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Get started with Telehealth

Ricardo Updated by Ricardo

WhatsApp is already where patient conversations happen — appointment reminders, triage, follow-ups. But when a conversation needs a voice or face-to-face moment, patients had to switch to a different platform, if there even was one. That break in the experience adds friction for both clinicians and patients, especially in regions where WhatsApp is the default communication tool.

Now you can keep the entire interaction in one place.

Clinicians can start a call directly from a WhatsApp conversation, take notes during the call, and access full transcripts afterward and AI-generated call summaries, so clinicians can focus on the patient instead of documentation.

This opens up real use cases: a nurse completing a visual assessment after a triage journey, a doctor doing a follow-up consultation without asking the patient to travel, or a community health worker connecting a patient to a specialist remotely — all without leaving WhatsApp.

Getting started

Telehealth is built over WhatsApp calling features. Learn more about how those work in the Calling article.

Simply head to Settings > Calls and switch on Enable calls and, if you want to run video calls as well, Enable video calls. That's it. Really!

Now, if you want to let your users call you anytime from WhatsApp, enable the Show call buttons option. This will show the call buttons on WhatsApp:

Note: if you don't have a helpdesk team ready waiting for these calls, we suggest you keep this setting off to avoid disappointing your users with missed calls.

Optional: Waiting room

To keep patients waiting while your team gets ready, we suggest you enable the Waiting room.

While they wait, there's hold music. We've added a few to choose from: Bossa Nova, Ambient Lo-fi, Smooth Jazz, World Music and Calm Classical. If none of those suit you, you can upload your own track!

You can also add a custom Welcome message that plays when people first call. The welcome message works the same way, so you can upload your own audio there too.

To enable it, simply head over to Settings > Calls, and enable the Waiting room toggle:

Both the welcome message and the hold music can be changed whenever you like, and you can switch the welcome message off if you'd rather callers go straight to the music.

Optional: Transcriptions & Call Summaries

For most clinicians the consult isn't the slow part. It's the note afterwards. You go back through what you typed during the call, try to remember what the patient said about when the pain started, and write it up properly, usually while the next patient is already waiting. Do that after every call and it adds up to a real chunk of the day.

Turn can write that summary for you now. It works from the call transcript and the notes you took during the call, so when the call ends the summary is already there. You read it, fix anything that needs fixing, and move on.

Out of the box there are two kinds. A General summary covers what was discussed and what was agreed. A SOAP summary is laid out as Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan, the format a lot of clinicians already write in, so you don't spend time reshaping it.

This feature requires an OpenAI integration. You can learn how to do that in: Integrate with an AI provider.

After that, turn on transcriptions and summaries in Settings > AI > Automatically transcribe & Summarise calls:

Initiating Calls

After everything is setup and enabled, how do you actually run calls? You have 2 options: calling users, which Meta charges for, or having users call you.

1. Call users

To call your users, Meta first requires you to ask for permissions. You can either do that automatically via a journey, for example during registration, using a Call Permission Request message:

Or from a Template. You can also manually ask for permissions from the Inbox directly:

When you have permissions, you can initiate a call by tapping either the voice or video call buttons on the top of the Inbox:

2. Have your users call you

To leverage the fact that Meta doesn't charge for user-initiated calls, you can prompt your users to call you. You can do that directly from Journeys, for example in a journey that's triggered 5 minutes before the appointment using the Request Voice or Video Call messages:

Then, the call will ring on your inbox (don't forget to set yourself as Available, on the bottom left):

Scheduled consults

If you're planning to have scheduled consults, you fully run your Telehealth operations from within Turn.io, without requiring an external EMR or Calendar. You can do that in the Agenda page. To learn more about how to set that up, head over to the Agenda article:

Accepting calls from your EMR

Your providers are already looking at their EMR/Calendar all day long. To avoid them from juggling multiple tabs, you can integrate Turn calling into your system. Learn more in the Turn Meet article:

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