A paper-based clinic, digitised in a week.
How The Foot Parlour rebuilt its front desk around Cliniko and Finger-Ink.
A five-seat podiatry clinic in South Manchester rebuilt its front desk around Cliniko and Finger-Ink. No receptionist required.
Until late 2025, The Foot Parlour was a paper-based operation. Paper calendars. Paper notes. Paper diaries for each practitioner. A full-time front-of-house administrator managed every patient arrival, every booking, every payment. The clinic itself — a five-seat podiatry practice in South Manchester — was busy and well-regarded. The way it was run had simply not changed in years.
The owner decided that needed to change. The administrator was approaching retirement. The role itself, on the payroll full-time, was no longer the right shape for the business. Rather than backfill the position, the owner made a different decision: digitise the entire operation and remove the front-of-house role altogether.
The owner contracted Chris Keller-Jackson to lead the project. Chris is a business analyst whose day job is running digital transformations for large companies. One of the clinic’s practitioners knew him and put his name forward. The brief was end-to-end: vendor selection, configuration, change management, hands-on support during the human transition.
Chris ran the kind of process he runs for his corporate clients. “A lot of the work that I do as an analyst is vendor selection,” he says. “I’ll look at the requirements the customer has and do research on individual vendors and then score them against the criteria of the requirements.” He worked through the requirements with the owner, then took the long list of patient management systems and scored them.
Two were shortlisted. One was Medesk. The other was Cliniko.
Removing the front-of-house role meant the new system needed to do the receptionist’s job. A check-in capability was non-negotiable. Medesk did not offer one. Cliniko, through the Connected Apps directory, did — via Finger-Ink.
“The one that came out top in pretty much every metric was Cliniko,” Chris says. “In part that metric was enhanced by the fact that there’s a kiosk option.” He researched Finger-Ink’s website to understand the integration model before recommending it. “You’ve got some great resources there to support understanding of how it would work. I quickly understood that from an interface perspective, from a third-party API perspective, it should interface cleanly.”
He proposed Cliniko and Finger-Ink to the owner. The owner approved. Both vendors offered an extended trial, which gave the team room to test without committing.
Chris does not usually configure systems himself — his work is requirements and selection. For The Foot Parlour, he configured both Cliniko and Finger-Ink personally. The setup did not slow him down.
Cliniko was quite an easy system to configure, and the interfacing and configuration of Finger-Ink was super easy. Everything you needed to know, all that workflow, all the how do you set it up, was just a doddle.
—Chris Keller-Jackson, Business Analyst, The Foot Parlour digital transformation
He trialled Finger-Ink on his own iPad first to demonstrate it to the clinic. Four weeks in, when the team bought the iPad they would use day-to-day, swapping the device over took minutes. Within a week of running the trial in the clinic environment, the team trusted the new setup to run without paper. The pricing was a nice bonus: Finger-Ink scales with the size of the practitioner team, so a five-seat clinic only pays only for what it uses. One less thing to manage.
The Foot Parlour’s waiting area is, in Chris’s words, “a very clinical white setting.” The team configured the kiosk with the clinic’s logo and brand colours so the iPad sat in the space looking like part of the clinic, not a piece of generic technology dropped into it.
It shows that you’ve thought about it. It’s a very, very positive, enticing move. And it certainly, from the feedback that I’ve seen, wows the customers.
— Chris Keller-Jackson, Business Analyst, The Foot Parlour digital transformation
Patients adapted faster than the team expected. Most of them already knew the format. UK GP surgeries have used digital sign-in terminals for years, and Foot Parlour patients arrived recognising what the kiosk was. “Oh, it’s just like the doctors,” was the comment Chris kept hearing in the first weeks. There was no behaviour change to ask for. The kiosk was already familiar.
Behind the kiosk, the workflow runs without intervention. When a patient checks in, the clinician is notified automatically and sees the arrival on their screen. The front-of-house function happens in the background.
The full-time front-of-house administrator role no longer exists. Patients self-check-in. Practitioners are notified automatically. Bookings, calendars and patient records sit in Cliniko rather than on paper.
The technology was the easy part. The harder transition was human — patients adjusting to upfront deposits, clinicians adjusting to digital notes, the owner adjusting to operating a clinic without a receptionist on the desk. Chris was in the clinic in person through the first month, walking the team through each change. “Digital transformations are not so much about the systems and the processes,” he says. “The biggest challenge often is the people.”
On the systems side, his verdict is shorter.
It’s a very clever integration with Cliniko in that it just works. No deep learning curve, no having to code anything, no having to do any detailed configuration. Everything just worked seamlessly.
— Chris Keller-Jackson, Business Analyst, The Foot Parlour digital transformation
That verdict is the case study’s most useful evidence. Chris is not a Cliniko user. He is not part of the Finger-Ink ecosystem. He is a professional implementer who scored vendors against requirements and recommended Finger-Ink on the merits. When he says “it just works,” it carries the weight of someone who has done this many times before.
The Foot Parlour is using Cliniko’s native forms today. Chris notes that Finger-Ink’s forms “would probably have been a better solution, ultimately” — the visual quality and the depth of integration are evident to him — but adding them on day one would have been a step too far for a team already absorbing a lot of change. Forms are a natural next step once the new way of working is settled.
Finger-Ink syncs with Cliniko, sets up in an afternoon, and is free to trial.
Patient check-in kiosk and intake forms for allied health clinics.
