Diagnostic Lab AI Receptionist India: ₹2/min

Start from your own call register, not from a vendor's example. Pull one week off your EPABX, sort it by reason, and multiply by four. Below is a model for a single-centre lab taking about 40 inbound calls a day, or roughly 1,200 a month. These volumes are an assumption we picked to make the arithmetic legible — they are not a published industry benchmark, and you should replace them with yours.

Dvaarik bills whole minutes, telecom-style. A 50-second call bills as one minute; a 2 minute 10 second call bills as three. The table below is built on billed minutes, not talk time, so the number at the bottom is the number you would actually see.

Add the phone number recharge of ₹2,000 per 30 days, which covers the number and one concurrent line and is auto-debited from credits.

At ₹5,700 across 1,200 handled calls that is ₹4.75 per call answered, or ₹3.08 per call counting voice alone. Every one of those calls is answered on the first ring, at 6am when the fasting patients ring, and at 9pm when someone wants to know if the report is up.

The Care Plan is not a subscription you are sold — it is the stated other half of the founding trade. The ₹40,000 custom build is free in return for (a) the Care Plan at ₹5,000/month for the first three months and (b) an honest testimonial and a short case study once you are live. From month four it is optional, and the founding rate stays locked for six months.

A processing lab with three collection centres feeding it is a different animal: more calls, sharper morning peaks, and the same patient often ringing two different numbers. Model it at roughly 100 calls a day, or 3,000 a month.

At that volume the 7am–10am peak will queue on a single line, so add a second concurrent line at ₹1,500/month.

• Voice: ₹9,600
• Number recharge: ₹2,000
• Second concurrent line: ₹1,500
• Month 4 onward: ₹13,100/month, excluding GST — about ₹4.37 per handled call
• Founding months 1–3: ₹18,100/month, with the ₹5,000 Care Plan debited from the same balance

If you also want outbound report-ready callbacks — say 400 a month at about 40 seconds each — that is 400 more billed minutes, or ₹800. Outbound goes only to your own patients and your own enquiries, inside sensible calling hours, with the agent identifying your lab by name at the start of the call. Never a bought list.

Every figure below was read on the vendor's own page on 21 Jul 2026 and is stored with the sentence it came from. Nothing here is taken from a search snippet, an AI summary, or another vendor's comparison page — each of those produced at least one wrong number when we tested them.

We are not claiming to be cheapest, and we will not. Rates move, and a headline rate is not a price until you know what it is attached to. The claim we will stand behind is about terms: ₹2/min from the very first minute, no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in.

Two cautions worth carrying into your own shortlist. First, several of these rates only exist at the far end of a volume curve — Agni's ₹2/min and HuskyVoice's ₹4/min are both published with volume qualifiers attached. Second, do not source a rate from a competitor's comparison page. Trikon publishes figures for other vendors, and its Bolna number contradicts what Bolna publishes on its own pricing page. Google's AI answers currently repeat the wrong one, because the wrong one is the one that got written down in a quotable shape.

Generic AI receptionist copy assumes every call is "book me an appointment". A diagnostic lab's phone does not work like that. The volume sits in lookups and logistics, and the two behave very differently on cost.

Lookups — short, high-volume, and the reason the maths works. Report status is the heaviest line in the model above, and it is the one lab owners raise first when we ask what their phone is actually doing. Whether it is the heaviest line on your phone is a question your own call register answers in ten minutes. The caller wants one bit of information: is it up yet. Handled well, that is a 40–55 second call and one billed minute. Handled by a human at the reception desk during the morning collection rush, it is the call that makes the person in front of the counter wait.

Logistics — longer, and worth every rupee. Home collection is where the money is, and it is the call most likely to be missed. It needs a slot, a full address with a landmark, the patient's age and gender for the phlebotomist's kit, the doctor's prescription, whether fasting applies, and a confirmation on WhatsApp. That is a two to three minute conversation and it converts into revenue. Missing it at 8:40am because the line is busy is the expensive outcome, not the ₹6 the call costs.

Prep and eligibility — short, and it protects your sample quality. "Khali pet aana hai kya?" for a lipid profile. "Can I take my BP tablet?" "Kitni der lagegi?" Answering these consistently, in the caller's language, at 5:30am, reduces the number of patients who arrive non-fasting and have to be sent home — which is a repeat trip for them and a wasted slot for you.

Price and package enquiries — the ones that leak. Somebody rings round several labs asking what a thyroid profile or a full-body package costs, and books wherever they get a straight answer first. This is the call type where a lab can lose business it never knew it had: a missed call leaves no record of what it was about, so the enquiry never enters your numbers at all.

Dvaarik builds each agent custom against your systems, so the order matters. This is the sequence that pays back fastest for a diagnostic centre.

1. Report status against your LIS or HMIS. The agent takes the lab number or the registered mobile, checks status, and says one of three things: ready, in process with an expected time, or held for a repeat run. It does not read out values — see the next section. When ready, it triggers your existing report delivery to the number on file. In the model above this single workflow is half of all inbound calls.
2. Home-collection booking with slot locking. Slot held while the call is still live, address and landmark captured, prescription requested on WhatsApp, and the booking dropped into the sheet or roster your phlebotomy coordinator already works from. Confirmation and a morning reminder go out on WhatsApp — billed by Meta directly to your own account, with zero markup from us.
3. Rate card and package quoting. The agent reads from your actual price list, including current package pricing, so a Tuesday quote matches a Friday quote. If you run different rates for corporate or camp patients, that logic is built in rather than left to whoever answers.
4. Prep and fasting instructions per test. Keyed to your own SOP, in the caller's language, so a Marathi-speaking patient gets a Marathi answer without anybody transferring the call.
5. Pending-report and sample-recollection callbacks. Haemolysed sample, insufficient quantity, a test that needs a fresh draw. These calls have to happen fast and they are unpleasant to make. The agent makes them to your own patients, explains what is needed, and rebooks the collection — with the escalation path to a human if the patient asks anything clinical.
6. A deposit or full payment link mid-call for home collection. Sent while the caller is still on the line, so a home visit is not made against a booking that evaporates. No commission on collections.
7. Corporate and camp enquiry capture. A corporate health-check or camp enquiry is a bulk contract arriving on the same phone line as a single walk-in, and it is the one most likely to go cold overnight. The agent captures it with the details your sales conversation actually needs and hands it to a human the same hour rather than the next working day.

See the working agent before you decide any of this — the live demo answers on the same stack we would build yours on.

This is the section other vendors leave out, and it is the one a lab owner should read hardest. An AI receptionist for a diagnostic lab has to be built with sharper boundaries than one for a salon.

It does not read out or interpret results. Not a haemoglobin value, not a TSH, not "is this normal". The agent confirms status and routes the report through your existing delivery to the registered number. Any request to interpret goes to your pathologist or the treating physician. We build the refusal in deliberately, and we test it.

It does not handle critical values. Under NABL and ISO 15189 your lab has to define who communicates a critical result, notify the treating clinician immediately, and document that the notification happened — check your own SOP for the exact wording you are accredited against. That call stays human. What we build is the agent that raises it fast — alerting your duty pathologist rather than trying to make the call itself.

It does not release health information to whoever happens to ring. Under the DPDPA 2023 your lab is the Data Fiduciary for every patient record you hold, and the Act gives you no telephone exemption. Status is confirmed against the registered mobile on the record, not to any caller who can supply a name. Where a family member is genuinely collecting on the patient's behalf, that is a rule you define and we implement — not a default we assume.

It does not tell anyone which test to take. "Should I do a full body checkup or just the thyroid?" is a clinical question. The agent quotes what your rate card contains and offers to connect the caller to a human or to the referring doctor.

It does not cold-call. Outbound goes only to your own patients and your own enquiries — report-ready callbacks, recollections, follow-ups on people who already contacted you. Never a purchased list, never outside reasonable hours, and the agent names your lab in the first sentence.

If a vendor cannot tell you in plain language where their agent stops, that is the answer to whether it belongs on a lab's phone line.

There is one offer and it is the same for everyone.

• Custom setup: ₹40,000 list, free for our 10 founding clients. The trade is stated plainly, not in fine print — the free build is in return for the Care Plan at the founding rate for the first three months, and an honest testimonial plus a short case study after go-live.
• Minimum first credit load: ₹10,000. With 18% GST that is billed as ₹11,800 — ₹10,000 of usable credit and ₹1,800 of GST.
• Month-1 debits from that balance: ₹2,000 phone number recharge plus ₹5,000 Care Plan, leaving roughly ₹3,000 for calls — about 1,500 billed minutes of voice.

Be realistic about what that covers. Our single-centre model above burns 1,850 billed minutes a month, so a lab at that volume will top up partway through month one. Top-ups start at ₹500, credits never expire, and at zero balance everything pauses gracefully rather than generating a surprise bill. We would rather you saw that arithmetic here than discovered it in week three.

Where a fuller voice breakdown matters: Bharat Standard is ₹2/min and covers 22 scheduled Indian languages plus English; Studio HD is ₹3/min; Global across 99 languages is ₹4–5/min; Ultra realtime is ₹10/min. ₹2/min is the base rate, and it is permanent — not a founding discount that expires on you.

WhatsApp confirmations and reminders are billed by Meta straight to your own WhatsApp account. We add zero markup, and you can see the charges in your own Meta billing rather than ours.

Four things move the total, and it is worth knowing which way before you commit.

Call length, more than call count. Whole-minute billing means a 61-second call costs the same as a 119-second one. An agent that rambles through a report-status lookup turns a ₹2 call into a ₹6 call across 600 calls a month — a ₹2,400 difference on one line item. This is the single biggest lever, and it is a build decision, not a pricing decision. Ask any vendor how long their agent takes to answer "is my report ready", and time it.

Language mix. If your patients speak Telugu, Marathi, Kannada or Bengali, they are covered inside the ₹2/min Bharat Standard rate. Check this carefully elsewhere — some vendors publish an entry tier that is Hindi and English only, with the wider language set gated behind a higher plan.

Seasonality. Dengue season, a corporate camp week, or a package promotion can double your inbound for a fortnight. On credits that is simply a bigger debit that month and a top-up. On a plan with included minutes it is an overage rate, and overage rates are usually the least attractive number on a vendor's page.

How many calls you are missing today. The honest comparison is not AI against your receptionist's salary — it is AI against the calls nobody answered. If you do not know that number, your telecom provider's missed-call log for last month will tell you in ten minutes, and that log is the only input that matters before you spend anything.

1. Pull last month's inbound call log from your EPABX or telecom provider. Note total calls and total missed.
2. Sort a single representative week by reason — report status, price enquiry, home collection, prep, other — and multiply by four.
3. For each type, round the typical call up to the next whole minute and multiply by the count. That gives billed minutes.
4. Multiply billed minutes by ₹2. Add ₹2,000 for the number. Add ₹1,500 per extra concurrent line if your morning peak needs one.
5. For the first three months as a founding client, add ₹5,000 for the Care Plan. Add 18% GST at the point you load credits.
6. Set that against the missed-call number from step 1, valued at your average realisation per patient. That comparison is the decision.

If you would rather not do the arithmetic, send us the call log. Tell us your problem on WhatsApp at +91 93923 98750 and you will get a plan and a price in a day, built around what your lab's phone actually does. Or ring the live demo agent first and ask it something awkward — that is the only proof worth anything.