Practices
Your phone answered, your book worked, your people paid.
Two desks for practices, run by our own team inside your own practice software, during your own operating hours. Your reception keeps the counter. We take the work that never reaches the top of their list, under the Privacy Act and your own access controls.
Owner-led medical, dental and allied health practices across Australia.
The moment
The phone rings out at eleven on a Tuesday, in a practice that is open, fully staffed and running normally.
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.
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.
- Calls, web enquiries and messages answered in your practice name, on your own number, during your own operating hours.
- Bookings, rescheduling and new patient intake handled 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.
- Recruiting: role definition, posting, 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.
- Registration and credential currency maintained, with expiries tracked ninety days ahead.
- Payroll processed on your own cycle, with your practice remaining the employer throughout.
What we do not do
The boundaries are the product.
Not the fine print. These are contractual rather than cultural, 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 own registrationd people.
We work alongside your team, not in place of it. What we remove is the second job that was handed to somebody hired for the first one.
You employ your own people and choose 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 maintain the records and the calendar. The regulatory obligation stays with you. We make it straightforward to meet, and we do not assume it.
We handle your information under the privacy framework that applies to your practice, with access agreed in writing before we are given anything. Access is role-limited, logged, and revoked the day somebody leaves the role. The obligation remains yours; ours is contractual to you.
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 the appointment book, the enquiries and the follow-ups. We do not touch the clinical record.
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 them, 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.
Proof of operations
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.
How it starts
Inquiring gets you a conversation.
- 01The review
A structured conversation about how your operation 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 organisation.
- 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.
Book
Book a 30-minute review.
Thirty minutes on how your operation 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.
Nothing is signed on the call.