The challenge: A 35-minute message lag between patient and GP

Bayside Medical Group runs eight GP clinics across Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs. After-hours calls are a constant: patients ringing about symptoms, medication queries, and requests for urgent home visits. Previously, these calls were routed to an outsourced after-hours answering service that took messages and passed them to the on-call GP.
The problem was the lag. Messages often took 30-45 minutes to reach the GP, and the information captured by the answering service was frequently incomplete. Missing details meant the GP had to call the patient back just to understand the issue before deciding on a course of action.
The answering service cost $14,000 AUD per month. The quality of data it provided was poor. And patients were frustrated by the wait.

The solution: Replacing the answering service entirely

Thrumble AI replaced the outsourced answering service entirely. After hours, all inbound calls across the eight clinics route to Thrumble, which handles triage using a GP-approved clinical decision framework.
The AI speaks in a natural Australian English voice and follows a structured triage flow: capturing the patient's details, asking about symptoms using standardised clinical questions, assessing urgency, and either booking a home visit with the on-call GP, advising the patient to attend the emergency department, or logging the call for a next-day follow-up.
For home visit requests, the AI captures the patient's address, confirms access details, and dispatches the visit request directly to the on-call GP's mobile with a full structured summary. No middleman. No message lag.

The results: The numbers speak for themselves

• 2,400 after-hours calls handled per quarter across all 8 clinics.

• Average time from patient call to GP notification: 2 minutes 15 seconds, down from 35 minutes with the previous answering service. A 70% reduction in response time.

• 89% of calls fully resolved by the AI (triage completed, action determined, patient informed) without any human involvement.

• 340+ home visits dispatched directly to on-call GPs with complete patient summaries, compared to the previous process where 40% of dispatches required a callback to gather missing information.

• Zero incomplete triage records. Every call produces a structured log with symptoms, urgency classification, and recommended action.

The commercial impact: $168K saved. Unnecessary ED referrals down 22%.

Bayside cancelled its outsourced answering service contract, saving $168,000 AUD per year.
The improvement in triage data quality has reduced unnecessary ED referrals by an estimated 22%, saving patients time and reducing downstream costs for the practice.
Fully deployed across all 8 clinics in 4 weeks.

From 35-minute message lag to 2-minute GP notification. $168K saved. 8 clinics, zero night staff.