Software for UK private clinics
Three no-shows by 11am Monday. The reminder went out. Nobody replied. £450 gone before lunch.
You’re the principal at a single-chair private dental practice, or the manager of a four-clinician physio in north London, or a solo private GP doing PMI work for Bupa and AXA, or a small-animal vet running on Provet Cloud with a Vetstoria layer on top. The PMS is fine at what the PMS does - Dentally, Cliniko, Pabau, Provet Cloud, Heydoc, Power Diary, WriteUpp do the chart, the diary, the prescribing pad. Around it you’ve put twenty-seven things - WhatsApp, Doctify, Working Feedback, Tabeo, Healthcode, Vetstoria - and none of them quite talk to each other. Monday morning you’ve lost three slots by 11. The £3,400 implant plan goes to Antalya on Saturday because you didn’t get the finance link in front of her before she left the chair. The owner of the cat that should be in for her annual booster never replied to the recall - vac lapsed in October, you’re at a clinical-decision tree on first-vaccination protocol again. Friday afternoon is four PMI portals - Bupa, AXA, Vitality, WPA - and Healthcode’s been partially integrated with Heydoc since 2023.
We make custom software for clinics - scoped per practice, sized to the bit between what the PMS does and patient seen, paid, reminded, recalled, reviewed, audited. Not another PMS. Not another marketing tool. Not a subscription plugin you sign up to from this page. Tell us where Friday afternoon goes and where Monday’s slots leak and we’ll come back with a sketch.
What you spend your week on that you shouldn’t have to
- Mondays - three no-shows by 11am. The reminder fired, nobody replied, the £150-£600 slot sat empty, the waitlist never got woken.
- Dentally / Cliniko / Pabau / Provet Cloud sends the reminder, but our patients live on WhatsApp - and the SMS is in the Other folder she hasn’t opened since 2019.
- The £3,400 treatment plan the patient said she’d think about - by Saturday she’s on Instagram looking at Antalya, and you forgot to send the Tabeo link.
- Annual booster recall for the cat or dog - Provet Cloud reminded thirty days out, owner ignored it, vac lapsed in October; you’re at a first-vaccine protocol again and the owner blames the practice.
- Friday afternoon, four PMI portals - Bupa Provider Online, AXA Health, Vitality Healthcare, WPA - different fee schedules, different EDI formats, Healthcode partial, the practice manager goes home at 7.
- New-patient PMH on a clipboard half illegible, allergies column missing the bit that mattered, receptionist re-keying it into the PMS while the next patient queues.
- Aesthetic patient texts at week three asking you to remove her before / after image - consent forms in three places, photos in iCloud, you’re trawling Pabau.
- The 6-month dental recall went out in July; October now, ninety patients haven’t replied and they’ll come back as £1,200 emergencies in February.
- The review SMS fires the moment Dentally raises the invoice - patient still has her coat in her hand; by the time she’s home it’s gone from her notifications and your GBP sits at 3.9.
- Lab result for Mrs Patel’s elderly cat lands at 4pm; by 6 the owner’s rung twice and the vet’s elbow-deep in the next consult.
- Therapy outcome measures the EAP insurer wants pre and post - PHQ-9, GAD-7 - currently a paper form on a clipboard the patient ignores.
These aren’t problems for a generic CRM. They’re the bit between the PMS doing what the PMS does and the patient seen, paid, reminded, recalled, reviewed, audited - that’s the bit we can take off your plate.
Example problems we could solve
Six things we hear most often from clinics - with what the solved version looks like in your week. Every build is scoped per practice: a single-chair private dentist probably needs the first three; a four-vet small-animal practice the first two plus the recall engine; a private GP group the first two plus the PMI concierge. None of it means binning what already works.
1. The no-show slot that fills itself before the chair sits empty
The £450-by-11am moment: three no-shows on Monday morning. Reminder went out Sunday night, none of them replied, the chair sat until 12, and by the time reception rang the waitlist at 11.30 the patient who’d have taken the slot was already booked somewhere else. £150-£600 a slot is the difference between a good month and a flat one.
Solved looks like: booking confirmed → 48h + 24h reminder going out where the patient actually replies - WhatsApp first where she’s onboarded, SMS as fallback, email last. The reminder asks one question - “see you Tuesday 10:30 - reply Y to confirm, N to rebook, or tap to move it” - and listens for the answer. Where she cancels or doesn’t confirm by the day-before threshold, the slot flags opening soon and the waitlist queue fires automatically with a two-hour booking window, ranked by clinician + treatment type + time-of-day fit, not just date. The slot fills before reception is asked to ring round. Target: no-show rate from ~12% to ~5% inside ninety days. The longer version lives at Resource & Waitlist Yield Recovery.
2. The reminder that lands where she actually answers - and the recall that books, not the one she ignored
The WhatsApp moment: Cliniko / Dentally / Pabau / Provet Cloud sends a reminder by SMS. The patient’s WhatsApp is open on her phone right now; the SMS is in the Other folder she hasn’t checked since 2019. The 6-month dental recall and the annual booster work the same way - sent, ignored, and now you’re at a first-vaccine protocol or a £1,200 emergency in February.
Solved looks like: the appointment reminder + recall ladder routes WhatsApp-first (where the patient’s given you her number for clinical care; service messages run under soft opt-in), SMS as fallback, email last. The 6-month dental recall runs as a relationship ladder (5-mo / 6-mo / 7-mo / 9-mo / 12-mo, with a practitioner-change-offer at 9 months for the patient whose last clinician has left); the annual cat / dog booster runs against the patient’s vaccination history with a pre-lapse window (30 / 14 / 7-day) AND a post-lapse “chat with the nurse” window so the relationship doesn’t end at lapse. Promotional content (whitening offers, summer aesthetic specials, vet wellness-plan upsells) sits on a separate explicit-consent list with audit trail - the summer Botox special never folds into the appointment reminder by accident. The longer version lives at Recurring Service Recall - the cross-clinic recall annuity that runs the dental six-month, the vet annual booster, and the monthly wellness-plan DD lifecycle through the same engine - plus Booking & Review Loop for the appointment-side cascade behind it.
3. The intake form she does on her phone - not on a clipboard at reception
The clipboard moment: new patient at 9.30. Five-page PMH on a clipboard, half illegible, allergies column missing the bit that mattered, receptionist re-keying it into the PMS for fifteen minutes while the next patient queues. You’ve mistyped a penicillin allergy more than once.
Solved looks like: at booking-confirmation the patient gets a link to a mobile-optimised intake form - past medical history, current meds, allergies (with the controlled-substance free-text field flagged so it doesn’t truncate), photo consent if it’s aesthetic, treatment T&Cs e-sign, payment-method-on-file where you take a deposit. She fills it on the bus on Tuesday morning, not at reception at 9.28. The submission writes back into the PMS via the integration we build; contraindications surface as a clinician-visible flag on her record before she walks in. Photo consent (aesthetic / dental cosmetic / vet imaging where owner-shared) stores against the patient with a per-image consent state, a withdraw-consent link the patient can use herself, and a clean trail you don’t have to trawl Pabau for two weeks later. The longer version lives at Client Onboarding & Intake.
4. The review request that lands when she’s actually happy
The coat-in-her-hand moment: Cliniko / Dentally raises the invoice and the review request goes out the same minute. She’s still putting her coat on. By the time she’s home it’s gone from her notifications. Your GBP sits at 3.9 with twelve reviews; the practice across the road sits at 4.8.
Solved looks like: twenty-four hours post-visit (the time the patient remembers the visit but the receipts are still on her phone), a “how did we do?” SMS with a 1-to-5 thumb-tap. Four or five routes to the GBP / Doctify / Working Feedback destination matrix with a skeleton review pre-drafted from the visit-type so she only has to edit a line; one to three routes to an internal complaints-and-recovery inbox where you get the chance to fix the issue before it lands as a public review. The longer version lives at Booking & Review Loop; the clinic version’s distinct features are the 24-hour delay, the 4-5 / 1-3 routing logic, and the GBP-vs-Doctify-vs-Working-Feedback destination matrix.
5. The treatment plan that doesn’t go to Antalya on Saturday
The chair-to-Antalya moment: £3,400 implant plan signed in the chair Tuesday afternoon. Patient says “I’ll think about it”. By Saturday she’s on Instagram looking at a clinic in Antalya for £900. By Thursday she’s deposited. You never sent the Tabeo link because the clinician was running ten minutes late and the receptionist forgot.
Solved looks like: at treatment-plan-signed-in-the-chair, the plan PDF lands on her phone with a finance-link option pre-rendered against your panel - Tabeo for instant 0% on £1k-£5k, Chrysalis for longer-term, V12 on the high-ticket implant + perio-rehab cases. The link uses her details from the PMS, not a blank form; she taps it on the train home, gets her instant decision, the plan transitions to finance accepted, book the prep visit, and the booking link comes back in the same thread. If she doesn’t tap, a soft nudge at +24h, then +72h with a short clinician video at her treatment level, then +7 days with the Antalya-rebuttal trust strip - cost-of-revision-work, same-surgeon-for-follow-ups, indemnity-and-recourse - the things a Turkey clinic can’t honestly offer. The longer version lives at Stage Payment & Retention Ledger; the dental-specific depth (Tabeo / Chrysalis / V12 splits, the stage-payment loop, the chair-to-deposit conversion-by-clinician dashboard) lives on the dental spoke, and the aesthetic-side version (lower-ticket package economics) lives on the aesthetic spoke.
6. PMI billing that doesn’t eat Friday
The four-portals moment: Friday afternoon. Bupa Provider Online, AXA Health, Vitality Healthcare, WPA. Four portals, four fee schedules, four EDI formats. Healthcode is meant to make this one workflow; the integration with Heydoc is partial; the practice manager is at her desk till 7.
Solved looks like: at consultation-close, the visit writes to a structured claim object with the per-insurer fee schedule already loaded against the patient’s policy. Bupa wants a procedure-pairing rule on outpatient consultation; AXA wants the pre-auth reference on every claim; Vitality has a 30-day window; Cigna’s eligibility check runs differently again. Healthcode submission renders against that schedule with the per-insurer wrinkles handled in code, not in the practice manager’s head. Claim submitted, the tracker watches the status - acknowledged, processing, paid, rejected - and when BACS lands the bank feed auto-reconciles the open receivable. Rejections surface the reason (missing pre-auth, code mismatch, fee-schedule version drift, patient-excess shortfall, eligibility lapse) with a one-tap re-submit where the fix is on your side and a one-tap “flip to self-pay” where it’s not. The longer version lives at Invoice & Dunning Ladder; the private-GP depth (the Bupa / AXA / Vitality / WPA / Cigna / Aviva wrinkles, the telehealth-to-PMS glue, the second-opinion letter engine) lives on the private-GP spoke.
The closest things we’ve already built
- mendbuddyour own multi-channel AI agent for inbound conversations across web chat, WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and inbound + outbound voice. The triage in problem 1, the WhatsApp-first reminders in problem 2, the lab-result-to-owner pattern on the vet side, the Antalya-rebuttal nudge ladder in problem 5 are all clinic-shaped versions of this. Trained on your practice’s scope language and your clinician-voice. See Mendbuddy.
- pharmaceutical-analytics.coma custom analytics dashboard we built for an analytics consultancy. The practice-manager KPI surface - no-show rate by clinician, recall-to-rebook by ladder stage, PMI claim age by insurer, Tabeo conversion by clinician, lifetime value by wellness-plan tier - is the same shape: operational data captured at every patient touchpoint, decision dashboard for the principal. See Pharmaceutical Analytics.
- mendmyiour founder’s service-business storefront with intake + payment + status-comms cascade end-to-end. The patient-side loop on a clinic site is shape-wise the same, with the PMS taking the role of the service-business back end. See Mendmyi.
If your week’s narrower than the whole of the above
Four sub-audiences whose week looks different enough that they have their own pages:
- Private dental →single-chair private and mixed NHS / private practices; the treatment-plan finance moment, the 6-month recall as a revenue annuity, the IRMER side of in-house radiography, the UDA-reporting Friday-afternoon job, the Antalya-comparison-shopping defence.
- Aesthetic / cosmetic →injectable clinics, aesthetic-nurse practices, cosmetic-led dental, vet aesthetic adjacency; the photo-consent vault that doesn’t fall apart at week three, the JCCP / Save Face audit-pack assembly, the MHRA POM-S remote-prescribing wrinkle, the Saturday-Botox slot economics, the before / after gallery as the marketing engine.
- Private GP →solo private GPs through small group practices; the PMI billing concierge in depth, the telehealth-to-PMS glue, the controlled-drugs register, the second-opinion documentation flow, the patient records-request workflow.
- Small-animal vet →single-practice independents through small multi-site groups; the lab-result-to-owner notify, the vaccination recall ladder (Lepto / DHP / KC / FeLV), the Provet Cloud / ezyVet integration shape, the pet-insurance claim engine (Petplan, Bought By Many, Agria), the monthly wellness-plan DD lifecycle.
Physio / chiro / osteo / talking therapy / podiatry / audiology practices: the hub above is your page. The recall ladder, the outcome-measure capture (PHQ-9 / GAD-7 / Oswestry / WHODAS where the clinical pattern uses them), and the PMI-billing concierge cover the load-bearing operational moments - the texture is in discovery, not on a separate page.
Adjacent verticals
- Domiciliary careadjacent regulator (CQC), different operational spine (rota / mileage / care-worker retention). Home-care agencies that also run primary-care home visits share a software shape with this hub.
- Pet servicesvet-adjacent for the boarding, grooming, day-care side of the pet relationship.
- Equinemixed-practice vets doing equine work alongside small-animal will want the equine hub for the rotational species-specific pieces.
- Lettingsadjacent for the property-side of the practice’s premises operation; not patient-care-shaped.
FAQ
Will the no-show recovery loop work with my PMS (Cliniko / Dentally / Pabau / Provet Cloud / Heydoc / Power Diary / WriteUpp)?
Yes for all the named ones. Each exposes an API or webhook for booking events; we read the booking, write back the status transitions (confirmed / cancelled / rebooked / no-show), and surface the waitlist matches. Practices where the PMS is older (R4, SOE in places) - we discuss what’s available; sometimes it’s a daily export rather than real-time, the loop still works just with a longer cadence.
Will WhatsApp reminders be compliant with health-data rules?
Service messages (appointment reminders, recall, treatment status, lab-result-ready) sit under soft opt-in once the patient has given you her number for clinical care. Promotional content (whitening offers, summer treatment specials, vet wellness-plan upsells) is held on a separate explicit-consent list with audit trail and a clean opt-out. We build the system so the two channels can’t blur into each other by accident - which is the actual ICO concern, not the channel itself. Data residency: EU-region throughout.
Does the smart intake handle special-category health data correctly?
Yes. Health data is special-category under UK GDPR Article 9; the lawful basis we configure is Article 9(2)(h) - provision of healthcare. Encryption at rest, EU-region storage, role-scoped access (receptionist sees demographic, clinician sees clinical), audit log on every read, and a privacy notice the patient sees at the start of the form.
Will the treatment-finance concierge work for Tabeo, Chrysalis, and V12?
All three. The build is panel-agnostic - your existing broker relationship stays as-is; we wire the plan-to-link generator and the status-callback so the financing decision comes back into the PMS as a record state, not a separate spreadsheet.
Will the system replace my PMS?
No. The PMS is fine at what the PMS does - the chair, the diary, the chart, the prescribing pad. What we replace is the bit between the PMS and the patient - the reminder layer, the recall ladder, the review-request timing, the treatment-finance link, the PMI claim reconciliation. If your PMS is also doing those things and they’re working, we don’t touch them.
Do you handle the CQC / GDC / GMC / RCVS / HCPC / JCCP / Save Face / MHRA / Healthcode side on my behalf?
No. Every regulator carries a clinician-side accountability that stays with the practitioner. What the system does is make the evidence trail assemble itself as you work - DBS register up to date, IRMER duty-holder roles current, MHRA Yellow Card adverse-events log, JCCP / Save Face membership status, indemnity renewal, CD register if you’re prescribing controlled drugs. When inspection or audit lands, the assembled folder is one URL; the inspection itself is yours to run.
What does it cost?
Every build is scoped per practice - depends on practice size, the PMS you already run, which of the six sketches above are in scope, whether multi-site / group-practice rollups are part of the brief. We talk it through, agree the scope and the price in writing, then build. Send an enquiry and we’ll come back with a sketch. See pricing for how we work.
How long until something’s live?
Most clinic builds we’ve sketched go from scope conversation to a working version you can test against real bookings in a few weeks, then a couple more weeks of running real patient comms through it before go-live. Exact cadence depends on what’s being replaced.
Tell us what your week looks like
Send an enquiry - what practice you run, what specialty, what PMS, where the operational pain sits (Mondays, Fridays, the recall slip, the PMI eating Friday, the treatment plan you almost lost). We’ll come back with a sketch of what we’d build and what it would cost. No calendar, no demo to sit through. Email reply, scoped sketch, you decide.