Medical telesecretariat in Belgium: what it costs, what Impulseo refunds, and the AI option

01

What is a medical telesecretariat?

A service that answers your practice line when you cannot: during consultations, at lunch, on your day off. In Belgium there are three kinds. A human telesecretariat puts trained operators on your line. An AI receptionist such as Tilcao answers with an AI agent. A hybrid service lets an AI take the call first and passes the rest to a person. Several Belgian medical telesecretariats now sell an AI option of their own.

Flanders defines a telesecretariat, for Impulseo, as at least an online diary plus answering and triaging the GP’s calls. Wallonia and Brussels describe it as help with the practice’s administrative management.

02

What does a medical telesecretariat cost in Belgium?

A monthly package of calls, then a price per call above it, or for some AI services a price per practitioner plus a price per call. On 15 October 2026 the published entry prices of human services ran from €95.60 a month including VAT (on one of Solutel’s two pages; its home page says €145) to €871.59 excluding VAT for 500 calls, and from €39 a month per practitioner plus usage for an AI service. Most services publish no price at all.

The bill follows the number of calls you forward. With Ringphone’s published plans, 100 calls a month cost €251.79 and 200 calls €398.69, excluding VAT, if every call lasts under three minutes: an illustrative calculation. An eligible GP gets half of the actual cost back through Impulseo. Tilcao publishes no price: it is set per practice, on a call.

SourcePrice pages of Ringphone, Solutel, Spit’up, Doctena, HuisartsAssist, HalloDok and Caryvox, read on 15 October 2026

03

What does Impulseo refund for a telesecretariat?

Half of the actual cost, up to a ceiling per GP per year, in all three regions. The conditions differ, and in Flanders the support is being phased out.

In Flanders the Departement Zorg pays a GP who is starting out, meaning recognised at most fifteen years ago, for five consecutive years at most, and only if the GP is a member of the local huisartsenkring. GPs who already received it on 1 January 2023 have a transition period that ends in 2027 at the latest. On 2 October 2026 VRT reported that the Flemish budget agreement scraps Impulseo support for GPs; we found no official text with a date.

In Wallonia the AViQ refunds half, up to €3,700 indexed per doctor, to GPs working alone or in a group, on a request made by 31 May each year. In Brussels Vivalis refunds half, up to €4,835.43 per GP for 2025, to GPs and medical houses that use a labelled medical record, are linked to the Brussels Health Network, belong to a huisartsenkring and take part in the out-of-hours service.

SourceDepartement Zorg, tegemoetkoming voor een telesecretariaat; Wallonie.be, Impulseo, updated 28/09/2026; Vivalis, intervention in the costs of a telesecretariat; VRT NWS, 2 October 2026

04

Does an AI receptionist count as a telesecretariat for Impulseo?

No official page says so, in any region. The Flemish definition asks for an online diary and for calls to be answered and triaged; the Walloon and Brussels pages speak of a telesecretariat service without defining it further. Ask your agency in writing before you count on the refund, whatever the supplier promises.

Tilcao does not promise it either. What it can show you is what it does on your line, on the demo line of our example practice, +32 460 23 23 00.

05

Where are Belgium’s medical telesecretariats based?

Anywhere: a telesecretariat answers from a distance, so a practice in Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Liège, Namur or Mons can use a service based in another province. What matters is the languages it answers in and the hours it covers, not its address. Tilcao, the AI option, answers for practices anywhere in Belgium in Dutch, French and English.

06

Human telesecretariat, AI receptionist or both?

All three work. They differ on the hours covered, on what happens to the appointment and on the unusual call. This compares categories, not brands: ask each supplier for its hours, its number of operators and what the contract covers, in writing.

07

What should a telesecretariat contract say?

What you pay depends on the number of calls you forward, so the contract matters more than the headline price. Get these in writing before you sign, from a human service and from an AI one.

• The hours covered, including Saturdays, public holidays and bridge days.
• The price per call above the package, and whether a long call counts double.
• Whether the appointment goes into your own diary or comes back as a message.
• Which languages are answered, at which hours.
• Your instruction for calls that may be urgent, and who applies it.
• Who processes the calls and recordings, where, and for how long, under professional secrecy and a processing agreement.
• The notice period, and how you take your line back.

08

Where does Tilcao fit?

Tilcao is the AI receptionist in the table above. It answers every call at once, says it is an AI, books, moves or cancels in the diary where your software allows a connection, answers WhatsApp, and hands the unusual call to a person. It never triages. It runs in dental practices today; for a GP, specialist, physiotherapy or other care practice we set it up on request, starting from your software and your rule for urgent calls.

What an AI medical receptionist does, and the eight questions to ask one, has a page of its own. The same comparison for dental practices is on dental answering service in Belgium.

09

Questions practices ask