Alma
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For healthcare

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

Alma is built for dental practices, primary care offices, specialty clinics, and telehealth and aesthetic providers. A patient may visit your website at 9pm wanting a cleaning, a same-week sick visit, or a dermatology consult. Alma's chatbot asks for the visit reason, preferred time, and insurance details, then sends the request to the practice management system (PMS) or electronic health record (EHR) your front desk already uses. Patients who prefer to call can still phone the office, and the rest can book on their own.

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

Who runs it

Built for small and midsize practices that do not have an IT team: dental primary care specialty clinics telehealth aesthetic. Hospital systems with HIPAA-bound patient data flows are not the intended customer.

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 · AN EXAMPLE PRACTICE

Robert Martinez runs Smile Studio, and the bot runs on smilestudio.com.

Smile Studio is a fictional practice we use as an example. In the example, Robert is a dentist with a four-chair practice, two hygienists, and one front-desk lead. The phone often rings during cleanings, and voicemail messages build up by lunch. He did not want a live-chat tool that sends alerts to staff on Slack. He wanted a chatbot that completes the conversation, asks the patient to choose a visit type and a time window, and passes the request to the front desk as a complete intake record.

The bot asks four questions: cleaning, checkup, whitening, or something else? · new patient or established? · insurance carrier (or self-pay)? · ASAP or routine, and what time of day? After that, it asks for a phone number so the office can confirm. In a conversation that came in an hour ago, a patient asked about a cleaning, chose April 30 at 3pm, and said she had Delta Dental. The front desk confirms the next morning by phone, as the practice always has, but the appointment request is already written down.

  • Runs on smilestudio.com with one snippet of code and no plugin
  • Captured the "Apr 30, 3pm cleaning" lead overnight while the office was closed
  • The front desk receives an email, and the lead's details appear in the Alma inbox
  • The same flow (the series of questions the bot asks) also handles checkups, whitening consults, and pediatric visits
  • No protected health information (PHI) is stored in Alma. The patient chart stays in the practice's PMS

Build the Smile Studio bot for your practice.

Choose the dental, primary care, or specialty template and adjust the visit reasons. Then paste the widget (the chat window that appears on your website) into your site. Your first patient booking can arrive overnight.

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Example conversations from 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 includes ten starter flows written by people who have actually run a front desk. Choose the one that fits your practice. For example, a dental practice might start with the Dental Office Bot, a primary care office with appointment scheduling and patient intake, and a telehealth provider with the Symptom Checker. You can then edit the visit reasons, the intake fields, and where each request is sent. The template library is included on every paid tier, with no extra charge for a "healthcare add-on."

  • 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 and 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.

Choose a template, edit the visit reasons, and go live before lunch.

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

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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 works as an intake form on your public marketing website. The patient chart, the official schedule (the schedule of record), and insurance claims stay in the systems you already use. Alma completes the conversation, records the patient's answers as a lead, and sends that lead to the place your front desk already works. Most practices use one of these three setups:

  • Lead → email to the front desk: one new-lead email for each request, with the patient's answers
  • Lead → SMS confirmation via CampaignCNX+. The patient gets a text message in 30 seconds: "Got your request for Apr 30 3pm. We'll confirm by 9am tomorrow."
  • Symptom-checker urgent flag → email to practice manager: the practice manager sees urgent requests the same day

To add the appointment to the schedule of record, you connect Alma to the PMS or EHR through Zapier (a service that passes information between apps) or, on the Agency plan and up, a webhook (an automatic message Alma sends to another system when a conversation ends). We do not have native integrations with Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Athenahealth, NextGen, eClinicalWorks, or Epic. Most modern systems accept new records through Zapier or a webhook that your IT contact sets up once. If your PMS cannot accept records from outside software, the lead arrives by email and in the Alma lead inbox, and your scheduler enters it the same way they do for phone calls.

Compliance, plainly stated

Is the healthcare chatbot HIPAA compliant?

A booking bot on a public website is a marketing tool. It is not the system a covered entity uses to hold its patient data. Patients visit smilestudio.com and ask about a cleaning, and they might mention that they have Delta Dental or describe a sore throat. None of that is the same as PHI stored in your chart system. Treating a website chatbot as if it were a chart system overstates what we do and makes your compliance position less clear.

Alma collects appointment requests and intake answers through a widget on your public website. It encrypts data at rest (while the data is stored), keeps each workspace's conversations separate from every other workspace's, provides data export and deletion on request, and sends the lead to where you already keep the chart. By default, Alma is not a Business Associate, a chart system, a service that verifies insurance eligibility with payers, or a substitute for the PMS or EHR your practice already runs on.

Some practices need a Business Associate Agreement on file. Most do not need one for a marketing bot, but some compliance teams require one, and that is handled as part of an Enterprise-tier discussion. We will not promise specifics on a marketing page. Please talk to sales, and we will explain what the regulated setup looks like for your situation. You configure which questions the bot asks, where the answers are sent, and how long they are stored. Compliance is a shared responsibility: we are responsible for how Alma stores and protects the data, and you decide what information to collect.

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

You can send each lead to email, to a text message through CampaignCNX+, to your PMS through Zapier, or, on the Agency plan and up, to your own webhook. The lead arrives where your team already works.

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Healthcare FAQ

Healthcare chatbot FAQ: dental, medical, telehealth

These answers are direct. Where the answer is "no, but," we say so.

Is Alma HIPAA compliant?

Not by default. Alma is a marketing chatbot for your public website. PHI stays in your PMS or EHR, not in Alma. A Business Associate Agreement is available on the Enterprise tier, so please talk to sales about the regulated setup. We will not claim "HIPAA compliant" on a marketing page just because we encrypt data at rest, because that is not what the term means.

Can it integrate with my PMS or EHR?

Yes, through Zapier, or through a webhook (Agency plan and up) that your IT contact sets up. We do not offer native integrations with Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Athenahealth, NextGen, eClinicalWorks, or Epic today. Most modern systems accept new records through Zapier or a webhook. Practices whose systems cannot accept outside records at all use the new-lead email instead.

Does it handle insurance verification?

The bot asks the insurance questions: carrier, plan type, and member ID if you want it. It does not check eligibility with insurance payers in real time, because that requires a different kind of tool. You receive a complete intake record that your scheduler can run through your normal verification process.

Can patients reschedule or cancel via the bot?

You decide how the flow works. The Appointment Reminder template records requests to reschedule or cancel and sends them to staff with the patient's preferred new time. The bot does not change the PMS calendar directly. Your front desk makes the change, just as it would for a reschedule by phone.

What about telehealth booking?

It works the same way as in-person booking. The bot records the patient's preferred time, the visit reason, and the platform they expect to use (your portal, Zoom, or another service), then sends the request to the scheduler. The Symptom Checker template is the most common starting point for practices that mainly offer telehealth.

Will the conversations show up in the EHR?

Yes, with a webhook setup on the Agency plan and up. Your IT contact connects the webhook to the EHR's intake endpoint (the address that receives new records), and the conversation arrives as a structured note or task. We can give your team the payload schema, which describes the data the webhook sends. For practices without that connection, the conversation stays in Alma's lead inbox, and the scheduler enters it into the EHR by hand.

How do I install the widget on my practice website?

You paste one line of JavaScript code into your site's header or footer. It works on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and custom-built sites. If an outside vendor manages the practice site, forward them the snippet, and the work takes about five minutes. You also choose which pages the widget appears on, so you can show it across the whole site or only on the services and contact pages. Nothing is installed on the office computers.

How is patient data stored?

Conversations are kept separate for each workspace, and no other practice's account can see your data. Data is encrypted at rest (while stored) and protected by TLS in transit (an encrypted connection while the data travels online). You get standard data export and deletion on request. You decide how long data is kept and which fields the bot asks for. Our advice is to collect only what you need to triage the visit, and to send chart-level details to your actual chart system.

Related reading

Start free

Your first patient could book by tomorrow morning.

The 14-day free trial does not require a credit card. Choose the dental, primary care, or specialty template, edit the visit reasons in your own words, and paste the widget on your practice site. The next time the office is closed, the bot will still take requests from patients.

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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