- Our own team
- Never a call centre
- Nothing clinical, ever
The phone rings out at eleven on a Tuesday, in a practice that is open, fully staffed and running normally.
We run your front desk, and everything behind it.
Two services, run by our own team inside the systems you already use. The Patient Access Desk answers the calls and works the book. The Workforce Desk hires, inducts and pays the people who do the work. Take one, or take both.
The two desks
- Built for owner-led practices
- Two to fifteen practitioners
- One or two sites
- A front desk of one to four
Why it happens
Nobody is doing anything wrong.
A front desk is single-threaded. One person, one thing at a time. The patient standing in front of them always wins, and that is the correct decision, made correctly, every time.
So the phone rings out while the practice is open. The recall list never gets run, because it is the only job at the desk with nobody standing in front of it. And hiring, inducting and paying people becomes a second job handed to somebody who already has one.
Both problems are structural. Neither is a staffing failure, and neither gets solved by asking the same people to try harder.
The front desk, drawn
A mechanism, not a measurement
1
thing the person at the desk can do at any one moment
A definition of one person, not a measurement of yours.
5
queues live at the same time while the practice is open
Counted from the lanes below. Each one is named elsewhere on this site.
At the counter
Always wins, correctly
The phone
Rings out
Web enquiries
Still in the queue
A cancellation
Reached, eventually
The recall list
Never reached
Every grey cell is a correct decision. There is one person, the patient at the counter is always right to win, and the rest of the work is deferred by somebody competent, every day.
Read this as a table
| Queue | Moments served | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| At the counter | 9 of 12 | Always wins, correctly |
| The phone | 1 of 12 | Rings out |
| Web enquiries | 1 of 12 | Still in the queue |
| A cancellation | 1 of 12 | Reached, eventually |
| The recall list | 0 of 12 | Never reached |
Counts taken from the diagram above
Across all twelve moments shown, exactly one queue is ever being served and the other four are waiting. The four states used are: Being served, Waiting, Gone, and Nothing waiting.
- The desk is on it
- Arrived, waiting
- Gone
- Nothing waiting
Twelve moments in an ordinary open hour, in order. Not twelve minutes, and not a record of anything. No timings appear in this diagram because this site makes no claim about response times.
The two desks
Two desks. Take one, or take both.
For healthcare practices
The Patient Access Desk
The calls, the bookings and the follow-up that decide how much of your available work actually gets done.
- Calls, web enquiries and messages answered in your practice name, on your own number, during your operating hours.
- Bookings, rescheduling and new patient intake made inside your own practice software, under your own booking rules.
- Recall and reactivation worked by phone, to the interval the practitioner set.
- Cancellations and failures to attend chased the same day, while rebooking is still likely.
- A monthly report covering every enquiry, how fast it was answered, whether it booked, and where it did not, the reason.
For healthcare now, other industries later
The Workforce Desk
The hiring, the induction, the records and the payroll that decide whether you have the people to do the work.
- Recruitment: role definition, advertising, screening and the first contact with applicants.
- Onboarding owned end to end, rather than spread across several inboxes.
- Induction and training, evidenced with dates and completion records.
- Worker compliance maintained, with expiries tracked ninety days ahead.
- Payroll processed on your own cycle, with your practice remaining the employer throughout.
Why most take both
The two problems regenerate each other.
A practice that finally staffs its desk properly has moved the bottleneck into hiring. A practice that hires efficiently still has a desk where one person does one thing at a time. Solve either one on its own and the other becomes the constraint, which is why the two rarely stay separate for long. They are still sold separately, and you are welcome to start with one.
What we do not do
Here is the catch, before you go looking for it.
These are contractual rather than cultural, they are the same on both desks, and they do not move.
No triage, no assessment of urgency, no advice of any kind. Anything clinical stops with us and goes to your team, under a protocol agreed in writing before we take a single call. All clinical and professional judgement stays with your practitioners.
Greeting, payments and the care of the person physically in the room stay with your team permanently. A remote operation cannot do that work and we will not pretend otherwise.
We work alongside your reception, not in place of it. What we remove is the second job that was handed to somebody hired for the first one.
Your practice employs its own people and chooses every hire. We recruit on your behalf, administer the employment lifecycle and process payroll. We are not an employer of record, we do not supply labour, and we never place our own people into your roles.
We work the appointment book, the enquiries and the follow-ups. We do not touch clinical notes.
We cover your own operating hours, whatever they are. If you open on a Saturday morning, that is part of your operating hours and it is covered. We do not extend past your trading hours, because the expensive problem is the call missed while you are open.
Recall contact follows the interval the practitioner set. We never contact a patient in order to reach a number, and we do not solicit reviews or testimonials.
We maintain the records and the calendar. The regulatory obligation stays with your practice. We make it straightforward to meet, and we do not assume it.
Proof of operations
This is not a concept waiting for a first client. Novada already runs a managed desk for care providers, answering calls overnight, every night of the year, inside those providers' own systems and to their own escalation protocols.
That work carries a harder version of most of the constraints on this page, in a harder form: a stricter clinical boundary, a more demanding regulatory environment, and consequences for a mishandled call considerably more serious than a missed booking.
What we will not claim
We will not quote you an industry statistic. We went looking for the sources behind this market's most-quoted numbers and mostly did not find them. We do not guarantee bookings, revenue or conversion rates, we publish no patient testimonials, and we have no practice case studies yet because the service is new. What we commit to is that the work is done, that it is measured against your own baseline, and that the monthly report shows what happened to every enquiry including the ones that did not convert.
What gets measured
Your own baseline, or nothing.
A baseline is taken before anything changes, so the reporting measures you against your own starting position rather than an industry figure. This is the report. It is empty because your numbers are yours, and we will not print somebody else's in their place.
The monthly report
No figures in it, on purpose
| What is measured | Baselinebefore anything changes | This monththe month being reported | Changeagainst your own baseline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every enquiry received, by channel | Not shown | Not shown | Not shown |
| How quickly each one was answered | Not shown | Not shown | Not shown |
| Whether it converted to a booking | Not shown | Not shown | Not shown |
| Time from offer accepted to productive start | Not shown | Not shown | Not shown |
| Registration and credential currency | Not shown | Not shown | Not shown |
| Where it did not convert, the recorded reason | Written, not scored. Not shown here. | ||
These cells are blank on purpose. The first numbers in them will be yours, measured before we start, so the only thing the reporting can compare you against is where you actually were.
No industry figure is used anywhere in this report
This is the structure of the report, not a sample of one. There are no numbers in it because there are none to show yet: the service is new to practices, there are no case studies, and a figure borrowed from somebody else would not be about your practice anyway.
How it starts
Enquiring gets you a conversation, not a sales process.
- 01The review
A structured conversation about how your practice actually runs. The output is an honest assessment of whether this fits. A meaningful proportion conclude that it does not yet, and we say so.
- 02The proposal
Scope, the protocols that will govern the work, what is explicitly excluded, and the measurement baseline. In writing, with nothing improvised on the call.
- 03The agreement
A services agreement, signed before anything is accessed, under the privacy framework that applies to your practice.
- 04Live
Access provisioning, protocol sign-off, baseline measurement, and your named coordinators introduced to your team. The first month is reviewed in detail with you.
Questions
The questions principals ask first.
Do you replace our reception team?
No, and we will not describe it that way. Your team keeps the counter, the greeting, the payments and the person in the room. What we take is the work that never reaches the top of their list, and the second job somebody was given on top of the one they were hired for.
Do we have to take both desks?
No. They are sold separately and you are welcome to start with one. Solving either problem tends to move the constraint onto the other, which is why the two rarely stay separate for long, but that is a decision you make later rather than now.
What software do you work in?
Yours. We work inside the practice software you already run, and we go deep on a small number of systems rather than claiming all of them. Tell us what you use on the call and we will tell you straight whether we already support it. Nothing migrates, and your software stays the system of record.
What happens on the review call?
Thirty minutes on how your practice actually runs: where enquiries come from, what happens to them now, and how hiring works today. You leave with a written assessment of whether this fits. A meaningful proportion conclude that it does not yet, and we say so.
Book
Book a 30-minute review.
Thirty minutes on how your practice actually runs. You leave with a written assessment of whether this fits, including if it does not, and a picture of your own numbers before anything changes.
The engagement runs quarter to quarter, with no commitment beyond the current one. Nothing is signed on the call.