Automate the repetitive workin your clinic

What you will have at the end.

Three automations running, each with a named owner and a failure alert, and a written rule for what you will never automate.

The tasks worth automating in a clinic share one property: they are boring, they are exactly the same every time, and they fail when somebody is busy. That last part is the real argument. A task that depends on memory has a failure rate, and in a clinic the busy days are exactly the days it fails.

Choosing what goes first

1. List the tasks, then score them on two axes

   Sit with whoever does the repetitive work and list every task that happens more than weekly. Then score each on frequency and on what it costs when it is missed.

   Automate high frequency and high cost of failure first. That is usually a list of three, and three is the right number to start with.

   —High frequency, high cost when missed: automate first.

   —High frequency, low cost when missed: automate second, it buys time.

   —Low frequency, high cost when missed: do not automate, build a checklist. An automation that runs twice a year is broken by the time you need it.

   —Low frequency, low cost: leave it alone.

2. The three that earn their keep in almost every clinic

   Different clinics differ at the margin. These three come up every time.

   —Enquiry notification. Every web form or ad enquiry reaches a named person within a minute, and lands in a list.

   —Review request. Fires a few hours after a completed visit, on a trigger rather than on memory.

   —Appointment reminder and the no-show follow-up. Most practice systems do the reminder; almost none do anything when somebody does not turn up.

Building the enquiry notification

1. Get it to a person in under a minute

   This is the highest-value automation in a clinic that advertises, because the value of an enquiry decays in minutes and every hour of delay costs you bookings.

   —Trigger on submission, from every source: web form, landing page, native ad form, chat.

   —Notify a named individual, not a role address that nobody feels responsible for.

   —Include only what the caller needs: first name, phone, service, time received. Never symptoms, never health information, and never anything you would not want sitting in a notification on a lock screen.

   —Write it to a shared list at the same time, so the enquiry survives a missed notification.

   In practice

   Send to two channels, not one. A text plus an email costs nothing and covers the case where someone is in with a patient.

2. Close the loop so you can see what was not called

   The notification is only half of it. Without a status you cannot tell the difference between an enquiry that was handled and one that vanished.

   —One column in the shared list: called, booked, no answer, not reached.

   —A daily count of enquiries still at no status. That is the number that goes on the dashboard.

   —A second attempt rule, written down. Two calls at different times of day before you stop.

The other two

1. Review request, on the appointment status

   Trigger on the visit being marked complete, delay two to four hours, send in daytime hours only, one link, no incentive. The detail is in the reviews guide; what matters here is that it runs on a trigger and not on a person.

   —Suppress it for anyone who already left a review, which requires keeping a simple list.

   —Suppress it after a visit that went badly, which requires a way for the team to flag that. One checkbox is enough.

   —Never send outside daytime hours. A review request at ten at night reads as spam and gets you nothing.

2. The no-show follow-up nobody builds

   A patient who does not turn up is usually treated as a gap in the day and then forgotten. They are in fact the warmest possible list: they wanted an appointment recently enough to book one.

   —Trigger on the appointment being marked as a no-show.

   —Wait a day, then send one short message offering to rebook, with a link.

   —One message. Not a sequence. A patient who missed an appointment does not need to be chased four times.

   —Flag anyone with three no-shows for a human conversation rather than another automated message.

Keeping them alive

1. Assume every automation will fail silently

   This is the part nobody builds and the reason automation gets a bad reputation in clinics. An automation does not announce that it stopped. It just stops, and three weeks later somebody notices that nobody has asked for a review since the software update.

   —Every automation gets a heartbeat: if it has not run in the expected period, somebody is told.

   —Every automation gets a named owner. Not a team, a person.

   —Every automation gets one line of documentation: what triggers it, what it sends, where it writes, who owns it.

   —Review the list quarterly and delete the ones nobody needs any more.

   In practice

   The most common cause of silent failure is a credential expiring, followed by a field being renamed in the practice software. Both are invisible until you look.

2. Automate the report to yourself too

   A weekly summary that arrives without anyone producing it is what keeps the whole system honest.

   —Enquiries received, called, booked.

   —Review requests sent, reviews received.

   —Any automation that did not run.

   —Send it on the morning of your weekly review slot, not at a random time.

When it goes sideways