Questions Belgian dental practices ask about Tilcao
Tilcao answers the phone and WhatsApp messages for dental practices in Belgium, in Dutch, French and English. It identifies the patient, checks what is genuinely free in the diary, books, moves and cancels appointments in the practice’s own systems, and answers questions about the practice from a knowledge base the practice writes and controls. It never assesses symptoms and never makes a clinical decision. Pain and emergencies go to a person, following the practice’s own rule, and every conversation leaves a structured summary and an audit trail.
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What does Tilcao actually do when a patient calls?
It answers, works out who is calling, and finishes what the caller rang about. Tilcao identifies the patient, checks real availability, books, moves or cancels the appointment in the practice’s own systems, and sends the confirmation. Questions about the practice are answered from a knowledge base the practice writes and can change, not from a general model guessing what a dental practice is usually like.
Tilcao runs as six roles: Receptionist, Scheduler, Recall, Treatment Coordinator, Back Office and Practice Manager. A practice switches on the ones it wants and leaves the rest off. Every role works inside the same rules and hands over to the same named people.
One small Belgian detail with a real consequence at the desk. From 1 October 2026, a dentist applying electronic third-party payment (derdebetaler / tiers payant) has to verify the patient’s identity at every patient contact, by reading an eID, an electronic foreigner card, a Kids-ID or an ISI+ card. A confirmation that reminds the patient to bring that card is a small thing to build and it saves a conversation at the counter.
What Tilcao takes is the repetitive work. A person is still the one a patient reaches when it matters.
- Books, moves and cancels appointments in the practice’s own systems, not in a parallel diary.
- Checks what is really free before it offers a time, rather than proposing an hour and hoping.
- Asks for two matching identifiers before it reads any booking back to a caller.
- Answers practice questions: opening hours, parking, what to bring, and whether the dentist works at the agreed tariffs (geconventioneerd / conventionné).
- Offers a slot freed by a cancellation to a patient who is waiting for one.
- Follows up on recalls and on treatment the dentist has already proposed.
- Handles WhatsApp and e-mail the same way it handles the phone.
- Leaves a structured summary and an audit trail for every conversation.
Which languages does Tilcao speak, and does it sound Belgian?
Dutch, French and English, and it changes language inside a single call when the caller does. The voices were chosen by ear, one per language, so the Dutch sounds Flemish rather than Netherlands Dutch and the French sounds Belgian rather than French. Each language also has its own pace and its own level of formality, because those are not the same thing in Brussels as in Antwerp.
Three languages is not a feature list, it is what Belgium is. Of the 11,521 dentists who held the right to practise in Belgium on 31 December 2025, 6,662 were domiciled in the Flemish Region, 3,330 in the Walloon Region and 1,529 in Brussels. A Brussels practice can take Dutch, French and English calls in the same morning, and a Flemish or Walloon practice near a city takes more English than it expects.
The vocabulary is Belgian too, and that is where imported products give themselves away. A caller says mutualiteit or mutualité, the Belgian health insurance fund, never zorgverzekeraar. A Flemish caller asks for 9u30 in the voormiddag, not 09:30 uur. A Walloon caller says septante and nonante. A patient asks whether the dentist is geconventioneerd or conventionné, meaning whether the dentist charges the tariffs agreed with the RIZIV/INAMI, the national health and disability insurance institute.
Tilcao never estimates a tariff it was not given. Convention status, times and prices live in the practice’s knowledge base, and anything the practice has not written down goes to a person instead of being invented.
Does Tilcao work with the software our practice already runs?
That is agreed per practice, and it is the first thing a demo should settle. Tilcao is not a practice management system and does not replace one. It reads the agenda, creates and moves appointments of the types it is allowed to create and move, and cancels. It writes nothing in the clinical record.
The honest background is that no Belgian dental package publishes an open, documented interface for appointments. Belgium’s national rails cover billing and insurability rather than diaries: eAttest, eFact, eTarif, Recip-e and the MyCareNet insurability and GMD/DMG checks say nothing about who sits in which chair on Thursday. So there is no one connector that works everywhere, and a vendor who claims otherwise has not looked.
In practice there are two routes. The first is the online booking layer a practice may already use, such as CLICKDOC, Doctena, Rosa or Helena Pro Calendar (formerly Progenda). The second is the practice’s own package, agreed with the vendor or with whoever supports it locally. The dental software page on this site lists every Belgian package on the MyCareNet register and what each one is approved for. Bring your package name to the demo call and expect a straight answer about what is possible today rather than a logo on a slide.
Tilcao is not on the MyCareNet list of recognised dental software, the register of packages approved for Belgium’s electronic health flows, and it does not need to be. Booking an appointment is not a MyCareNet flow. Tilcao does not attest, does not invoice and does not touch eAttest or eFact. Electronic invoicing has been compulsory for Belgian dentists since 1 September 2025 and it stays exactly where it is, inside the practice’s own software.
NIC/CIN register of recognised dental software packages for MyCareNet, version 10 March 2026
What happens when a patient is in pain, and what does Tilcao refuse to do?
Tilcao stops booking and follows the rule the practice wrote. It does not ask diagnostic questions, does not name a condition and does not decide how urgent a complaint is. Those are clinical judgements and they stay with the practice. What Tilcao does is record what the caller said, in the caller’s own words, and put a named person on it.
The refusals below are configured, not advisory. A blocked action does not happen, and the block is logged with the rest of the call.
- 112 for a life-threatening emergency, anywhere in Belgium.
- 1733 for out-of-hours GP triage.
- The Dutch-language dentist on-call line for Flanders and Brussels, 0903 39 969 at 1.50 euro per minute, on weekends, public holidays and bridge days, 09:00 to 18:00.
- The Brussels French-language garde, 02 426 10 26, on Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays and bridge days, 09:00 to 17:00.
- In Wallonia there is no single number. The map on dentistedegarde.be is live during on-call periods.
| Tilcao does this | Tilcao never does this |
|---|---|
| Records the complaint in the caller’s own words | Names a condition or suggests a diagnosis |
| Applies the practice’s rule for pain, swelling, bleeding or trauma | Judges how urgent a complaint is |
| Hands the call to a named person, with the file attached | Recommends or doses medication, including over the counter |
| States the out-of-hours route and repeats the number twice | Promises a prescription, a treatment or a price it was not given |
| Logs the handover with its reason | Writes anything into the clinical record |
Are patients told they are speaking to an AI?
Yes, in the first sentence, before anything else is said, and on the phone the caller is also told the call is recorded. Article 50 of the EU AI Act has required that disclosure since 2 August 2026, for any AI system a person interacts with, unless it is obvious. Tilcao says it whether or not it would be obvious, because a patient ringing a dental practice is not expecting to have to work it out.
The wording a practice can start from is the one used in the demo on this site: “Hello, you have reached the dental practice. You are speaking to the practice’s AI assistant and this call is recorded. How can I help you today?” A practice can change the phrasing to fit how it speaks to its patients. It cannot remove the disclosure.
A disclosure with no alternative is not a choice. Anyone who would rather speak to a person says so and Tilcao hands over straight away, or takes a callback when the practice is closed. Nothing about the transfer is made difficult.
An appointment-booking agent is not a high-risk AI system under the AI Act, and Tilcao does not claim a high-risk conformity assessment it has not done. Nor does it claim an endorsement: there is no Order of Dentists in Belgium, and no Belgian professional body has published a position on AI at the front desk.
Where does patient data go, and who can hear the calls?
The practice is the controller and Tilcao is the processor, and that is written down before the first real patient call, not after it. A dental call is not ordinary data: a reason for a visit, a pain complaint or a medication list is health data, special category data under Article 9 of the GDPR, and it has to be handled as such from the first second of the call.
- Recording. Belgian law does not forbid recording a conversation you are party to, but Article 314bis §2 of the Strafwetboek / Code pénal punishes using such a recording with intent to harm. Separately, every participant, patients included, must be told before the recording about the recording, its purpose and how long it is kept.
- Who can listen. Inside the practice, whoever the practice gives access to. Inside Tilcao, only the people who need it to run the service, under a written confidentiality obligation that mirrors medical secrecy, with access logged. Professional secrecy under Article 458 of the Strafwetboek / Code pénal binds the practice independently of the GDPR and breaching it is criminal.
- Retention. A call does not inherit the retention period of the clinical file. The period for audio, transcript and structured summary is agreed with the practice and written into the processing agreement as a number.
- Sub-processors. Telephony and WhatsApp run on named third parties, today Retell for voice and the Meta Cloud API for WhatsApp. Every sub-processor and its processing region is listed in the annex to the agreement, and the list changes with a dated entry rather than quietly.
- Minimisation. National register numbers, card numbers and full addresses are redacted at ingestion, and the free-text account of a complaint is kept apart from anything replicated to a dashboard.
| Question | How it is answered |
|---|---|
| Who decides what is processed | The practice. It is the controller. |
| What Tilcao is | The processor (verwerker / sous-traitant), acting on the practice’s written instructions. |
| What kind of data a dental call contains | Health data, special category under Article 9 GDPR. |
| On what ground | Article 9(2)(h) for health care, read with Article 9(3), alongside the ordinary grounds in Article 6. Not consent alone, because consent is not freely given when the alternative is not getting care. |
| What must exist first | A processing agreement under Article 28, with an annex naming every sub-processor and the region it processes in. |
| Who supervises | The Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit / Autorité de protection des données, Drukpersstraat 35 / Rue de la Presse 35, 1000 Brussels. |
Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit / Autorité de protection des données, guidance on sensitive data
What does Tilcao cost, and how does a practice start?
Tilcao does not publish a price list. It is priced per practice and agreed on a call, because what one practice needs and what the next one needs are not the same thing, and a published number would be a guess dressed as a fact. What can be said plainly is what moves the price.
Tilcao is early and pre-pilot. There are no customer names on this site, no counts, no percentages and no case studies, because none exist yet. When pilot results exist they will be published as measured results with their method beside them.
Starting is a sequence rather than a switch, and most of it is the practice’s knowledge rather than anyone’s engineering. The list below gives the five things that move the price first, then that sequence in order.
The practice keeps its own number. Calls reach Tilcao by forwarding, either always or only when nobody picks up, and the practice can switch the forwarding off itself.
- How many sites, and how many dentists work across them.
- Which channels are switched on: phone, WhatsApp, e-mail.
- Which of the six roles the practice wants, from the Receptionist alone to the full set.
- How Tilcao reaches the agenda, which depends on the software the practice runs.
- How much of the day and the week is covered.
- A 30-minute call. Bring your schedule, we bring the demo practice.
- The rules and the knowledge base: opening hours, appointment types and their lengths, who does which treatment, what may be said about tariffs, and the rule for pain.
- The agenda route, agreed with the practice and with whoever supports its software.
- A dry run end to end on the demo practice, before a patient hears anything.
- The processing agreement signed, before the first real patient call.
Questions practices ask
Which languages does Tilcao speak, and does it sound Flemish or Dutch?
Dutch, French and English, and it changes language inside the same call when the caller does. The voices were chosen by ear, one per language, so the Dutch sounds Flemish and not Netherlands Dutch, and the French sounds Belgian and not French. The vocabulary follows the voice: mutualiteit and mutualité rather than zorgverzekeraar, voormiddag and namiddag, 9u30 rather than 09:30 uur, septante and nonante. A patient in Brussels can begin in French and finish in Dutch without being handed to anybody.
What happens if a patient calls in pain or with a dental emergency?
Tilcao stops booking and follows the rule your practice wrote. It does not ask diagnostic questions, does not name a condition and does not decide how urgent a complaint is, because that is a clinical judgement and it belongs to your team. During opening hours the call goes to a named person straight away, with what the caller said attached. When the practice is closed, Tilcao states the route the practice chose and repeats the number twice: 112 for a life-threatening emergency, and in Belgium the wachtdienst or garde dentaire, the dental on-call service, which runs only at weekends, on public holidays and on bridge days.
What happens when Tilcao cannot answer the question?
It says so, and it hands over. Tilcao answers from the knowledge base your practice writes, so anything outside it is not guessed at: it goes to a named person, or it becomes a callback task with the question recorded in the caller’s own words. That is deliberate. A confident wrong answer about a tariff or a treatment costs a practice more than an honest handover ever will.
Does Tilcao work with the practice management software we already use?
That is settled per practice, before anything is connected. Tilcao is not a practice management system, does not replace one and writes nothing in the clinical record. It reads the agenda, creates and moves appointments of the types it is allowed to, and cancels. No Belgian dental package publishes an open, documented appointment interface, so the route is either the online booking layer the practice already uses or a route agreed with the software vendor. Bring your package name to the demo call, whether that is DentAdmin, CareConnect Dentist, Titanium, Crossuite, Octopus, Dent Open or e-Dent, and expect a straight answer about what is possible today.
Where is patient data stored, and who can hear the recordings?
Your practice is the controller, Tilcao is the processor, and that is set out in a written processing agreement under Article 28 of the GDPR before the first real patient call. The agreement names every sub-processor and the region it processes in, so the list can be checked rather than believed, and it changes with a dated entry. Inside Tilcao only the people who need it to run the service can read a transcript, under a written confidentiality obligation that mirrors medical secrecy, and their access is logged. Call audio does not inherit the retention period of the clinical file: that period is agreed with the practice and written down as a number.
Are patients told they are speaking to an AI?
Yes, in the first sentence, before anything else is said, and on the phone the caller is also told the call is recorded. Article 50 of the EU AI Act has required that disclosure since 2 August 2026, and Tilcao gives it whether or not it would be obvious to the caller. Anyone who would rather speak to a person says so and Tilcao hands over, or takes a callback when the practice is closed, because a disclosure with no alternative is not a choice.
What happens when Tilcao makes a mistake?
You see it. Every conversation leaves a structured summary and an audit trail, and the booking outcome is taken from what was actually written to the diary rather than from what the agent said it would do. A wrong appointment is an appointment your team can move or cancel like any other. If a rule is wrong, the rule changes and the behaviour changes with it, and any workflow can be paused. Tilcao is early, so the honest answer is that mistakes will happen, and that the design is built around catching them quickly rather than around promising they will not.
What does Tilcao cost for a practice like ours?
There is no published price list, and no number on this site, because Tilcao is priced per practice and agreed on a call. What drives it is concrete: how many sites, which channels are switched on, which of the six roles the practice wants, how Tilcao reaches the agenda and how much of the day is covered. The fair comparison is with what the practice already spends on the same work, which is its telesecretariaat invoices, the Belgian human telephone secretariat, and the desk time the phone takes from the people at the front.
How long does it take to set up in our practice?
The part that decides it is how Tilcao reaches your agenda, and that depends on the software you run, so anyone quoting you a single number has not asked the question yet. The rest is quick and it is mostly your knowledge: opening hours, appointment types and their lengths, who does which treatment, what may be said about tariffs, and the rule for pain. Nothing goes live until it has run end to end on a demo practice and the processing agreement is signed. Your practice keeps its own number and forwards calls to Tilcao, always or only when nobody picks up, and can switch the forwarding off itself.
Does Tilcao replace our receptionist?
No, and a practice buying it for that will be disappointed. Tilcao takes the repetitive part of the work: the calls that are only a booking, a move or a cancellation, the same four questions all day, the recall list nobody gets round to, the phone ringing while your assistant is at the chair. What it hands back is a person with time for the patient standing in front of them. A person is still the one a patient reaches when it matters, and pain, anything clinical, anything outside the rules and anyone who asks for a human all go to your team.