Procurement template

Make vendors demonstrate the failure paths—not only the happy-path demo.

Use this template to compare vendors against one bounded hospital workflow. Replace the bracketed decisions, add hospital-specific requirements, and require evidence for every high score.

This is an operational starting point, not legal, privacy, security, procurement, or clinical advice. Adapt it with the hospital teams responsible for the deployment.

Hospital

Workflow

Operational owner

Pilot scope

Required live demonstration

Ten scenarios vendors should not be allowed to skip.

Scenario	Vendor must demonstrate
Confirmation	Identity step, current-state check, confirmation, and write-back
Reschedule	Permitted slot lookup, constraints, repeat-back, and atomic booking
Cancellation	Cancellation confirmation, capacity release, and downstream event
No-show recovery	Eligibility, retry and stop policy, rebooking, and disposition
Clinical question	No medical advice, approved language, and human destination
Urgent language	Hospital-approved instruction, transfer, fallback, and audit event
Wrong person or number	Minimum disclosure, record flag, and stop behavior
Tool outage	Safe stop, patient explanation, staff task, and recovery procedure
Low confidence	One safe clarification or human escalation
Human request	Immediate transfer or callback task without resistance

Section 0101

Organization and use case

Define the operating boundary before asking about the technology.

Hospital, department, location, and workflow in scope
Monthly eligible records, expected volume, languages, and operating hours
Current baseline and the exact operational outcome to improve
Allowed actions, prohibited actions, exclusions, and human owner
Source systems and the authoritative appointment or patient state
Pilot population, launch limit, rollback condition, and success gate

Section 0202

Voice, language, and patient experience

Ask for evidence from the exact workflow and language—not a generic language count.

Languages and variants tested for the proposed workflow
Code-switching, accents, background speech, poor connection, and interruption handling
Pronunciation, pace, silence, repeat requests, and patient disclosure controls
Voicemail, proxy answer, wrong number, opt-out, and do-not-contact behavior
Hospital review and approval of every patient-facing script and fallback

Section 0303

Identity, privacy, and data handling

Require a deployment-specific data-flow answer instead of a blanket compliance claim.

Identity verification before appointment details are disclosed
Every field read, created, transmitted, stored, logged, or exported
Applicable controller, fiduciary, processor, and subprocessor roles
Notice, consent, opt-out, correction, retention, deletion, and complaint workflows
Hosting regions, cross-border flows, encryption, key management, isolation, and access logs
Separate policies for recordings, transcripts, prompts, model training, analytics, and support access
Incident notification, evidence preservation, contract-end export, and deletion

Section 0404

AI and workflow risk management

Score the system by the actions it takes and the harms it prevents.

Risk register for wrong identity, wrong slot, stale state, failed escalation, bias, and overreach
Model, prompt, policy, and tool versioning with approval, rollback, and kill switch
Action permissions separated from conversational capability
Confidence thresholds, hard stops, adversarial tests, and incident learning
Human review and post-launch monitoring responsibilities

Section 0505

Integration and reliability

Ask what happens when the system of record is slow, stale, conflicting, or unavailable.

Scheduling, EHR, CRM, telephony, messaging, and task-queue integration method
Authentication, authorization, least privilege, secret rotation, and test environment
Idempotency, concurrency, duplicate prevention, retry, timeout, and reconciliation
Availability, maintenance, failover, backup, recovery objectives, and manual procedure
Event, disposition, error, and audit-log schema

Section 0606

Human escalation contract

Require all eight fields for every escalation category.

Observable trigger
Immediate patient-facing response
Actions that become unavailable
Destination team or queue
Minimum context package
Acceptance target
After-hours and failed-transfer fallback
Audit event and QA review owner

Section 0707

Evaluation and acceptance testing

Use hospital-supplied scenarios and production-like permissions.

Scenario inventory with expected outcome for every branch
Action-level scoring for identity, state, tool call, write-back, disclosure, escalation, and disposition
Language-specific testing with hospital-approved reviewers
Outage, tool error, ambiguous speech, call drop, and adversarial tests
Launch threshold, rollback threshold, and daily pilot review

Section 0808

Measurement and attribution

Separate contact, booking, attendance, billing, and collected value.

Eligible, attempted, reached, verified, resolved, and escalated definitions
Confirmed, rescheduled, cancelled, rebooked, and completed-visit definitions
Time to resolution, attempts per resolution, and unresolved queue age
False action, duplicate action, privacy failure, and failed handoff
Operational capacity recovered versus completed visit or recognized revenue

Section 0909

Implementation and governance

Make dependencies, owners, expansion gates, and exit obligations visible.

Named vendor and hospital owners
Discovery, configuration, integration, testing, training, pilot, and expansion plan
Required hospital decisions, source data, and staff training
Change control, release review, manual fallback, and weekly operating review
Exit assistance, data export, deletion, and transition support

Section 1010

Commercial response

Require one unit and three volume examples for every variable charge.

Setup, platform, telephony, messaging, model, integration, support, and overage costs
Professional service, change request, premium support, and exit costs
Low, expected, and high-volume examples with assumptions
Commercial exclusions and dependencies

Weighted evaluation

Score evidence, not presentation polish.

Use a 0–5 score and require written evidence for every score above 3.

Workflow completeness and bounded actions20%

Patient safety and human escalation15%

Privacy, security, and data governance15%

Integration and reliability15%

Evaluation evidence and observability15%

Voice and language patient experience10%

Implementation and support5%

Commercial clarity5%

Source and review references

Use the source, then make the hospital decision.

Healthcare Voice AI Implementation Checklist for Hospitals in India Human Escalation Rules for Healthcare Voice AI Healthcare Voice AI for Hospitals in India NIST AI Risk Management Framework WHO Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health India Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025 ABDM Health Data Management Policy

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