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Case Study · Healthcare · Private Practice · Melbourne

From a drowning inbox to a 5-minute morning check-in

5+ hrs/week → ~0
Time spent on referral admin
0
Referrals missed since go-live
Same-day
Response time to referring GPs
100%
Referral capture rate
Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call

No pitch — I'll tell you honestly whether this is worth building for your practice.

Every Monday, before

Inbox — 5 unread
🏥Referral — GP Letter (New Patient)
📋NDIS Plan — Referral Attached
📧Re: Self-referral enquiry
🏥Urgent — GP Referral, please action
📋Referral form (scanned PDF)

Referrals triaged by whoever opened the inbox first. No record of who was contacted, or when.

Every Monday, now

Referral Dashboard — live
12
Referrals this week
2
Awaiting confirmation
83%
Conversion rate
GP referrals
55%
NDIS
30%
Self-referral
15%

One glance. Every referral tracked, prioritised, and already drafted into Cliniko for review.

How it works

📧
Step 1
A referral arrives

by email, exactly like today. GP letter, NDIS plan, or self-referral.

🔎
Step 2
It gets read automatically

name, condition, urgency, and referring GP are picked up, even from a messy PDF.

🩺
Step 3
It's prepared for you to approve

a ready-to-confirm patient entry appears in Cliniko. Nothing is finalised without you.

📊
Step 4
You see the whole picture

a live dashboard shows referral volume, sources, and gaps — no more guessing.

How this works technically
Referral Intelligence Pipeline — Architecture Diagram
SOURCEEXTRACTTRANSFORM + AILOADVISUALISE📧Referral EmailsGmail / Inbox🏥GP ReferralsUnstructured text📋Patient NotesManual intake forms⚙️EXTRACTEmail parsingGmail API / IMAPRegex + rules enginePython ETL scripts🔄TRANSFORMClean + normalise fieldsDate / name / condition parsingStructured row creation🧠AI ANALYSISOpenAI / LLM text analysisPatient need classificationPersonalised recommendationsUrgency + priority scoring📊LOADGoogle Sheets APIStructured referral rowsAI recommendations colAuto-timestamp + flagsBooking-ready format📈LOOKER STUDIOLive dashboard📬 Referrals by week🎯 Conversion funnel🧠 Client need themes📅 Booking performance⚡ Practice gapsOUTCOMES →✓ Zero missed referrals✓ AI booking recommendations✓ Practice gap insights✓ Content strategy from data✓ Live funnel view

Questions you're probably asking

Is my patients' data safe?

Your patients' data is never used for anything except their own referral. It isn't used to train AI models. It isn't shared with other clinics, sold, or shown to any third party. It moves from your inbox into your own Cliniko account, and nowhere else. You can revoke access at any time, and if you ever end this engagement, your data is deleted from our systems within 7 days — your Cliniko records stay exactly where they always were: yours.

Full data-handling breakdown below ↓

I'm not technical — can I actually use this?

You keep using Cliniko exactly as you do today. There's no new software to learn, no dashboard you're forced to check, nothing to configure. The system works quietly in the background; you just click "confirm" on a prepared patient entry instead of typing it from scratch.

Built and tested with a real solo practitioner, not a developer.

Isn't this too expensive for a solo practice?

A fixed price, scoped after you see a free working prototype using your own de-identified sample referrals — no surprise invoices. Typically cost depends on personalised requirements, which is less than a single month of part-time admin support, as a one-time investment you own.

See full cost comparison below ↓

Will it work with my software?

Built and confirmed working with Cliniko via its official API. If you use Halaxy or Power Diary, the referral-reading and prioritising steps are identical — only the final step (how it reaches your software) is adapted, and that's confirmed with you before any work begins, not assumed.

Cliniko integration live and verified — see the case study build.

Options considered

Hire part-time admin
Cost
~$800–1,200/month
Time to live
Weeks (hiring, training)
Outcome
Still manual, still error-prone
Off-the-shelf software add-on
Cost
Ongoing subscription
Time to live
Immediate
Outcome
Can't read unstructured referrals, rigid
This build
Cost
One-time payment
Time to live
~9 days
Outcome
Automated, tailored, owned outright

Results

Time spent on referral admin
Before
~5+ hrs/week
After
Automated intake; practitioner reviews only
Referrals missed or delayed
Before
At least one significant miss
After
Zero since go-live
Visibility into referral sources/conversion
Before
None
After
Live dashboard, updated automatically
Time to first response to referrer
Before
Days, inconsistent
After
Same-day acknowledgement

Figures confirmed with the client prior to publishing; full methodology available on request.

What happens to your patients' data, in plain terms

Your patients' data is never used for anything except their own referral. It isn't used to train AI models. It isn't shared with other clinics, sold, or shown to any third party. It moves from your inbox into your own Cliniko account, and nowhere else.

  • Only named individuals can access it — no shared logins, ever.
  • Your Cliniko API key is generated by you, and you can switch it off instantly, without needing us.
  • Data isn't kept permanently in any system we control — it's processed, handed to Cliniko for your review, and cleared from our pipeline shortly after.
  • If anything unusual ever happened, you'd be told directly and immediately — not left to find out later.
  • If you ever end this engagement, your working data is deleted from our systems within 7 days. Your Cliniko records were always yours and stay exactly where they are.
Technical detail, for anyone who wants it

Hosting is in an Australian region on Google Cloud infrastructure. All data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest using the storage provider's default encryption. Named subprocessors involved in processing a referral are OpenAI (text analysis only, not model training) and Cliniko (your own account). An audit log of every referral processed is retained for 30 days for troubleshooting, then cleared.

I used to dread opening that inbox on a Monday. Now I open a dashboard instead of a pile of PDFs.

Practitioner, name withheld for privacy

Is this a fit for your practice?

This system was built for a solo Cliniko user. If you're on Halaxy or Power Diary, the referral-reading and prioritising steps are identical — only the final step changes to match your software.

Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call