How PHYX Physiotherapy built a premium patient intake experience in Hong Kong — and saved HK$240,000 a year doing it.
Sebastian Swarbreck didn’t set out to find just a form builder. He set out to extend his clinic’s reception coverage without hiring a second receptionist, while keeping the patient experience consistent with the premium clinic he was building. What he found became something he now considers a competitive advantage, and would rather his competitors didn’t copy.
PHYX Physiotherapy opens at 7:30am. The first person through the door is whichever clinician is on the early shift — not the receptionist.
“The first thing that happens is we switch on the iPad, turn on the music and fire up Finger-Ink,” says Sebastian Swarbreck, co-founder and CEO. From that moment until 9am, when the receptionist arrives, every patient who walks in checks themselves in by tapping their details into an iPad mounted at the front desk. The receptionist runs the front desk through the day, with patients still self-checking on the iPad whenever the desk is briefly unattended. From 5:30pm onward, the iPad is the front desk again until close at 7:30pm.
It’s a small operational detail with significant business consequences — and it’s why a clinic with four physiotherapists and a single receptionist runs a 12-hour operating day without the patient experience falling off.
Sebastian is not a physiotherapist. He is a non-clinician founder who built PHYX in Central, Hong Kong’s most expensive commercial district, with a deliberate market position: premium clinical experience, accessible price point. PHYX charges less than the traditional one-on-one clinics that operate at HK$2,000 a session, and feels far more premium than the high-volume conveyor-belt practices that charge HK$600–800. Eight physiotherapists, modern facilities, every patient-facing detail branded from the moment they arrive.
Operating hours — 7:30am to 7:30pm to fit around Hong Kong’s working day — created an awkward problem. Covering reception across that span properly meant hiring two or more receptionists. “I didn’t want to have that issue of having multiple receptionists,” Sebastian recalls.
“It effectively saves me 240,000 Hong Kong dollars a year, which is pretty significant.”
— Sebastian Swarbreck, CEO & Co-Founder, PHYX Physiotherapy
Cliniko was Sebastian’s patient management system from day one. He had used it before, trusted its reliability, and treated the choice as settled. What Cliniko’s native forms couldn’t do was deliver the look and feel of a premium clinic. For a practice whose entire commercial proposition rested on patient experience, that was a problem.
He found Finger-Ink in the Cliniko integrations directory. Native sync with Cliniko was a non-negotiable requirement — anything that didn’t reliably write back to the patient record was disqualified. Finger-Ink synced cleanly. He looked at a few alternatives, started a trial, and built his first branded form. Then he sent it to a physiotherapist friend to test.
The friend emailed back saying how slick everything looked, calling it a standout differentiator. That email was the moment he committed.
Setup took about an hour. Connecting to Cliniko was, in his words, “so easy.” The longer task was building out the branded forms themselves — the layer that would carry the PHYX brand into every patient’s first interaction with the clinic.
“Finger-Ink helps us deliver that premium experience right from the start.”
— Sebastian Swarbreck, CEO & Co-Founder, PHYX Physiotherapy
Halfway through our conversation, Sebastian stopped and corrected himself.
“Scratch everything I said before about looking at the forms,” he said. “That’s why I found you 100%. I didn’t want to have that issue of having multiple receptionists.”
The branded forms were what made him commit. The check-in kiosk — the digital receptionist for the hours when a human one wasn’t there — was the real reason he was looking. Forms were, in his words, “a mega added bonus.” Both products now do work that the clinic depends on, but they entered the story in a particular order that’s worth noticing: he came for covering the front desk, stayed for the brand consistency.
Between 7:30am and 9am, the iPad is the front desk. Patients arrive, type in their phone number, the system finds their booking in Cliniko, they check themselves in. If they have outstanding forms, they complete them on the iPad in the waiting area — or finish them later at home or on their phone in transit.
From 9am, the receptionist runs the front desk. She greets patients, handles the moments that need a human, and manages the workflow that comes with eight physiotherapists running parallel sessions. The iPad stays on. Patients still self-check whenever the desk is briefly unattended — a phone call, a step away, a busy moment with another patient. After 5:30pm, the iPad is the front desk again until close.
This is what Finger-Ink does for a clinic with one receptionist and a 12-hour day. It handles the patient lookup, the form completion, the check-in confirmation. The receptionist gets to do the work that actually needs them.
Without Finger-Ink, this clinic doesn’t run these hours on one receptionist. Not at this standard.
“I'm not going to push it too much to everyone else — it's a great differentiator for us.”
— Sebastian Swarbreck, on whether he recommends Finger-Ink to other Hong Kong clinics
Sebastian has recommended Finger-Ink once — to his former employer, who runs on a different patient management system. Beyond that, he keeps it to himself.
“Clients love it,” he says, “and the rest of the local market hasn’t caught up yet. It’s part of the reason we’re doing quite well.”
It’s an unusual thing for a customer to say. Most software gets recommended enthusiastically because the buyer wants to validate their choice. Sebastian has the opposite instinct: the product is working well enough that he’d rather his competitors didn’t catch on. Branded patient intake — forms and check-in that look and feel like PHYX, not a generic software — is doing real competitive work for the clinic, and he’d like to keep it that way.
PHYX is opening a second clinic in Tsim Sha Tsui within twelve months of the first. Rolling Finger-Ink out at the new site is, in Sebastian’s words, a given. The system that lets a single receptionist run a 12-hour day in Central is the system the second clinic will run on too — from the day it opens.
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Patient check-in kiosk and intake forms for allied health clinics.
