What happens to patient enquiries when the practice is closed

Separate the administrative question from the clinical one

This is the whole job, and it has to be done before any software is involved. "Do you treat children", "is parking available", "do I need a referral for a dermatology appointment", "what are your Saturday hours" are administrative: they have published answers and answering them at eleven at night is a service. "Is this mole worrying", "should I stop taking this", "is this amount of bleeding normal" are clinical, and no automated system should go near them - not because the software cannot produce a fluent reply, but because a fluent wrong reply at eleven at night is the worst possible outcome for the patient and the practice.

What an assistant must do when it reaches the line

Stop, say plainly that this needs a clinician, and say how to reach one - including, where the practice wants it, the emergency route. The failure mode to test for is not refusal; it is a system that hedges its way into an answer because refusing felt unhelpful. Ask any vendor to show you a transcript where their assistant was pushed three times on a clinical question, and read what it did on the third attempt rather than the first.

The privacy question that comes before the clever one

A patient who types their name, their date of birth and their symptom into a chat window has created a record, and where that record lives is a decision the practice has to make deliberately rather than discover later. Ask where conversations are stored, for how long, who inside the vendor can read them, what happens to them on account closure, and whether hosting can be placed in the jurisdiction your regulator expects. Any vendor unwilling to put those five answers in writing has answered the question.

What the log of unanswered questions is actually worth

More than the automation, in the first month. The list of questions the assistant could not answer from the website is a precise inventory of what your website never said - and it is almost always full of administrative things the front desk has been repeating by telephone for years. Practices routinely find that the project paid for itself as a content audit before it saved a single call.