Rebuilding patient intake for a 40-clinic network
Replaced a paper-and-fax intake process with a scheduling and records platform used by 900 staff across 40 clinics.
- Reduction in intake time
- 72%
- Daily active staff
- 900+
- Unplanned downtime incidents
- 0
The challenge
Intake ran on scanned forms and a scheduling tool that had not been updated in a decade. Records were rekeyed by hand at each site, appointment data drifted between clinics, and any change to the process required a vendor ticket with a six-week turnaround. Compliance review had flagged the audit trail as inadequate.
Our approach
Ran a four-week discovery across six representative clinics, shadowing intake staff rather than relying on the process documentation, which turned out to describe a workflow nobody actually followed.
Built the scheduling core first as the highest-risk component, and put it in front of two pilot clinics within nine weeks.
Designed the records service with an append-only audit log from the start, so compliance review ran alongside development instead of blocking release.
Migrated clinics in waves of five, keeping the legacy system readable throughout so no site was ever without a fallback.
The outcome
All 40 clinics moved onto the platform over five months with no cutover weekend and no data loss. Average intake dropped from 18 minutes to 5. Northwind's own engineers now own the codebase; we spent the final two months pairing rather than writing features.
Working on something similar?
If this looks like your situation, we can probably tell you within one call whether the same approach applies.