Imagine this: you wake up on a Tuesday morning with a serious migraine. No work for you today, you think. You call in sick, then head to your clinic’s website to book an appointment ASAP. Wednesday or Thursday would be ideal.

The site takes you to a calendar. It’s packed out with bright red, each half-hour slot showing ‘appointment taken’. Head still throbbing, you have to manually click through each day’s schedule, searching for an opening.

The page is slow. It takes a long time. And the calendar doesn’t show you the soonest appointment available; that’s for you to find out for yourself.

One of the clinicians, meanwhile, has just arrived at work. She notices her schedule looks even busier than usual today. Because she’s double-booked not once, not twice, but in three different slots.

There’s definitely no time to review clients’ notes before appointments – though there usually isn’t anyway. Lunch will be a 10 minute affair again.

In short: nobody’s happy.

Before Rite NRG began work, that’s what was happening. The clinic was using a legacy booking system that didn’t find calendar gaps for clients, didn’t prevent appointment clashes, didn’t assign appointments to clinicians or locations and didn’t even check clinicians’ capacity before booking.

Office admins were managing the system manually themselves. Only they had the full picture of the business process and operations: therapy reports, lab tests, clinicians’ schedules, report writing & appointment prep, team meetings, payments, refunds and cancellations.

And because the system couldn’t link with any other tools, like a user portal, health records, payment & invoicing – they had to input the same information into several systems, multiple times.

It was completely inefficient. Inevitably, mistakes were made.