Northbay Clinic: patient follow-up on autopilot
Northbay Clinic runs a busy multi-practitioner outpatient practice. Their front desk was excellent at handling people in the room — but follow-up, the quiet work that fills next month's calendar, kept slipping.
The bottleneck
Recall reminders, post-visit check-ins and rebooking nudges all depended on someone remembering to send them between phone calls. When the day got busy — which was always — follow-up was the first thing to fall off. Empty slots and no-shows followed.
"Every gap in the calendar was a patient who'd simply never been reminded to come back."
What we built
We built a follow-up engine that runs without anyone thinking about it, designed to be careful with sensitive health context:
- Smart recalls: patients due for a check-up are messaged automatically on the right cadence for their visit type.
- AI-drafted, human-tone replies: common scheduling questions are answered instantly, with anything clinical handed straight to staff.
- No-show recovery: missed appointments trigger a gentle, immediate rebooking offer instead of a lost slot.
- Compliance-aware logging: every message is logged and access-controlled, keeping the practice's records clean.
In healthcare, tone and privacy matter as much as efficiency. We kept a human in the loop for anything clinical and automated only the repetitive scheduling work — the part that was being dropped anyway.
The results
Booked visits rose 35% in the first quarter as patients who'd have quietly lapsed were reminded at the right moment. No-shows nearly halved thanks to instant rebooking. And the front desk did it all without a single new hire — they simply stopped doing the part a system does better.
Where they're headed next
We're now extending the same engine to intake forms and pre-visit instructions, shaving minutes off every appointment before it even starts.
