Inquiry check
Watches for unanswered inquiries and overdue recalls.
All workflow examples
Workflow example: Appointment-based clinics
Business profile
A business and workflow you can recognize.
A dental clinic with a front desk, office manager, and practitioner. Work arrives through phone and email and connects to the calendar and approved patient records.
The challenge
Where the work starts to slip.
Calls and messages wait while staff help patients. Missing intake details create repeated calls and delay booking. Recall follow-up stops when urgent front-desk work takes priority. The front desk carries too many separate follow-up queues.
Canadian context: Statistics Canada’s Survey of Oral Health Care Providers reports staffing or HR challenges at 82% of Canadian dentist offices and operational challenges at 76%, led by administrative, financial, or operational work (2023/2025).
The review
Measure the real workflow before changing it.
We observe two weeks of front-desk activity, recording each inquiry’s channel, received time, first acknowledgement, resolution time, owner, and next action. We review 100 consecutive intake submissions for required-field gaps and place 100 overdue recall patients into a controlled, approved reminder cohort. The baseline is measured locally, not assumed.
How the work moves
Routine steps move forward. Decisions stay with your team.
Patient context
Collects approved non-clinical context.
Routine response
Prepares routine responses and appointment options.
Reply handling
Sorts replies as booked, rescheduled, needing information, or escalated.
Outcome check
Checks the booking, receipt of details, or need for staff follow-up.
Clinical advice and treatment decisions stay with the clinic. The workflow only supports non-clinical work.
Interactive prototype
See how a recall reaches a verified booking.
Choose a patient response, review the prepared reminder, and see how the system adapts while clinical decisions stay with the clinic.
- System support
- Watch for overdue recalls, collect approved non-clinical context, prepare reminders, and classify replies.
- Your team decides
- Approve reminders, handle clinical questions, and manage sensitive exceptions.
Recall patientOverdue 9 months
- Patient
- JB (last visit Mar 2025)
- Channel
- Email + phone
- Current state
- Awaiting approval
- ✓Recall detected
- ✓Patient context assembled
- ✓Reminder prepared
- 4Approval
- 5Reminder sent
- 6Reply classified
- 7Outcome verified
- 8Record updated
Prepared reminder
A friendly recall reminder is ready for review.
The system used the last visit date, approved contact preferences, and the clinic's recall policy. It did not include clinical advice or make a diagnosis.
Activity record
Recall detected, patient context assembled, reminder prepared, and approval requested.
The rollout
Start controlled. Earn capability from evidence.
Week 1: Connect and baseline
Map inquiries, intake, and recall queues. Give every item an owner and next action.
Week 2: Observe and prepare
Draft acknowledgements, appointment options, and recall reminders for staff approval.
Weeks 3 to 4: Operate
Send approved reminders, classify replies, confirm bookings, and escalate exceptions.
Weeks 5 to 8: Earn responsibility
Send routine acknowledgements and reminders within agreed limits. Route clinical or sensitive content to staff.
The results
Make the scenario and the measures explicit.
This illustrative scenario is grounded in a randomized German dental field experiment by Altmann and Traxler from 2010 to 2011. It is not a Canadian or AdiAstra promise.
- Per 100 due recall patients: about 9 book within 30 days without a reminder (8.9%) and about 19 book with a reminder (19.3%) in the experiment.
- Experimental difference: about 10 additional bookings per 100 due patients. This is external evidence, not a promised outcome.
- Pilot design target: 100% of inbound inquiries receive a timestamp, owner, and next action.
- Pilot design target: 95% receive an automatic acknowledgement within 10 business minutes. Urgent or clinical content routes immediately to a person.
- Pilot design target: 100% of submitted forms receive required-field validation before ready status.
- No-show and administrative-time improvement appears only after a comparable local before/after pilot.
What stays with your team
The clinic keeps control of clinical and sensitive decisions.
- Clinical advice and treatment decisions stay with practitioners.
- Sensitive patient situations and policy exceptions go to staff.
- When a patient relationship requires personal contact, a person makes the call.
- Every draft cites approved records. Missing facts are surfaced, not guessed.
What comes next
Expand only when the evidence supports it.
Once intake and recall are running, the same operating model can support scheduling continuity and follow-up. The workflow can use the clinic’s established booking process to keep the next non-clinical action visible.