An AI receptionist for clinics — built to hear as little as possible

Most of Australia's privacy law has a small-business exemption. Health is the hole in it: if your practice provides a health service and holds health information, the Privacy Act applies to you regardless of turnover, and in Victoria, NSW and the ACT a state health-records law sits on top. That is not our obligation to carry for you — it stays with the practice — but it shapes how a phone service for you has to behave. Our answer is not clever paperwork. It is to make the receptionist unable to collect the sensitive part in the first place.

It won't discuss symptoms, conditions, diagnoses, medications, results, treatments or therapies — not to describe them, confirm them, guess at them, or even repeat back what a caller has said. If a patient starts explaining what's wrong, it lets them finish, says kindly that it's not the right one to talk to about the clinical side, and gets them to the practice.

Clinical detail is never written down. A message about a health matter records only that the caller would like a call back, plus their name and number — and whether they said it was urgent, so you know which call to return first. The one exception is an emergency: the text that alerts you passes on what the caller said, so you know what you're dealing with. A booking carries the appointment type from your own list ("check-up and clean", "emergency appointment"), never the symptom. You ring them and hear it from them directly.

No health advice, of any kind. Not “that sounds fine”, not “that can wait”, not “you should come in”. If asked, it says plainly that it isn't qualified.

Nothing is kept at the voice provider. For restricted practices no call audio is kept and the written transcript is deleted rather than kept; the practice keeps a call-log entry and the message, if one was taken. Asked, the receptionist tells a caller exactly that.

Ordinary reception still works normally. Appointments, hours, location, parking, fees, cancellations and rescheduling — the actual job of a front desk.

A receptionist in restricted mode has one rule that outranks every other: if a caller describes anything that sounds like danger to life or limb, it stops whatever it was doing. You choose at signup how that call is handled, and you can change it on your settings page:

• Tell them to hang up and ring triple zero (000), hang up so their line is free, and text you at once with the caller's number and what they said. This is the default.
• Put them through to your emergency contact first — an on-call clinician, a practitioner — and tell them to ring 000 if that rings out.
• Say your own words first — your after-hours line, your crisis card, one or two sentences the receptionist says exactly, in your words — then tell them to ring 000.

Whichever you choose: it does not ring 000 for them, it will never say or imply that it has or that help is on the way, it does not assess how serious it is (it is told to err heavily on the side of acting), and it texts you every time.

This rule exists only in restricted mode. An ordinary Giday receptionist is not given it — a plumber's receptionist should never hang up on a caller who mentioned a burst pipe — and Giday is not an emergency service for any client.

It is not a triage line, a nurse, a clinical intake tool or a way to collect patient history over the phone. It is an AI receptionist that knows which conversations aren't its own. Every call also opens with the same recording notice every Giday client's callers hear — the greeting says the call is on a recorded line — and that notice can't be switched off, by us or by you. We think a patient is owed that sentence more than anyone.

Nothing here makes your practice's privacy obligations ours — they stay with you, as they would with a human receptionist or a call centre. What we can promise is that we have built it to hold as little as possible, we have written down exactly what it does, and if the rules change we will change it with them and tell you. If you want the detail, the recording-laws guide and our legal pages are the long version.