Anima Makes GP Phone Queues a Thing of the Past with Telnyx

Ask a GP practice to name its biggest operational problem and the answer usually rings. Patients wait on hold, reception teams work through the backlog one call at a time, and the queue keeps refilling. Anima, a care platform built by doctors and trusted by more than 200 GP practices across the UK, set out to remove the queue entirely by building voice agents for primary care receptions. That meant finding telephony infrastructure the team could program, inspect, and trust with mission-critical healthcare calls.

Four reasons Telnyx won

Anima refused to default to the biggest name in the market. "We didn't start by treating the incumbent as the automatic answer, and that's how we came across Telnyx," said Dr. Souradip Mookerjee, lead clinical engineer at Anima. "We explored the space quite broadly because we were looking for a partner to help build on our new telephony product."

Early prototypes ran on Twilio while the team evaluated everything from delegating numbers and direct SIP integrations with GP phone systems to redirects, transfers, and conferencing. Telnyx won on four counts: strong programmable call support through the Voice API, support for Anima's SIP infrastructure, UK-pinned data processing that matters to its customers, and substantially better unit economics.

The economics were concrete. "Our telephony transport rate moved from roughly $0.0085 per minute to $0.0035," he said. Cost alone would not have carried the decision, though. "Healthcare communications are mission critical, so price alone isn't enough for us. We also need visibility into exactly what happened to every single call, and the control to route, reject, bridge, or transfer calls programmatically. Telnyx gave us that combination."

Productionizing a safe healthcare call flow

The build itself moved fast. "The APIs were pretty straightforward to get the hang of, and Telnyx has quite a nice library," he said. "The real work for us was productionizing this healthcare call flow safely."

The caution is occupational. Mookerjee trained as a medical doctor, earned a PhD at the University of Cambridge, and now builds clinical AI used at national scale, with published research spanning machine learning in healthcare.

That flow starts the moment a patient dials. Telnyx sends Anima a signed webhook, the platform identifies the GP practice from the number, and it checks details like opening hours and capacity before creating a SIP connection into Anima's voice agent layer. From there, Anima can bridge the call, transfer it to reception when a human should take over, or route it safely when a practice can't accept more calls. Around that core, the team built audit records, monitoring, failure handling, and real-world testing.

"Telnyx provided really clear infrastructure primitives, so our engineers can spend their time on the healthcare workflow we're trying to productionize rather than fighting the telephone stack," he said.

Infrastructure patients never notice

"Patients and practices very rarely comment on the infrastructure by name," he said. "They mostly comment on the fact that it enables this kind of experience."

The clearest signal came from the queue itself. Practices told Anima they wanted to shrink their long telephone queues, and word spread once the product delivered. "One telephony partner told us that our product increased the value of their own offering because it helped eliminate that problem," he said. "They began telling their other GP customers about us."

Practices also valued what each call became. Patients keep the familiar telephone, while every call creates a structured request that enters the same workflows as an online submission. That feedback pushed Anima to sharpen human handover and call routing. "Telnyx's programmability let us respond to those needs quite quickly," he added.

The rollout was quiet in the best way. "The feedback was characterized by the lack of any real pushback, because it just worked out of the box," he said. "Ultimately, patients get to benefit from the fact that these long telephone queues are now a thing of the past."

Communication as part of the product

Anima's experience points to a simple test for choosing a telephony partner. "I'd recommend Telnyx to any business building a product where communication is part of the product rather than just a utility on top," he said. "It gave us mature voice and messaging primitives without dictating our application architecture. The economics were quite compelling to us as well."

The daily engineering experience sealed it. "The APIs gave us a lot of granular control. The tooling made difficult problems diagnosable. In the telephony stack, that's often quite rare," Mookerjee said. "That combination is really valuable, especially for a regulated, high-volume product like ours."