OpenPhone vs. KrispCall for a Multi-Clinic Physical Therapy Group

A scheduling text, a call about an insurance authorization, a message confirming an appointment, all of these can touch information covered under HIPAA once they reference a specific patient's care. Before rolling out either platform, ask directly whether the vendor will sign a business associate agreement covering how patient information is handled in calls, texts, and any stored recordings or transcripts, and get that answer in writing rather than assuming either tool is automatically compliant.

This is one of the clearer cases in this whole comparison where the right move is to confirm the specific commitment during a sales conversation with each vendor rather than relying on general marketing claims about security.

A single-location practice can often get by with one line and one front desk person. A multi-clinic group needs each location to have its own reachable number, while still giving a scheduling coordinator or practice manager visibility across all of them, useful when one clinic's front desk is short-staffed and a call needs to be picked up by someone covering from another location.

OpenPhone's shared-inbox model works well here if your clinic count is small; KrispCall's stronger call routing and queuing tools become more useful as you add locations and need calls to move to whoever is actually available, not just ring at one empty desk.

Check these points before you choose a platform:

• Ask each vendor directly whether it will sign a business associate agreement, and get the answer in writing rather than relying on marketing claims.
• Give each clinic its own reachable number while letting a scheduling coordinator or practice manager see activity across all locations.
• Keep appointment reminders and scheduling texts inside the practice's compliant system, not a scheduler's personal phone.
• Route overflow calls from a short-staffed clinic to a coordinator or another clinic's front desk instead of letting them go unanswered.

Appointment reminder texts reduce no-shows, but every reminder that references a specific therapy appointment is a message that should be handled the way any other patient communication is: through the practice's compliant system, not a scheduler's personal phone. Build a simple reminder cadence, one text a day or two ahead and, where a patient prefers it, a call the morning of, and keep that consistent across every clinic rather than leaving it to each front desk's own habits.

A shared system also lets you see, across clinics, which reminder approach is actually cutting down on no-shows and which isn't, instead of guessing based on any single location's experience.

Insurance authorization and benefits verification calls are a substantial, recurring part of front desk work at any multi-clinic practice, and they tend to get worse, not better, as you add locations, since each one is calling different payers on its own schedule. A practice manager overseeing that work across several clinics is a real operations role; general and operations managers nationally earn a median wage around $105,000¹, which is a reasonable way to think about the cost of that coordination role when deciding how much phone system support to invest in for it.

A shared call log across clinics helps a practice manager spot which locations are spending the most time on hold with payers, which is useful information when deciding where to add staff.

Not every multi-clinic group needs full centralization. A newer clinic still building its patient base, or one in a location far enough from the others that staff rarely cover across sites, may be better served keeping more local control over its own scheduling and phone line, with the practice manager checking in periodically rather than managing every call in real time.

Revisit this decision as the group grows. A setup that made sense with three clinics can start to strain once you're running six or seven, simply because the volume of calls, texts, and coverage gaps grows faster than most practices expect when they're only running one or two locations. Revisiting the setup once a year, rather than only when something breaks, tends to catch that shift earlier and keeps front desk staff from feeling like the system is working against them.