What do closed hours cost a clinic? A simple model
A clinic open 49 hours a week is closed for 119. A model of what those hours cost, built on assumptions you can swap for your own.
On this page
A typical UAE clinic is closed about 70% of the week. We wanted to know what that costs, so we built a simple model. It is only as good as its assumptions, so every one of them is below, and every one is yours to change.
The assumptions
- Open Saturday to Wednesday for a full day, a half day on Thursday, closed Friday: 49 hours a week. That leaves 119 hours a week with nobody on the phone.
- 80 calls a month come in after closing. Fewer than three a night.
- 35% of those callers would book if someone answered.
- AED 500 per consultation.
Saturday to Wednesday full days, a half day Thursday, closed Friday.
What the model says
- 80late calls a month
- 28would book (35%)
- AED 14,000revenue at stake a month
At AED 500 per consultation. Swap in your own numbers.
| Clinic | Late calls a month | Would book (35%) | Revenue at stake a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| A busier clinic | 145 | about 50 | about AED 25,000 |
A busier clinic
- Late calls a month
- 145
- Would book (35%)
- about 50
- Revenue at stake a month
- about AED 25,000
That is before a single treatment plan. For many specialties the first consultation is the start of the revenue, not the whole of it.
Where those patients go
Most of those callers do not leave a message. They call the next clinic. The loss never appears in a report, because a call that was never answered leaves nothing behind but a line in the phone log.
Covering those hours with people means two or three extra hires for nights and Fridays. That is the gap our after-hours agent is built to close: it answers in Arabic and English, books into your calendar or captures the verified request for your team, and hands over a summary in the morning.
Swap in your own numbers
Is 35% too high for someone calling after hours? Is AED 500 right for your specialty? Change them. Put your own call volume, booking share, visit value and opening hours into the ROI calculator, and the model rebuilds around your clinic.
If you want the real numbers instead of a model, the 7-day After-Hours pilot measures them on your own line and ends with an ROI audit.
What the model leaves out
The model only counts consultations. It ignores treatment plans, repeat visits and referrals that follow a good first contact. It also ignores the daytime calls that ring out while the desk is busy, which for many clinics are as many again. And it says nothing about cost, on purpose. The question here is simply what doing nothing costs. Whether a fix is worth it is a conversation for your own numbers, on a demo call.
How to make the model accurate
Use your phone log for the call count, not a guess. Use the booking share your front desk sees in the daytime, then lower it for evening calls if you think late callers are less serious. Use the average first-visit value for your specialty, not the average treatment value. If the result still looks large with cautious inputs, the gap is real. If it looks small, you have learned something useful too, and it cost you ten minutes.
Hear what this sounds like on a real line.
An Arabic call, start to finish, with the English translation beside it.
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Start with a 7-day pilot.
Seven nights on your after-hours line. No IT disruption, and an ROI audit at the end.
- Period
- 7 days
- Pilot
- After-Hours
- Covers
- Nights, weekends, holidays
- Ends with
- ROI audit
# 7-day pilot period period: 7 days pilot: After-Hours # voice: nights, weekends, holidays timeline: day 0 setup no IT project day 1-7 live AI disclosed on every call day 8 roi audit answered · captured · recovered rules: disclosure, human on request, 998, no medical advice