A boutique clinic with no front desk

Richmond Rehab is small by design. Three physios, a few massage therapists, and a tight focus on patient outcomes. There’s no front desk reception, and there hasn’t been one in a long time.

Luke describes himself as the owner, the clinician, the manager, the marketer, the accountant, and — with an IT background going back to writing the original Richmond Rehab website in HTML twenty years ago — the unofficial systems person. He runs the clinic systems-first because he has to. There is no spare capacity in his week to absorb broken workflows.

“I don’t have the time to do what I need to do now, let alone things that I’ve automated.”

— Luke Anthony, Owner & Principal Physiotherapist, Richmond Rehab

Running a clinic without a receptionist creates two problems at once. The first is what to do at the front desk — patients arriving for their appointment need a way to announce themselves, complete any outstanding paperwork, and let their practitioner know they’re ready. The second is what happens to all the admin that a receptionist would otherwise absorb. Patient information needs collecting, updating, and entering into Cliniko. Without a receptionist to do that, it falls back on Luke and the practitioners.

Before Finger-Ink, both problems were solved by hand. Patients filled in paper forms when they arrived. Luke scanned the completed forms back in. Then he re-keyed the data into Cliniko, by hand. Three manual jobs, every new patient. He’d asked the team to keep records up to date as part of the patient interaction. By his own admission, that “absolutely never happened.”

He needed something better. Forms that didn’t need re-keying. Intake that didn’t depend on someone remembering to chase it. A way of running a clinic that didn’t cost him an hour every time a new patient walked in.

The search: nothing else cleared the bar

Luke is, by his own description, the kind of person who keeps looking until something is right. He evaluated the obvious options first.

Google Forms

Cheap. Familiar. But the privacy story didn’t work for patient health information, and there was no Cliniko sync — so the manual data-entry job remained. The forms also looked, in his words, “pretty janky.” As a representation of his clinic’s brand, it was a non-starter.

Cliniko’s native forms

Available, included, dismissed. “No logic flow, no branding,” in Luke’s words. Functional for the most basic intake, but nothing he’d put in front of a patient.

The all-in-one platforms

Luke had also tried one of the broader category platforms — the kind that bundle forms with AI receptionists, communications, and clinical notes. More features in absolute terms, but the patient-facing forms looked, in his words, “terrible,” and feedback he gave the platform went unanswered. He left.

“I’d rather pay for two specialist subscriptions than put a clunky form in front of a patient.”

— Luke Anthony, on choosing specialist over all-in-one

What he set up

Luke found Finger-Ink in the Cliniko connected apps directory. He started a trial, built his first branded forms, watched them sync directly into the Cliniko patient record, and never went back. That was eight years ago.

The forms solved the immediate problem — the three manual jobs per new patient — but they didn’t yet solve the front desk. The Finger-Ink check-in kiosk shipped about six months after Luke became a customer. He adopted it as soon as it was available, and it has been the front desk ever since.

The system that runs the clinic today has two layers.

An iPad in the waiting room as the front desk. Every patient checks in there — new, returning, group class, all of them. The Finger-Ink kiosk handles patient lookup, surfaces the right intake form when one’s outstanding, and notifies the practitioner that their patient has arrived.

Branded forms with conditional logic. Patient intake reflects the Richmond Rehab brand from first interaction. Forms branch depending on whether the patient is funded through NDIS or paying privately. They sync straight into Cliniko — no scanning, no re-keying, no chasing.

Setup was, in Luke’s words, pretty straightforward. A generic new-patient form with details syncing into Cliniko was easy. The conditional logic took some refining — trial and error to get the branching exactly right — but once it was built, it ran. Luke estimates he hasn’t logged into the Finger-Ink portal in roughly six months. There hasn’t been anything to do.

A day at Richmond Rehab, with Finger-Ink in it

Patients arrive and tap their phone number into the iPad. Finger-Ink looks up their booking in Cliniko, pulls up the right form if one’s outstanding, and lets them complete intake while they wait. The practitioner gets a notification that their patient is ready.

Every patient checks in. Originally a COVID-era response — Luke needed to track who had been on-site for audit compliance — the universal check-in stayed in place after the pandemic eased, for two reasons. First, it meant practitioners could see their patients had arrived without anyone needing to walk out and look. Second, it gave Luke a reliable attendance record for group classes, which made invoicing them substantially less painful.

The iPad does more than check-in. Through Cliniko’s SMS templates, Luke has a backup form-link he can send in seconds when a patient hasn’t completed their intake before arriving. The kiosk also surfaces other web links where the user can book an appointment, find out about other clinic services, or even leave a message. Gradually, it has become the operational hub of a small clinic that runs without a front desk.

Eight years in

Luke is a power user by background. He has an IT background, manages around ten subscriptions that integrate with Cliniko, and has built custom software using Cliniko’s API to fill gaps Cliniko hasn’t. He’s not retained by inertia, and he’s not afraid to leave a vendor when the relationship sours — he recently cancelled an AI note-taking subscription after the vendor removed features to push him to a higher tier. He didn’t hesitate.

With Finger-Ink, the absence of friction is what keeps him there. The forms sync. The kiosk handles check-in. There’s nothing breaking, nothing chasing, nothing demanding his attention. And when there is something to discuss — a feature request, a technical constraint, an idea for the roadmap — the founder picks up the phone.

“Brendan’s been a legend, so we’re not leaving Finger-Ink any time soon.”

— Luke Anthony, on why Richmond Rehab stays

The maths Luke didn’t have to do

Luke has never had a receptionist at Richmond Rehab. So the value isn’t a salary line he’s removed — it’s a salary line he’s never had to add. A clinic running without a receptionist still needs the work that one would do: the patient lookup, the intake collection, the data entry into Cliniko, the practitioner notification when someone arrives. Done by hand, that work falls back on the owner.

The Australian average salary for a health clinic receptionist or front desk manager sits at around $60,000 a year. That’s the figure Richmond Rehab would otherwise be looking at to deliver the front desk experience the kiosk and forms now deliver between them — not as a one-off saving, but every year, ongoing.

Eight years on, Luke’s Finger-Ink subscription costs a small fraction of that, paid monthly. The forms still sync. The kiosk still runs. The portal still doesn’t need logging into. The maths makes itself.

How he describes it to other clinics

Asked how he’d explain Finger-Ink to another clinic owner, Luke gave the answer that should be on the homepage of half the websites in this category. He framed it as a self-selection question, not a sales pitch.

“If you care about how it presents — or you care about what the patient’s thinking — it’s a bit of a no-brainer.”

— Luke Anthony, asked what he’d tell another clinic owner

Richmond Rehab is, by Luke’s own description, “not the most exciting clinic going around.” It’s a small Melbourne physio practice with no receptionist, run by a clinician who wears every hat. It’s also been a Finger-Ink customer for eight years — with patients who comment on how good the forms look, an iPad that runs the front desk, and three manual jobs per new patient that Luke never has to think about again.

Eight years running a clinic without a receptionist. An iPad on the front desk that handles every check-in. Forms that sync, intake that just happens, and a portal Luke hasn’t needed to log into in six months.

It just works.