The question practice managers ask after a Jackie demo is rarely whether the technology works. The Park Street and Greensand deployment data has settled that part. The real question is operational, and it usually arrives in this shape: what does this actually look like in the building on a Tuesday morning. Who answers which calls. What does the reception team do differently. What changes about the rota, the handovers, and the way the day runs.
This post answers that question directly. It covers how Jackie is configured to work alongside an existing reception team, which calls route where, what the team experiences in the first week, the first month, and the first quarter, and what the practical workload shift looks like once the deployment is stable. It is written for practice managers who are protective of their reception teams and want to know exactly what changes day-to-day before they commit to a pilot.
It is not a case for replacement. The deployment model that has produced the strongest live results does not replace anyone. The reception teams at the live sites are doing more useful work after the deployment than before it, and the workload shift is the point of the post.
The Deployment Principle: Concurrent Capacity Alongside the Team
The configuration model at every live Jackie site follows the same principle. Jackie is concurrent capacity on the phone channel sitting alongside the reception team, not above it, not in place of it, and not in competition with it. The reception team continues to work the way it has always worked. Jackie answers calls in parallel with the team, absorbing the routine volume that was previously bottlenecking the queue.
This matters because it sets what the team experiences when the deployment goes live. In a substitute model, the team would expect their work to shrink. In the alongside model, the opposite happens. The urgent and complex work expands into the space the routine volume used to occupy. The shift is from running flat on phones for two hours every morning to doing the rest of the job properly.
The reception team’s job description is unchanged. The composition of their day is what changes. What they spent the 8am window doing previously, batch-processing routine calls under queue pressure, is what Jackie spends the 8am window doing. What the team is doing in that window instead is the work that has been getting deferred for years.
Before getting to which calls route where, it is worth being specific about the configuration choices the practice makes during setup, because those choices shape everything that follows.
What the Practice Decides During Setup
The setup phase takes one to two weeks and is practice-specific. Jackie is not deployed with generic NHS settings. The practice decides which call types Jackie handles end-to-end, which call types route to the reception team with a structured summary, and which call types route immediately to clinical staff or urgent care pathways.
The decisions made during setup typically cover the following.
Which routine call types Jackie completes end-to-end. At most live sites this includes appointment requests, sick note and fit note requests, appointment cancellations, prescription queries, Pharmacy First navigation, and routine admin queries. The practice’s specific eligibility rules are configured into Jackie’s decision logic, so sick note rules at Park Street follow Park Street’s protocols, not a generic NHS template.
Which call types route to reception with a structured summary. Sensitive calls, calls from regular patients with relationship continuity, complex multi-issue calls, and calls where the patient asks for a human at any point all route to reception with a complete summary of what the patient has said so far. The receptionist picks up the call with context, not from scratch.
Which call types route immediately to clinical staff. Red flag symptoms are flagged in real time during the conversation and routed to a clinician or urgent care pathway according to the practice’s safety protocols. This routing is not at the receptionist’s discretion. It is built into Jackie’s clinical safety configuration and audited as part of the DCB0129 risk management file.
These configuration choices are reviewed with the practice manager and signed off before Jackie goes live. They can be adjusted as the deployment matures and the team identifies call patterns that should route differently.
How the Workload Divides on a Typical Day
The most useful way to picture the workload split is to walk through a typical 8am window at a practice running Jackie.
At 8am the phones open. Inbound calls arrive in the same pattern they always have, concentrated in the first two hours. Every call is answered the moment it arrives. There is no queue and no hold time, because Jackie holds every conversation concurrently.
A patient calling for a sick note speaks to Jackie. Jackie verifies identity, checks whether the current note has expired, applies the practice’s eligibility rules, and either processes the request or routes the patient to self-certification with an SMS link. The call completes without a receptionist being involved.
A patient calling to cancel an appointment speaks to Jackie. Jackie verifies identity, processes the cancellation directly in EMIS, frees the slot in real time, and confirms the cancellation with the patient. The call completes without a receptionist being involved.
A patient calling about a complex query involving multiple family members speaks to Jackie. The conversation surfaces the complexity quickly. Jackie routes the call to the reception team with a structured summary of what the patient has said so far. The receptionist picks up the call with full context. The conversation that follows is the conversation that actually requires a human.
A patient calling with chest pain or another red flag symptom speaks to Jackie. The symptom is identified in real time. The call is routed immediately to a clinician or to 999 according to the practice’s safety protocols. The reception team is notified that the routing has happened.
A regular patient who recognises the reception team and prefers to speak to them by name asks for a human at the start of the call. Jackie routes the call to reception without delay. The relationship-based interaction happens between the patient and the receptionist, with no AI intermediation.
Across the morning, the reception team is handling a smaller volume of calls, but the calls they are handling are the ones that benefit most from their attention. The high-volume routine workload that was previously consuming the entire morning is being absorbed in parallel by Jackie.
What the Reception Team Experiences in the First Week
The first week is the adjustment period, and the experience is reasonably consistent across the live sites.
The first thing the team notices is the absence of the 8am queue building behind them. The phones are still ringing, but the calls are being answered concurrently rather than stacking. The pressure to hurry off one call to get to the next one drops away. The team finds they have time to actually finish the conversations they are having.
The second thing the team notices is the structured summary that arrives with every routed call. The receptionist picking up a call that Jackie has routed sees what the patient has already said, what has already been verified, and what the patient is asking for. The handover quality is higher than a typical cold transfer between team members, because the summary is structured rather than verbal.
The third thing the team notices is the recovery of time for the other parts of the job. Prescription processing, scanning, document handling, and the front-desk work for patients walking into the building all expand into the time the routine call volume used to occupy. The team is busier on those tasks than before, because the time is now actually available to do them.
The week-one feedback from receptionists at Greensand specifically referenced this point. Practice staff welcomed the change because automating the repetitive administrative tasks freed receptionists to focus on more complex patient needs and provide a more personal level of support where it mattered most.
What Changes Over the First Month
By the end of the first month, the workload composition has stabilised and the team’s experience shifts from adjustment to operational pattern.
The reception team is now anticipating which calls Jackie will handle and which will route to them. The mental model becomes routine: Jackie absorbs the volume, the team handles the calls that benefit from a human. The rota does not need to change. The team composition does not need to change. What changes is the throughput on the other categories of work the team is responsible for.
QOF activity, outbound patient contact, care navigation, and follow-up work all expand into the space. At Park Street, the 51 hours of reception time recovered across the first eight weeks was redirected to exactly this category of work. The headcount conversation never came up at the partners’ meeting. The conversation that came up was whether the team should now take on additional outbound campaigns that the practice had previously deferred for capacity reasons.
The patient feedback by the end of the first month also stabilises into a recognisable pattern. The complaints about long phone queues drop sharply, because the queues are not building. The feedback that comes in from the AI calls themselves is mostly about speed of answer and conversation quality. The Park Street SMS feedback specifically flagged “more polite than the receptionist” and “reduced my anxiety because I did not have to wait.” These were not isolated comments. They were the dominant pattern.
What the Practice Looks Like at the End of the First Quarter
By the end of the first quarter, the deployment is fully stable and the practice is operating in a new equilibrium.
The reception team is the same team. The rota is the same rota. The phones are answered the same way they were before, from the patient’s perspective. What has changed is the composition of the work being done inside the building.
The morning call surge that used to define the day is no longer the operational centre of gravity. The team is engaged in work that uses their judgement rather than their throughput. The high-value tasks that were previously squeezed by call volume are now happening consistently. QOF completion rates can be measured more reliably, because the team is reaching the patients they need to reach. Outbound campaigns can run in parallel with inbound demand, because the inbound queue is no longer absorbing the team’s entire morning.
The practice manager has a different problem set. The issues that come across the desk are no longer about queue length or call abandonment. They are about how to use the recovered capacity, which patient populations to focus on for proactive contact, and which deferred initiatives the team can now realistically deliver.
This is the shape of the deployment at the end of the first quarter at the live sites. It is not a transformation story. It is a workload composition story, and the change is in what the team has time to do well.
How the Pilot Lets the Practice See This Before Committing
The four-week free pilot model is designed to produce exactly this picture before any contract conversation takes place. The pilot runs on the practice’s existing telephony with no setup fee and no hardware. The practice ends the four weeks with live data from its own patient list: time recovered, call completion rate, patient feedback, safety event rate, and the operational pattern the team has actually experienced.
Most practices that move from pilot to paid contract make the decision on that data, not on a sales pitch. The Park Street and Greensand deployments both started as four-week pilots and converted on the strength of the live numbers.
If you want to see how Jackie works alongside a live reception team before deciding whether to pilot, the 20-minute demo uses real call recordings from the deployed sites. The pilot itself begins with the one-to-two week setup process described above, and the practice manager signs off on every configuration choice before the system goes live.
Book a 20-minute demo at auxilis.ai
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Jackie replace any role on the reception team?
No. At every live site, the reception team has remained fully employed throughout the deployment. Jackie operates as concurrent capacity sitting alongside the team. The composition of the team’s day changes because the routine call volume is absorbed in parallel, but the headcount and the job descriptions do not change.
Which calls does Jackie handle and which route to reception?
The split is configured during setup and signed off by the practice manager. Jackie typically handles routine appointment requests, sick note requests, appointment cancellations, prescription queries, Pharmacy First navigation, and general admin queries end-to-end. Calls that involve sensitive content, complex multi-issue queries, regular patients asking for a named receptionist, or any call where the patient asks for a human at any point are routed to the reception team with a structured summary of the conversation so far.
What happens when Jackie routes a call to the reception team?
The receptionist who picks up the routed call sees a structured summary of what the patient has already said, what has been verified, and what the patient is asking for. The handover is higher quality than a typical cold transfer between team members, because the summary is structured rather than verbal.
What does the setup process look like in practice?
Setup takes one to two weeks. The work includes telephony integration, configuration of the practice’s specific protocols (sick note rules, appointment eligibility, escalation pathways), clinical safety sign-off, and review of the routing logic with the practice manager. No new phone number is issued and no hardware is installed. Patients continue to call the same number they have always called.
What does the reception team experience in the first week?
The first thing the team notices is that the 8am queue stops building. The phones still ring, but the calls are being answered concurrently rather than stacking up. The team finds they have time to finish the conversations they are having and that the work on the other parts of the job, prescriptions, scanning, front-desk presence, expands into the time previously consumed by call volume.
Does Jackie work for patients who are uncomfortable with technology?
Patient calls behave the same way from the patient’s perspective. The number is the same. The conversation is a normal phone conversation. There is no app, no menu, and no form. Live deployment data, including feedback from over-65 patients tracked specifically at Park Street, shows complaint rates from this group going down rather than up after the deployment, primarily because the phone is answered immediately and the conversation feels normal.
Can the reception team override Jackie’s routing decisions?
Yes. The practice manager can adjust the routing configuration at any point during the deployment based on patterns the team is observing. If certain call types are routing in ways the team would change, the configuration is updated. The system is configured to the practice’s preferences, not the other way around.