One line. Both languages.
Your province's rules.
Arbol answers your clinic's phone in English or French, books in the appointment book you already keep, covers the hours nobody is at the desk — and keeps its privacy defaults aligned to where you actually operate.
The coverage form, filled in
Six fields decide whether a clinic's phone is actually answered. Here is how they read once Arbol is on the line.
- Lines answered / Lignes réponduesAll of them, at the same time
- Overflow is a concurrency problem. Every line is taken in parallel — no hold queue, no callback pile.
- Hours / Heures24 / 7, including holidays
- Evenings, lunch and weekends are when working patients call. That is coverage, not overtime.
- Languages / LanguesEnglish and French
- The caller picks; the agent follows. Same memory, same booking rules, either language.
- Books into / Réservation dansThe appointment book you already keep
- Real availability, the right clinician, the right site. Nothing migrated, nothing replaced.
- Escalation / TransfertYour approved path, with the transcript
- No clinical advice, ever. Anything urgent-sounding follows the route your clinic wrote, and the human gets the whole conversation.
- Record kept / Dossier conservéRecording, transcript, summary, outcome
- Every contact is searchable, so a manager reviews what was said instead of reconstructing it.
Privacy regime / Régime de confidentialité
Province
Ontario
OHIP
Statute
PHIPA — Personal Health Information Protection Act
What that changes here
Health-information custodian expectations are configured with your privacy officer: purpose, retention, access log and disclosure.
Province
Québec
RAMQ
Statute
Law 25 — modernised private-sector privacy regime
What that changes here
Service in French by default, and the heightened consent, transparency and breach obligations Law 25 introduced.
Province
British Columbia
MSP
Statute
PIPA British Columbia
What that changes here
Provincial private-sector privacy rules sit alongside the federal baseline; residency and retention are set with your counsel.
Province
Alberta
AHCIP
Statute
HIA and PIPA Alberta
What that changes here
Health Information Act expectations for custodians and affiliates, mapped onto how the agent collects and hands over information.
Province
Elsewhere in Canada
Provincial plan
Statute
PIPEDA — federal baseline
What that changes here
Where no provincial statute displaces it, PIPEDA governs personal information used in commercial activity, and health information carries heightened expectations.
None of this is legal advice — it is the checklist we configure against, with your privacy officer, before a single call is taken.
Four boxes nobody wants to tick
Having a clinic on paper is not the same as getting through
Patients who cannot reach the front desk do not appear in a wait-time statistic. They appear as abandoned demand — and often as somebody else's appointment.
After hours is when working patients call
Evenings, lunch and weekends. A voicemail box is a callback list for tomorrow, not access tonight.
One person cannot own the lobby and every ringing line
When reception is checking someone in, the phone loses. That is arithmetic, not attitude.
No-shows are the visible twin of unanswered phones
By the time a missed visit is confirmed empty, the slot is gone. Confirmation and waitlist backfill have to happen before the clinician walks into the room.
The four rules we configure against
01
Privacy / Vie privée
PIPEDA, and the provincial statute that sits on top of it
Personal information used in commercial activity falls under the federal baseline, and health information carries heightened expectations for purpose, consent and safeguards. Provincial overlays are configured with your privacy officer rather than assumed by a national script.
BasisPIPEDA, plus provincial health-privacy statutes by jurisdiction
02
Identity / Identité
The agent says it is virtual, in your clinic's name
Patients hear it in the opening line, before any personal detail is collected, along with the fact that the call is recorded. It is a product default, not a switch an implementation can flip.
BasisProduct default — not configurable
03
Clinical limit / Limite clinique
No triage, no diagnosis, no advice
The agent books, confirms, reschedules and escalates. Anything that sounds urgent follows the path your clinic approved, with the transcript attached, and reaches a person.
BasisHard boundary in every deployment
04
Data / Données
Your clinic's data stays your clinic's data
Isolation per clinic, encryption in transit and at rest, and export or deletion whenever you ask — in a format you can hand to somebody else.
BasisContractual, and testable on request
The access problem is measured, and it is not about effort
Three published figures, each linked. Read them as the market you are operating in, not as a sales argument — they are true whether or not you ever talk to us.
- 26%
got a same- or next-day appointment
Canada ranked last of ten high-income countries on this measure — and it had been 46% in 2016.
CIHI, international health policy survey ↗- 77%
do not find evenings and weekends easy
More than three in four adults say getting care in the evening, on a weekend or on a holiday is not easy. That is the window a message bank currently owns.
CIHI, access to primary care ↗- 1 in 6
adults without a regular provider
83% reported having a regular health care provider in 2024. The rest arrive as new patients — usually by phone, usually once.
CIHI, 2024 ↗
Bilingual is not a phone menu
Bilingue · pour de vrai
The caller chooses, not a menu
No “press 2 for French”. The agent hears the language and continues in it, including mid-call if the family switches.
The rules do not change with the language
Same booking logic, same escalation path, same limits on what may be recorded — a French call is not a lesser version of the English one.
Québec gets French by default
In Québec the agent opens in French, and the Law 25 expectations for consent, transparency and breach handling are configured with your privacy officer.
The record keeps the original
Transcripts and summaries are stored in the language the conversation happened in, so nothing is lost in a translation nobody reviewed.
Five questions to ask any vendor — including us
Print this, hand it to whoever signs off on privacy at your clinic, and make every supplier answer it in writing. We would rather lose to a good answer than win against no question.
Our answers, in short- 01
Where the data lives, in writing
Ask for the storage regions and the isolation model per clinic, not a general assurance about “the cloud”.
- 02
The retention setting, not the retention policy
A policy is a document. A setting is a number you can change. Ask which recordings, transcripts and facts expire, and when.
- 03
Who can read a conversation, and what that leaves behind
Access to a patient conversation should itself be an event you can audit later.
- 04
The breach process, before you need it
Who assesses, in what window, and what your clinic receives to make its own notification decision.
- 05
The subprocessor list and the exit
Who else touches the data, and what you get on the way out: a full export, in a format someone else can read.
Straight answers
Prefer email? Write tosupport@getarbol.com — a person answers.
01How do you handle PIPEDA and provincial health privacy?
Health and personal information are treated as sensitive by default: purpose-limited collection, encrypted storage, per-clinic isolation, and export or deletion when you ask. Provincial overlays are configured with your privacy officer. The short version lives on our Canada privacy page.
02Does the agent really work in French?
Yes. The caller speaks French, the agent answers in French, and the booking rules, escalation paths and records are the same ones your English calls use.
03Does the agent tell patients it is an AI?
Yes, in the opening line, using your clinic's name. It also announces call recording. Transparency is not a setting an implementation can turn off.
04Do we have to replace our EMR or phone system?
No. Arbol answers the number you already publish and books in the schedule you already keep. Nothing is migrated, and your data is exportable in full.
05What does it cost?
A flat monthly fee in CAD, sized to your call volume, channels and locations — not per minute. You get the number in writing after a 30-minute call.
Last field · Dernière case
Bring one week of calls. We will fill the form with your numbers.
Thirty minutes on volume, abandoned calls, no-shows and how far out the book runs. You leave with the business case in your own figures — and the privacy checklist for your province.