Articles · applied AI from Saudi Arabia
30 of Every 100 Patient Calls Went Unanswered
How many calls to a hospital never reach a person? Few organisations publish the number. Two sources do.
Most hospitals can tell you how many appointments they booked. Far fewer publish how many calls never reached a person. Two sources do, and they point the same way.
The government count
In January 2025, the Inspector General of the US Department of Veterans Affairs published a review of the clinical call centre serving the Atlanta region of the Veterans Health Administration (report 23-01609-14). Over a three-month period, 30% of callers hung up before reaching anyone. The VHA's own standard is 5%. Only 22% of answered calls were picked up within 30 seconds, against a standard of 80%.
The cause was staffing. The Inspector General estimated the centre needed 53 staff to handle about 135,600 calls and averaged 29. Local reporting on the review adds that when staff prioritised mental-health calls, other calls went unanswered. That is the "busy with something else" problem, in a real health system.
Other counts
In February 2023, the Isle of Man's Health Minister published call data for six GP practices. Three had more than 40% of calls go unanswered. The worst, Ramsey Group Practice, lost almost 45% of about 75,000 calls between June and December 2022. The best, Laxey, lost fewer than one in five.
In October 2025, Clarus, a call-management vendor, reported that roughly one in four patient calls to the clinics of eight large Miami health systems was not answered or returned within one business day. The test was about 2,000 calls over eight weeks.
Invoca, a call-analytics company, published 2021 data from its own platform. Healthcare providers left 29% of calls unanswered on average. Hospital networks were at 36%, dental practices 37%, primary care 24%, senior care 17%. The page does not state its sample size. DentalBase, an AI receptionist vendor, puts dental practices at 38%, but its page does not say where that figure comes from. I treat it as a claim, not a measurement.
My read: a quiet phone is not a rare event. It is a rate.
What this does not prove
An unanswered call is not always a lost booking. Invoca's own worked example assumes 19% of calls are appointment opportunities and 43% of those convert. On those assumptions, 29,000 unanswered calls out of 100,000 become about 2,400 lost appointments, not 29,000.
The counts also measure different things: hung up, unanswered, or not returned within a day. Most come from vendors with something to sell. Atlanta and the Isle of Man are public counts, but of a veterans' call centre and GP surgeries, not hospitals. I found no figure for Saudi Arabia, and none that splits unanswered calls into after-hours and too-busy.
What the sources do agree on is the size: from about one in four calls to more than four in ten. On the Isle of Man, the worst practice lost more than double what the best one did. That gap is why your own number matters.
The question for Saudi hospitals
I build AI receptionists for hotels and hospitals in Saudi Arabia, so I read these numbers with an interest. Before buying anything, I would ask the phone system for two figures for one month: calls received, and calls answered, by hour. That gives you your own rate, and shows whether the gap is at night or at midday.
That number is worth more than any I have quoted here.
Sources: VA Office of Inspector General, report 23-01609-14, January 2025; WSB-TV, 31 January 2025, on the report; Invoca, "The Cost of Missed Appointment Calls for Healthcare Marketers" (2021 platform data); Manx Radio, 1 February 2023, on Isle of Man GP call data; Clarus press release, 22 October 2025, Miami Digital Front Door Index; DentalBase, "38 percent of calls go unanswered".