Pretty Good AI vs Clearwave

Two products that both say front office and mean different rooms

Clearwave built its business at the check-in desk. Registration, real-time insurance eligibility, self-service kiosks in the waiting room, payments at the point of service. Later it added scheduling, patient communications and a voice AI product.

Pretty Good AI built its business at the phone line, and extended outward into scheduling, referrals, forms and revenue workflows on athenaOne.

Both companies now use the phrase front office. They are describing different physical places.

That distinction sounds academic until a practice buys the wrong one, which happens more than it should, because the symptom a practice notices is usually just that things feel slow.

Two different problems that feel identical from the outside

Here is the test that separates them, and it takes about ten minutes with data most practices already have.

Look at your abandoned call rate and your average hold time. Then look at how long a patient spends between walking in and being roomed.

If the phone numbers are bad and the waiting room numbers are fine, you have an access problem. Patients cannot reach you to book. No amount of check-in improvement changes that, because the patients you are losing never made it into your building.

If the phone numbers are fine and patients are stacking up in the waiting room while staff key in registration and chase coverage, you have a throughput problem at the desk. That is what Clearwave has spent years building for, kiosks included, and a voice agent will not fix it.

Plenty of practices have both. The order you fix them in still matters, and the honest answer is to fix whichever one is currently costing you visits.

What we do not build

We do not make kiosks. We have no plans to. A practice that wants a self-service terminal in the waiting room should buy one from a company that makes them, and Clearwave does.

Real-time insurance eligibility is also an area where Clearwave has longer-standing depth than we do. We run eligibility checks as part of the athenaOne workflow around a booking or a visit, and for most of our customers that is the right amount of it. A practice whose specific pain is coverage surprises at the desk should weigh a product built around that check.

Saying this plainly is more useful than pretending the products overlap completely. They do not.

Where the architecture difference shows up

Clearwave’s voice AI is positioned around dropping hold times and booking more patients, which is the right goal.

The difference is structural rather than a matter of quality. A voice agent built on top of a check-in and eligibility platform is extending an existing workflow engine to a new channel. An agent built voice-first calls athenaOne tools during the conversation, so it reads the live slot table and writes the booking while the patient is still on the line.

For a simple appointment the two feel the same to the caller.

The gap opens on the calls that are not simple. A patient who needs a specific provider at a specific location, who last cancelled twice, and whose appointment type requires a preceding visit, is a call where the agent either resolves it live or captures it for someone to finish later.

An ENT group we work with found their hardest recurring case was not clinical at all. It was patients calling to move a post-operative follow-up that had to sit inside a fixed window relative to the surgery date, with a different provider than the one who did the procedure if that provider was out. The rules for that already existed in athenaOne as appointment types and provider group settings. The workable approach read those rules rather than reimplementing them, and handed off to a person when the window was already blown, because at that point somebody has to make a judgment call about what to do next and that is not the automation’s decision to make.

Both of us will be at Thrive

Clearwave is a sponsor of athenahealth Thrive 2026. We are a Platinum sponsor. Practices walking that floor will get a similar-sounding pitch from a lot of booths, ours included.

Three questions cut through it, and they work on any vendor there.

Ask them to book your hardest appointment type, live, in an athenaOne environment rather than a demo sandbox. Ask what happens when the agent cannot complete the request, and watch the handoff rather than the happy path. Ask how many athenahealth API endpoints they actually connect, because that number sets the ceiling on what any of this can do inside your system.

For reference on the last one: athenahealth exposes roughly 800 endpoints and we connect 500+ of them.

The short version

Waiting room slow, registration manual, coverage surprises at the desk, kiosks appealing: Clearwave is built for that and we are not.

Phone queue long, calls abandoned, patients unable to book at all: that is the problem we built for, and it is worth measuring before you decide, because your own phone logs will settle the question faster than either of our sales teams will.