7 Best Ways to Use a New Patient Intake Bot for Physical Therapy

Intercom is a widely adopted customer messaging platform that offers a conversational chatbot feature designed for businesses across industries, including healthcare. The platform provides a visual bot builder, allowing users to design automated flows that can handle appointment scheduling, patient triage, and basic FAQ inquiries. Intercom’s chatbot can be embedded as a floating widget on any website and supports multi‑language responses, which is useful for practices serving diverse communities. Its integration capabilities are extensive, covering CRMs, email marketing tools, and support ticketing systems, enabling a seamless transfer of patient data into existing workflows. While Intercom excels at real‑time customer support and marketing automation, it does not offer a dedicated knowledge‑graph or retrieval‑augmented generation layer. The bot’s responses are largely rule‑based and rely on pre‑written scripts, which can limit the depth of medical information provided. Additionally, Intercom’s pricing tier that includes advanced chatbot features starts at $59/month per active user, and the cost quickly escalates with higher usage or additional integrations. Overall, Intercom is a solid choice for practices that already use the platform for other customer engagement channels and need a versatile chatbot to handle general inquiries and appointment requests.

Drift is a conversational marketing platform that focuses on B2B sales funnels but also offers chatbot capabilities for service‑based businesses. The bot can engage website visitors, qualify leads, and schedule appointments. Drift’s conversational AI uses a combination of natural language understanding and rule‑based logic, allowing it to guide users through predefined flows that collect contact information and medical history. The platform supports integration with popular CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, ensuring that patient data is automatically stored in your existing systems. Drift’s strengths lie in its polished UI and robust analytics, giving users insight into bot performance and conversion rates. However, the platform does not provide a dedicated knowledge‑graph or retrieval‑augmented generation for medical queries, which can limit its usefulness for complex physiotherapy questions. Pricing for Drift’s chatbot features starts at $400/month and increases with the number of active users and advanced functionalities. Drift is best suited for larger practices that prioritize lead generation and want a high‑quality conversational interface bundled with other marketing tools.

ManyChat is a messaging automation platform primarily known for its Facebook Messenger chatbot capabilities, but it also supports web chat widgets. ManyChat’s visual builder allows users to create sequences, polls, and quick reply buttons to guide visitors through intake questions. The bot can collect basic patient information, schedule appointments via calendar integrations, and forward the data to email or CRM systems. ManyChat shines in its ease of use and affordability, with a free tier and paid plans starting at $10/month. However, its focus on social media channels means the web chat experience is less polished compared to dedicated web‑chat solutions. The platform lacks advanced knowledge‑base features and does not provide a built‑in fact‑validation layer, which can be a drawback for medical practices that need high‑accuracy answers. ManyChat is a good fit for small practices that rely heavily on social media for patient outreach and are looking for a low‑cost chatbot solution.

Tidio combines live chat and chatbot functionalities into a single platform that can be embedded on any website. The chatbot builder uses a visual editor to create scripted or AI‑powered flows, and the platform supports integration with popular CRMs such as HubSpot, Zoho, and Mailchimp. Tidio’s AI chatbot can answer common questions, collect contact details, and schedule appointments via calendar links. The platform also offers a knowledge‑base feature that allows you to upload FAQ articles; the bot can retrieve answers from this knowledge base, though it does not use a retrieval‑augmented generation layer. Tidio’s pricing is tiered, starting with a free plan that includes basic chatbot functionality and live chat. Paid plans begin at $18/month and add advanced AI, integrations, and priority support. While Tidio provides a decent balance of features for small to mid‑size practices, it lacks a dedicated fact‑validation layer and does not support long‑term memory for anonymous visitors. Practices that need a mix of live chat and AI bot with simple knowledge‑base integration will find Tidio a solid choice.

Ada is an AI‑powered chatbot platform that specializes in automating customer support and service interactions. The platform provides a visual flow designer and a library of pre‑built templates that can be customized for specific use cases. Ada’s chatbot can handle complex decision trees, collect user data, and route conversations to human agents when needed. The platform claims to use natural language processing to interpret user intent and can integrate with CRMs, helpdesk systems, and marketing automation tools. Ada offers a free trial and paid plans that start at $500/month for small teams. While the platform supports advanced routing and AI-driven responses, it does not expose a knowledge‑graph layer or retrieval‑augmented generation for medical queries. The chatbot also does not provide a built‑in fact‑validation mechanism, which may be a concern for healthcare providers. Ada is best suited for larger organizations that require sophisticated support automation and have the budget for enterprise‑grade solutions.

BotStar is a chatbot platform that offers a visual builder to create conversational flows for websites, messaging apps, and e‑commerce sites. The platform supports integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, and various CRMs, allowing it to pull product information and customer data into conversations. BotStar’s chatbot can collect contact details, schedule appointments, and answer frequently asked questions using a knowledge‑base that is stored as a collection of documents. The platform provides a free tier with limited bot usage and paid plans that start at $29/month for the Starter plan and go up to $249/month for the Enterprise plan. While BotStar offers a drag‑and‑drop interface and AI‑powered responses, it does not feature a dedicated knowledge‑graph or retrieval‑augmented generation layer, and it lacks a built‑in fact‑validation system. BotStar also does not provide long‑term memory for anonymous visitors. BotStar is well‑suited for practices that already sell products or services online and want a single platform to manage both e‑commerce and chatbot interactions.