You cannot answer the phone. You are in a room with someone who needs you.
Every call that rings out during a session is a person who will book with whoever picks up. We build the front desk layer that answers, books and reminds, and stays entirely out of the clinical room.
In a clinic the bottleneck is not effort. It is that you cannot be in two places.
A trade business loses calls because the owner is up a ladder. A practice loses them for a better reason, and that makes it harder to fix.
When you are with a client you are unavailable, and you should be. That is not a scheduling failure, it is the job. But it means that for most of your working day the phone is answered by nobody, and a new client enquiry is a person who has finally worked up to making the call. They will not usually try twice.
The second loss is quieter. It is the client who came three times, got better, and drifted. Nobody rang. Nobody sent anything. There was no decision to stop treating them, the relationship just ran out of momentum, and the practitioner only notices months later when the diary looks thin.
And then there is the paperwork. Notes get pushed to the end of the week and written from memory, by which point the detail that made them clinically useful has gone. Rebooking reminders never go out because sending them is a job somebody has to remember. Invoices chase themselves last.
None of this is a discipline problem. It is what happens when the only person who can do the admin is the same person generating the revenue, and they cannot do both at once.
The 108 figure is measured from a real client engagement, described in full below. The first two are the structural facts of running a practice, stated as direction rather than a claim about your numbers.
The front desk, and nothing past the door of the treatment room.
Calls during sessions
A call that rings out while you are with a client gets a text back within about a minute, so the enquiry stays alive until you are free.
The questions asked before booking
What it costs, whether there is a rebate, what happens in a first appointment, parking, how long it runs. The same questions every time, answered instantly and consistently.
Booking and confirmation
Into your real calendar, with a confirmation on the spot and reminders before the appointment, so the slot is either used or released in time to refill it.
Rebooking
The follow up appointment that should have been made and was not. Prompted at a sensible interval, in a way that makes it easy to say not right now.
Clinical notes
Rough notes or a recording become a completed write-up in your required format, ready to review and edit. A draft for a human, never a finished record.
Accounts and rebates
Invoices sent, unpaid balances followed up politely, and the paperwork a client needs for their rebate produced without you doing it at nine at night.
In health, what the system refuses to do matters more than what it does.
These are not settings. They are built in, agreed before anything goes live, and we will not remove them on request.
It never
- Offers a diagnosis, an opinion or a treatment recommendation.
- Decides how clinically urgent someone is.
- Asks what is wrong with the person, or records symptoms.
- Claims to be you, a practitioner, or any registered professional.
- Stores clinical content it did not need in order to do its job.
- Continues a conversation that has turned distressing.
It always
- Handles the appointment, not the condition.
- Hands to a human immediately on anything clinical or distressed.
- Identifies itself as an assistant if asked directly.
- Uses a client code rather than a name wherever a record is produced.
- Leaves a gap blank rather than filling it with a plausible guess.
- Ends with a person, every time.
A practice where the booking button did not work.
The book now button led to a page that did not exist.
This practice was doing everything right at the front and losing people at the last step. The booking link on the live website pointed at a calendar that had been switched off, so it returned a 404. Four of six paid services had no calendar at all, so even a determined client could not book them. And no appointment notifications existed anywhere: the only two configured were in-app alerts addressed to an assigned user, and no calendar had an assigned user, so nobody was ever told anything. Clients were not being reminded and the practitioner was not being told.
We rebuilt the booking layer. Every paid service now has a working calendar and a live link. Every calendar carries a full notification set, 18 each and 108 in total: confirmations, reminders and follow ups to the client, and alerts to the practitioner by both email and SMS. Because she had no user seat in the system, the alerts go to her real email and mobile rather than to a seat that does not exist. Alongside it we built the tool that turns her rough session notes, or a recording, into a completed case note in the required clinical format, ready to review and download. It never invents a clinical fact, anything not in the notes is left blank, session content is never stored, and the templates use a client code rather than a name.
Findings and build from a client’s live booking system and a delivered clinical notes tool. Published without the client’s name.
What the first month looks like in a practice.
Free audit
We look at what actually happens now. How calls are handled during sessions, what reminders exist, and how many appointments were booked against how many enquiries arrived.
Agree the boundaries
What it may say, what it must never touch, when it interrupts you and when it waits. In a health setting this is the longest conversation and it should be.
Build and test
Built and run against real scenarios, including the awkward ones, before any client receives anything.
Live
Missed call text-back and appointment reminders usually go first, because between them they recover the most for the least risk.
What practitioners ask us.
Find out how many enquiries never reach you.
Twenty minutes on the phone and a look at your actual numbers: calls that rang out during sessions, appointments booked against enquiries received, and how many clients stopped rebooking without anyone noticing. Written down and yours to keep.