Docplanner transforms patient access to doctors' booking with 24/7 AI support
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Challenge
Docplanner connects patients with doctors in the world’s largest healthcare marketplace, making access to care simpler and more convenient. This includes providing a solution for patients who prefer to book appointments by phone.
Solution
It is 6.48 am, and Karin has been up most of the night with her daughter Emilia, who has a fever. Anxious, Karin tries to call the family’s doctor to make an urgent appointment, but the line is closed. She calls back when the practice finally opens and is placed on hold. After 10 minutes, she hangs up, feeling frustrated, and starts searching for an available doctor.
It is a scenario familiar to many parents and carers, with 30 percent of calls to doctors going unanswered according to Docplanner research. In health care, access isn’t just a convenience — it’s a matter of trust. High call volumes and gaps in after-hours access leave patients unable to make appointments when they need care most. For doctors’ practices, the impact is just as real: unanswered calls mean disgruntled patients, missed appointments, and lost revenue.
This is the problem that leading healthcare platform Docplanner set out to solve. Operating under several names — including ZnanyLekarz in Poland, Doctoralia in Latin America, MioDottore in Italy, and Jameda in Germany — the platform connects patients with healthcare providers across 13 countries in Europe and Latin America. It works by helping patients to find the right doctor, read and leave reviews, and book appointments. At the same time, the platform helps reduce the administrative burden on clinicians, freeing doctors to focus on patient care. Due to its convenience, the platform manages 100 million website visits and 22 million appointment bookings every month. Furthermore, 300,000 doctors trust the solution.
While most of these bookings occur online, Docplanner also has call centers in some of its markets for patients who prefer to make bookings via phone. However, traditional call centers are expensive to operate, complex to manage, and inconsistent across markets, making this model difficult to scale. Patients must also often wait on hold before they can speak with an agent.
To overcome these limitations, Docplanner wanted to build an AI voice assistant to provide tech-adverse patients with round-the-clock booking access, instant answers to common questions, and WhatsApp or SMS follow-up.
"Our goal was to provide patients with an always-on way to communicate with their doctor, ask questions about services, and make bookings — while freeing doctors from the burden of managing these tasks. Most importantly, we wanted it to be scalable to support 300,000 doctors."
Creating an always-on AI voice assistant for bookings
Docplanner worked with Twilio to replace its fragmented, human-only call center model with a scalable, AI-powered solution. The solution involved building an always-on AI-powered voice assistant, Noa Booking, that enables patients to book appointments 24/7, while reducing doctors’ workloads. Available in three languages, Noa Booking can handle routine administrative queries instantly, schedule appointments in real time due to its integration with doctors’ calendars, send SMS confirmations and follow-ups, and seamlessly hand them off to human agents when patients need more complex support.
Building this solution involved leveraging Twilio’s global telecom infrastructure and expertise in contact-center routing, messaging, and AI voice assistants. It also uses Twilio Phone Numbers to provide each participating doctor with their own phone number that patients use to reach Noa Booking.
Once a call is initiated, Twilio ConversationRelay manages real-time AI voice interactions, while Twilio Conversational Intelligence is used for real-time transcription to create a ‘source of truth’ for conversations. Responses are then delivered in a natural-sounding voice provided by one of Twilio’s AI voice technology providers.
Other Twilio features used include TaskRouter to support handoffs to human agents with full context, if needed; Programmable Voice to ensure the reliability of inbound and outbound calls; Recordings to ensure compliance and quality; and Programmable Messaging to send appointment confirmations and follow-ups via SMS and WhatsApp.
"We knew that to succeed, especially with tech-averse customers, the quality had to be really high. That meant a localized language model that could understand customers’ accents, the ability to send instant confirmations via WhatsApp and SMS, and a human fallback so that if anything went wrong, the booking would still go ahead."
Navigating complexity and AI implementation with ease
Using Twilio to power a single voice AI platform has made it dramatically easier for Docplanner to scale Noa Booking across markets, with Twilio effectively navigating the complexity of the telecommunications landscape across borders and enabling consistent deployment across regions.
“Working with Twilio really helped us with managing local chaos,” says Chris. “And I use the word chaos very intentionally. Navigating the telecommunications industry in multiple markets simultaneously is not easy, so being able to lean on Twilio’s support to allocate phone numbers, redirect calls from existing providers, and support doctors and clinics with other technologies has been crucial.”
Beyond navigating the complexity of the telecommunications sector, working with Twilio also made it simpler for Docplanner to deploy its AI. For example, Docplanner was able to select different speech-to-text and text-to-speech models and easily integrate them into its tooling, rather than building voice infrastructure from scratch. This allowed the team to focus on customer-facing aspects of its AI solution.
"Twilio handles all the essential ‘boring’ AI stuff, while we get to focus on the cool, fun stuff — like designing conversations, integrating Noa Booking with doctors’ calendars, and making sure the bot understands services, pricing, and insurance options."
Laying strong foundations for further expansion
Since launching Noa Booking initially in Mexico and Poland Docplanner has seen a measurable improvement in performance in these markets. Doctors using Noa Booking receive twice the number of bookings as doctors relying on traditional call centers, thanks to always-on availability and zero hold time. Many of the additional appointments are booked early in the morning when traditional call centers are closed. These results highlight the value of offering always-on availability. Early operational signals also point to fewer missed calls and faster answers, directly addressing the original problem of unanswered patient calls.
Significantly, the shift from human-only call centers to AI has brought costs down by 50 percent. Using Twilio has also dramatically improved scalability, enabling the company to onboard 1,300 doctors to Noa Booking in just three days.
Patient feedback has been positive, with users praising the assistant’s speed, clarity, helpfulness, and empathy, reinforcing that Noa Booking is improving both patients’ and doctors’ experiences.
Docplanner intends to build on these strong foundations by launching Noa Booking in other markets and extending it beyond voice into channels such as WhatsApp and SMS.
The company also aims to evolve Noa Booking’s capabilities to support a broader range of business models and needs — including doctors who work across multiple clinics and workflows requiring patients to verify their medical insurance before appointments. Maintaining patient trust as the platform grows and evolves will be key to its success.
"As we continue to enhance our platform's capabilities, our collaboration with Twilio remains essential in realizing our vision. With plans to expand into new markets such as Spain and Brazil, we are committed to offering our customers innovative and efficient booking solutions. By leveraging Twilio's advanced communication technologies, particularly in speech-to-text and text-to-speech functionalities, we are committed to support an increasing number of doctors globally and cater to a diverse pool of requests and workflows. This scalability ensures we maintain the highest quality of service, meeting and exceeding our clients' expectations as we grow."
