# Phone Answering Requirements for Dental Groups > Six requirements a dental group or DSO should put in writing before evaluating phone answering, from one voice across offices to who owns the call records. **Author:** gethelpdesk-ai **Published:** 2026-09-26 **Category:** guides **Tags:** dso, multi-location, operations, evaluation, governance, front-desk **Canonical:** https://gethelpdesk.ai/blog/what-a-dental-group-should-require/ --- ## The Short Version When a dental group evaluates anything that answers its phones, the work usually goes into a list of questions for the vendor. That list is worth having, and there is [a full one for multi-location groups](https://gethelpdesk.ai/blog/ai-receptionist-multi-location-dso/) already. It is also the second document you need. The first is shorter, harder to write, and almost nobody writes it: a statement of what the group requires, full stop, regardless of who supplies it. The difference matters because a requirement you have not written down is a requirement each office will interpret for itself. Twelve offices interpreting the same unstated standard produce twelve standards, and you will not find out which ones diverged until a patient rings two of them in the same week. Here are the six requirements that are worth stating in writing before any vendor conversation starts. ## Requirement One: Every Office Sounds Like One Practice This is the requirement groups assume they have and rarely hold. A patient who rings the Ridgeview office and the downtown office in the same afternoon should hear the same practice answering twice. Not the same voice, necessarily, but the same answers to the same questions: whether you are taking new patients, what happens if they cannot get through, what the office does with an urgent call at eight in the evening. Most groups have never decided what those answers are at group level. Each office arrived at its own by accident, through whoever happened to be on the desk when the question first came up, and the differences have been quietly compounding since. The moment the phone is answered consistently, those differences become visible, and the group discovers it has to make choices it has been deferring for years. That is not a problem with the phone. It is the phone surfacing a problem the group already had. Write down the answers first, and the rollout becomes an implementation rather than an argument. ## Requirement Two: The Business Side Stops Where Clinical Judgement Starts The American Dental Association is precise about what a dental support organisation is and is not. A DSO is an entity that practice owners contract with to manage the administrative, marketing and business sides of a practice. The ADA states plainly that DSOs do not provide patient clinical services, and that all patient clinical services are provided by, and under the direct supervision of, licensed dentists. That line is the single most useful thing a group can borrow when writing requirements for anything that talks to patients. Answering the phone is administrative. Deciding whether a caller with facial swelling needs to be seen tonight is not. The requirement to write down is where your group puts that boundary, in concrete terms, before anybody demonstrates anything to you. In practice that means naming which calls end in a booking, which end in a handover to a named person, and which end with the caller being read the practice's own instruction and then connected to whoever is on call. Those are your clinical protocols expressed as call outcomes. A group that has not written them has not defined the job, and will end up accepting whatever definition arrives in a demo. We have written about what happens when that boundary is left implicit in [who is accountable when AI books it wrong](https://gethelpdesk.ai/blog/who-is-accountable-when-ai-books-it-wrong/). ## Requirement Three: Write Down Who Owns the Record Groups get this wrong in a specific way, and the ADA's own guidance shows why. The ADA's position on ownership of dental records and radiographs is that the dentist owns the physical record of the patient and is the legal guardian of the chart and its complete contents, including radiographs. Patients do not have the right to possess the original, but they do have the right to see, review and inspect it, and to request and obtain a copy. Where it gets complicated is exactly where groups live. The ADA advises that dentists working under office-sharing arrangements, as an employee or an independent contractor, should ensure their original contract clearly specifies who owns the dental records and when the dentist may have access to them. It notes that in a multi-practitioner practice the party responsible for maintaining the original record may depend on the legal structure of the practice, and that unless an agreement says otherwise a professional corporation would likely be considered the owner. On a sale, the ADA advises requiring the purchaser to retain existing records for at least ten years, and to maintain a minor's records for at least five years after they reach the age of majority, which varies by state. Apply that to your phones and the requirement writes itself. Call recordings, transcripts and call summaries are records of patient communication. Your requirements document should state who holds them, which office they belong to, who inside the group may see them, how long they are kept, and what happens to them if a location leaves the group or an associate does. The ADA urges dentists to review business services agreements with a healthcare attorney experienced with them, and this is one of the clauses worth that review rather than a shrug. ## Requirement Four: Local Difference Is Allowed on Purpose The opposite failure to requirement one is a group that standardises everything and breaks the offices that were working. Locations legitimately differ. Hygiene intervals, the length of a new-patient exam, which days the owner dentist does surgical work, whether Saturday mornings exist, how the on-call rota runs when one dentist covers three sites. Flattening those in the name of consistency does not create a standard, it creates a set of workarounds. The requirement to state is which dimensions are central and which are local, decided deliberately rather than by whoever configures the system first. Our rule of thumb is that the patient-facing promise should be central and the operational detail behind it should be local: every office says the same thing about whether it can see you this week, and every office reaches that answer from its own schedule. The sequencing of that decision during a rollout is covered in [taking AI from one office to the whole group](https://gethelpdesk.ai/blog/from-one-office-to-the-whole-group/). ## Requirement Five: One Set of Numbers, Not Twelve If each office reports its phone performance in its own format, the group has data and no information. Require, in writing, that the same four or five measures exist for every location and mean the same thing in each: calls received, calls answered, calls that ended in a booking, calls that were handed to a person, and calls that went unanswered. Then require that they be comparable across locations without anybody assembling a spreadsheet by hand. The point is not the dashboard. It is that a group cannot manage what it cannot compare, and the most common failure at scale is twelve offices each reporting honestly in twelve incompatible ways. If you are not sure what your current baseline even is, [find your real missed-call number](https://gethelpdesk.ai/blog/find-your-real-missed-call-number/) works through getting an honest figure for one location before you try it across all of them. ## Requirement Six: Name Who May Change It, and Who May Not The last requirement is the one that prevents the slow drift back to twelve standards. Somebody has to be able to change what the phone says, because practices change. But if everyone can, the consistency you just bought lasts about a quarter. Write down which changes a location may make on its own, which require a regional or group sign-off, and who at group level owns the patient-facing wording. Make it a named role rather than a committee. Committees are how a small wording change takes six weeks, and six-week changes are how offices start working around the system. ## What This Looks Like as a Document It is shorter than people expect. One page, six headings, written before you speak to anybody. | Requirement | What the document has to state | |---|---| | One voice | The group's agreed answers to the five questions patients ask most | | The clinical boundary | Which calls end in a booking, a handover, or an on-call escalation | | Records | Who holds call records, who may see them, how long they are kept, what happens on exit | | Central versus local | Which dimensions every office shares and which each office sets | | Measurement | The four or five measures every location reports identically | | Authority | Who may change the patient-facing wording, and who may not | Take that into vendor conversations instead of a feature checklist, and the conversations get much shorter. Most of what is being sold will meet or miss the requirements visibly, and you will be comparing against your own standard rather than against whichever product you saw most recently. ## Where We Stand GetHelpdesk.AI routes calls per location for multi-location groups and DSOs, so each office keeps its own schedule, its own rules and its own escalation path while the patient-facing answer stays the group's. Bookings go directly into the practice management system on each location's own appointment types, provider hours, operatory routing and block-outs, and every call comes back as a transcript and a summary. Multi-location practices and DSOs are quoted on number of locations, with no per-minute billing. That matters for a group specifically, because a per-minute model turns the busiest location into the most expensive one and quietly discourages the offices that need the coverage most from using it. What we do not do is decide the six requirements above for you. Those are governance decisions and they belong to the group. ## Key Takeaways - Write what the group requires of itself before writing questions for a vendor. - Consistent phone answering surfaces differences between offices that have been compounding for years. Decide the answers first. - The ADA draws a clear line: support organisations handle the business side, and clinical services remain with licensed dentists. Use that line to define which calls may end in a booking. - Call recordings, transcripts and summaries are patient communication records. State who owns them, who may see them, and what happens on exit. - Decide which dimensions are central and which are local on purpose. Flattening everything creates workarounds, not a standard. - Require the same four or five measures in every location, defined identically. - Name one role that may change the patient-facing wording. Committees cause drift. ## Frequently Asked Questions **Is this different from a vendor evaluation checklist?** Yes, and it comes first. A checklist asks what a product can do. A requirements document states what your group will hold true whoever supplies it. The second one is much harder to write and makes the first one take half as long. **Who should write it?** Whoever owns the patient experience across locations, with the clinical boundary section signed off by a clinician. It is a one-page document, not a project. **What if our offices genuinely need to answer differently?** Then say so in the document. The failure is not difference, it is undeclared difference. An office that answers differently on purpose is fine. An office that answers differently because nobody ever decided is the problem. **Why do call records need a separate clause?** Because they are records of patient communication and they accumulate quickly across a group. The ADA's guidance on record ownership in multi-practitioner settings points at exactly this kind of ambiguity, and it is much cheaper to settle in advance than when a location is leaving. **Does this apply to a two-location practice?** The clinical boundary and the records clause do, immediately. One voice and central versus local start mattering at the point where you can no longer hold both offices in your head, which for most owners is around the third. ## Where to Start Ring two of your own offices this week as a patient would, with the same question, and write down both answers word for word. If they differ in a way you would not have chosen, you have found the first item for the document. [What a dental virtual receptionist must get right](https://gethelpdesk.ai/blog/what-a-dental-virtual-receptionist-must-get-right/) sets out what a good answer sounds like once you have decided what yours should be.