Alma
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For healthcare

The healthcare chatbot that lets patients book themselves, so the team can focus on care.

Dental practices, primary care offices, specialty clinics, telehealth and aesthetic providers. A patient hits your website at 9pm wanting a cleaning, a same-week sick visit, or a derm consult. Alma is the conversation that catches them. The bot asks for the visit reason, preferred time, and insurance info, then routes the request to the PMS or EHR your front desk already lives in. The phone keeps ringing for the people who'd rather call; the rest book themselves.

Start free → Ask Alma

/HEALTHCARE · 10 TEMPLATES · WEBSITE WIDGET · LIVE IN 30 MINUTES

Who runs it

Built for the small-to-mid practice that doesn't have an IT team: dental primary care specialty clinics telehealth aesthetic. Hospital systems with HIPAA-bound patient data flows are not the buyer here.

The Alma leads inbox for a dental practice, showing five captured patients tagged by the intake flow: a new patient on Delta Dental PPO, a cleaning with insurance verified, a same-day emergency slot, a new patient using CareCredit, and one referred out for oral surgery.

/A · A REAL PRACTICE

Robert Martinez runs Smile Studio. The bot sits on smilestudio.com.

Robert's a dentist with a four-chair practice, two hygienists, one front-desk lead. The phone rings during cleanings. Voicemail piles up by lunch. He didn't want a live-chat tool that pings staff on Slack. He wanted a chatbot that finishes the conversation, gets the patient to commit to a visit type and a time window, and hands the request to the front desk as a clean intake row.

The bot asks four things: cleaning, checkup, whitening, or something else? · new patient or established? · insurance carrier (or self-pay)? · ASAP or routine, and what time of day? Then it asks for a phone number to confirm. The conversation that landed an hour ago: a patient asked about a cleaning, picked April 30 at 3pm, said she had Delta Dental. The front desk confirms next morning by phone, the same path the practice already used, just with the appointment request already written down.

  • Lives at smilestudio.com: one snippet, no plugin
  • Captured the "Apr 30, 3pm cleaning" lead overnight while the office was closed
  • Front desk gets an email + the lead row in the inbox
  • Same flow handles checkups, whitening consults, and pediatric visits
  • No PHI lives in Alma. The practice's PMS owns the chart

Build the Smile Studio bot for your practice.

Pick the dental, primary care, or specialty template. Tweak the visit reasons. Paste the widget. The first patient books overnight.

Start free → Ask Alma

Three conversations, three specialties

Dental · Smile Studio

Cleaning booker

Hi! Booking a visit at Smile Studio?
Yeah, a cleaning
Got it. New patient or established?
Established. I had Delta Dental last visit.
Perfect. Still Delta? Best time of day for you: morning, lunch, or after 4?
Afternoon. Apr 30 if open.
Apr 30, 3pm is open. Want me to hold it? Just need your phone for confirmation.

Primary care · 3-provider family practice

Same-week sick visit

Hi! Are you booking a visit, asking about a refill, or something else?
Sick visit, sore throat and fever for 2 days
Sorry to hear that. Are you an established patient with us?
Yes
We can usually fit sick visits within 24 hours. Today, tomorrow morning, or tomorrow afternoon?
Tomorrow morning if possible
Got it. What's your name, DOB, and best phone? The front desk will call to lock the slot.

Dermatology · specialty clinic

Insurance pre-check

Hey! Looking to book a derm consult? I can check if we're in-network with your plan first.
Yes, BCBS PPO
We're in-network with BCBS PPO. Is this a routine skin check, an acute issue (rash, mole change), or cosmetic?
Mole change. Concerned.
Understood. I'll flag it as priority for the scheduler. What's your name and best phone? They'll call within a business day with the next acute slot.

/B · 10 HEALTHCARE TEMPLATES

Dental, medical & specialty chatbot templates: 10 starter flows

The Healthcare category in Alma ships ten starter graphs written by operators who've actually run a front desk. Pick the one that fits. A dental practice grabs the dental office bot, a primary care office grabs appointment scheduling and patient intake, a telehealth provider grabs the symptom checker. Edit the visit reasons, the intake fields, and the routing destination. The library is on every paid tier, with no "healthcare add-on" upcharge.

  • Medical Practice Welcome Bot: directs to appointments, refills, or office info
  • Appointment Scheduling Bot: provider, reason, insurance, preferred time
  • New Patient Intake Bot: demographics, insurance, basic medical history
  • Prescription Refill Bot: medication name, pharmacy, last fill date
  • Office Hours & Location Bot: hours, providers, parking, contact
  • Insurance & Billing Bot: accepted plans, payment options, billing questions
  • Symptom Checker Bot: triage to urgent / routine / emergency
  • Dental Office Bot: dental-specific services, insurance, booking
  • Appointment Reminder Bot: confirm, reschedule, or cancel
  • Patient Satisfaction Survey Bot: post-visit feedback + review routing
The Alma template library at 145 ready-to-use templates across 15 categories, grouped by job: lead generation, qualification, booking, retargeting and support.

Pick the template, edit the visit reasons, ship before lunch.

Most practices are live in under 30 minutes. The dental, primary care, and specialty templates are already wired with the right intake fields.

Start free → Ask Alma
The Alma chat widget open on a dental practice website. A patient has asked whether the practice takes Delta Dental and how soon they can get a cleaning, and the bot confirms Delta Dental PPO is in network and offers the next new patient slot.

/C · WHERE THE REQUEST GOES

How the healthcare chatbot integrates with your PMS or EHR

The bot is a marketing-layer intake form. The chart, the schedule of record, and the claim still live in your existing tooling. What Alma does is finish the conversation, write a clean lead row, and push that row to the place your front desk already works. Three patterns most practices use:

  • Lead → Google Sheet: a single ledger the front desk has open all day
  • Lead → SMS confirmation via CampaignCNX+. The patient gets a text in 30 seconds: "Got your request for Apr 30 3pm. We'll confirm by 9am tomorrow."
  • Symptom-checker urgent flag → email to practice manager: same-day eyes on the high-acuity intake

For the schedule of record, the route is a webhook or Zapier into the PMS / EHR. We do not have native integrations with Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Athenahealth, NextGen, eClinicalWorks, or Epic. Most modern PMS/EHRs accept inbound rows via Zapier or a webhook your IT contact wires up once. If your PMS doesn't have an inbound API, the lead lands in the email + sheet path and your scheduler handles the data entry the same way they do for phone calls.

Compliance, plainly stated

Is the healthcare chatbot HIPAA compliant?

The honest answer most chatbot vendors won't give you: a public-facing booking bot is a marketing-layer tool, not a covered entity's data plane. Patients arrive at smilestudio.com and ask about a cleaning. They might mention they've got Delta Dental. They might describe a sore throat. None of that is the same as PHI sitting in your chart system, and treating a website chatbot like it is overstates what we do and confuses your compliance posture.

What Alma does: collects appointment requests and intake answers from a public-facing widget; encrypts data at rest; isolates each workspace's conversations from every other workspace's; gives you data export and deletion on request; routes the lead to where you already keep the chart. What Alma is not, by default: a Business Associate, a chart system, a payer-verified eligibility service, or a substitute for the existing PMS/EHR your practice runs on.

For a practice that needs a Business Associate Agreement on file (most don't, for a marketing-layer bot, but some compliance teams require one), that's an Enterprise-tier conversation. We won't promise specifics on a marketing page; talk to sales and we'll walk through what the regulated setup looks like for your situation. The short version: you configure what questions the bot asks, where the answers route, and how long they're stored. Compliance is a shared responsibility: we make the data plane defensible, and you make the operational decisions about what to collect.

Wire the bot to the tools your front desk already uses.

Sheets, email, SMS via CampaignCNX+, Zapier into your PMS, your own webhook. The lead lands where the work already happens.

Start free → See all integrations

Healthcare FAQ

Healthcare chatbot FAQ: dental, medical, telehealth

Plain answers. Where the answer is "no, but," we say so.

Is Alma HIPAA compliant?

Out of the box, no. Alma is a marketing-layer chatbot for your public-facing website. PHI lives in your PMS/EHR, not in Alma. A Business Associate Agreement is available on the Enterprise tier; talk to sales for the regulated setup. We won't claim "HIPAA compliant" on a marketing page just because we encrypt at rest, because that's not what the term means.

Can it integrate with my PMS or EHR?

Yes via Zapier or an outbound webhook your IT contact wires up. We don't ship native integrations with Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Athenahealth, NextGen, eClinicalWorks, or Epic today. Most modern systems accept inbound rows through Zapier or a webhook; the practices that don't have an API at all use the email + Sheet path.

Does it handle insurance verification?

The bot asks the questions: carrier, plan type, member ID if you want it. It doesn't verify against payer eligibility databases in real time; that's a different category of tool. What you get is a clean intake row your scheduler can run through your normal verification process.

Can patients reschedule or cancel via the bot?

You configure the flow. The Appointment Reminder template captures reschedule and cancel intent and routes those to staff with the patient's preferred new time. The bot doesn't write directly back to the PMS calendar. Your front desk makes the change, same as a phone reschedule.

What about telehealth booking?

Same shape as in-person. The bot captures the patient's preferred time, the visit reason, and the platform they expect to use (your portal, Zoom, etc.), then routes the request to the scheduler. The Symptom Checker template is the most common starting point for telehealth-first practices.

Will the conversations show up in the EHR?

Via webhook setup, yes. Your IT contact wires the outbound webhook to the EHR's intake endpoint, and the conversation lands as a structured note or task. We can give your team the payload schema. For practices without that integration in place, the conversation lives in Alma's lead inbox and gets re-keyed by the scheduler.

How do I install the widget on my practice website?

One line of JavaScript, pasted into your site's header or footer. It works on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and custom builds. If an outside vendor manages the practice site, forward them the snippet and it takes about five minutes. You also choose which pages the widget appears on, so you can run it site-wide or keep it to the services and contact pages. Nothing gets installed on the office computers.

How is patient data stored?

Conversations are isolated per workspace. No other practice's account can see your data. Encrypted at rest, TLS in transit. You get standard data export and deletion on request. You decide retention windows and what fields the bot asks for. The shorter answer: collect only what you need to triage the visit, and route the chart-level data to the system that's actually a chart system.

Related reading

Start free

Your first patient books tomorrow morning.

14-day free trial, no card. Pick the dental, primary care, or specialty template. Edit the visit reasons in your voice. Paste the widget on your practice site. The next time the office is closed, the bot is still working.

Start free → Ask Alma
Trial
14 days, no credit card
Setup
30 minutes for most practices
Templates
10 healthcare flows, ready to edit
Install
One snippet on your website