primary care offices sending referrals, school counselors, pharmacies, insurance companies, attorneys asking about records, and vendors all dial the same number. Treating every one of them the same way either buries your intake coordinator or interrupts clinicians who should be in session.

Routing is the set of decisions about where each of those calls should go. MedReception AI lets you make those decisions once and have them applied on every call.

Routing keys you can build rules on

Katie learns who is calling and why early in the conversation, then applies your rules. The keys practices on SimplePractice use most:

• Caller type: new inquiry, existing client, family member, referral source, pharmacy or other organization
• Clinician: a caller who asks for their therapist by name
• Service line: couples work, child and adolescent care, psychiatry, group programs
• Location: which office, or telehealth only
• Urgency: anything your escalation rules name
• Time: whether the office is open or closed

Transfer, or summarize?

While the office is open, a call can be transferred to a staff member you choose. Not every call deserves that. A referral fax question can wait an hour; a client calling from the parking lot because the door is locked cannot. Your rules decide which calls ring through and which become a structured summary for the right person: who called, why, what they need and how urgent it is.

Summaries are where most calls should land, because they let a coordinator or biller work through requests in a block instead of answering the phone every few minutes.

Keeping clinicians out of the phone queue

A good routing table protects session time. Many practices set a simple rule: never ring a clinician who is with a client. Requests for a specific therapist become a summary marked for that clinician, and only calls your protocol labels urgent go to whoever is designated to handle them, with the option of routing those urgent matters through SimplePractice messaging. Clinicians then read what is theirs between sessions and act on it in SimplePractice, where MedReception AI is live with practices today.

Drafting your first routing table

Start with a list of call types and write one owner beside each. Then mark which ones need a live person during business hours and which only need a summary. That short document is most of the setup conversation, and it is easy to adjust after you have seen a few weeks of real calls.

Two questions tend to expose gaps. First, who owns a call when its owner is out sick or on vacation? Second, which calls from outside organizations, such as an attorney or a school, should never be discussed beyond taking a message? Writing those answers down before launch saves awkward improvising later.