Voicemail gets checked at 13:10, between the morning list and the afternoon one. Four messages. Two want an appointment, one wants to move Thursday to Friday, one is a man selling card terminals.
You ring the two back. One picks up. The other rings you at 17:40 while you are with a patient and leaves a second voicemail. By Thursday one of them has booked somewhere else. The patient is free at lunch, you are free at six, and the two of you are never free at the same time.
The system sits on the three doors a request comes through. The form on your website, the voicemail transcript, and the WhatsApp number on your Google listing. It reads the request, looks at the real diary in Cliniko, Jane or Semble, and replies with three free slots that fit. Initial assessment, forty-five minutes, with the practitioner who treats knees.
The patient picks one. It is booked, in your system, under their name, with the right appointment type. You get a one-line note in the diary and the patient gets a confirmation with the address and what to bring.
Then the reminders. Two days before, a text with the date, time and address, and a line that says reply MOVE if you need to change it. Two hours before, a shorter one. If someone replies MOVE, the same slot logic runs again and the gap is offered to the waiting list before anyone at the desk has noticed it opened. The two-hour one is the one that matters: people forget at 08:00 what they agreed at 13:00 last Tuesday, and a nudge at 09:00 for an 11:00 appointment catches the ones who were about to stay home.
Nothing clinical happens here. If a message says my back went this morning and I cannot stand up, it goes straight to you with the phone number, and the patient is told you will call. The system books appointments. It does not decide what anyone needs.
This is the kind of thing we build. It runs in your own accounts: your Cliniko, your WhatsApp number, your Gmail. How many voicemails did you not get back to last week?