We checked the phone statistics in the vendor pitches. Most of them have no source.
Medical practices are told they miss 23–42% of calls, that 85% of those callers never ring back, and that 69% — or 74%, or 41% — will switch providers. We went looking for the studies behind those numbers.
If you have taken a demo call from anyone selling phone answering, AI receptionists or patient-access software, you have heard some of these:
- Practices miss 23–42% of incoming calls
- 85% of callers who do not get through never try again
- 69% of patients will switch providers over poor communication
- 74% of callers switch after a bad phone experience
- 41% switched because they could not reach their practice by phone
- 60% hang up after waiting more than a minute
We sell a service that looks better if all of that is true. So we went looking for the research.
What we found
Almost all of it traces back to other vendors' blog posts. Following the citations generally leads to another marketing page, which cites a third, which cites nothing. Where an original survey exists, the methodology — who was asked, how many, when — is usually not published.
Three things stand out.
The ranges are too wide to be useful. "23–42% of calls missed" spans a practice with a manageable problem and one in crisis. A statistic that covers both is not measuring anything.
The switching numbers contradict each other. 69%, 74% and 41% are presented as the same claim in different places. They cannot all be the rate at which patients switch over phone access.
The numbers drift upward over time. The same claim reappears a year later with a higher figure and no new research attached. That is a marketing pattern, not a measurement one.
What we think is actually true
Two things, neither of which needs a statistic.
A missed call at a medical practice is not a lost sale — it is usually a task that comes back. The patient rings again, or arrives without the answer they needed, or the pharmacy calls instead. The cost is real but it is mostly displaced work, not lost revenue.
The people who cannot get through are disproportionately the ones with something wrong. Routine callers reschedule. The person calling three times before lunch is usually the one with a problem, and they are the call you least want to miss.
Neither of those is quantified in this post because we cannot quantify them honestly.
How to measure yours, in a week
Your phone system already knows. Ask for three numbers for the last 30 days:
| Metric | What it tells you | | --- | --- | | Calls offered vs calls answered | Your real missed-call rate, not the industry's | | Average time to answer | Whether the problem is capacity or timing | | Abandoned calls by hour of day | Almost always clustered — usually 8–10am and just after lunch |
That third row is the useful one. Most practices do not have a phone problem all day. They have ninety minutes where one person cannot be in two places, and the rest of the day is fine. That is a much cheaper problem to solve than the one the statistics describe.
Why we are publishing this
Because we are going to ring some of these practices, and we would rather arrive without a deck full of numbers we cannot stand behind. If a vendor quotes you a statistic, ask them for the study. We would expect you to ask us.
Every figure quoted at the top of this post is repeated widely across healthcare call-centre and patient-access vendor marketing. We have deliberately not linked to those pages. If you know of a primary source for any of them, we would genuinely like to see it — [email protected].