Patient inbox
Where the enquiry lands, and what it carries
A patient enquiry that arrives as an email, a WhatsApp message and a form submission is three records of one person. The inbox makes it one — with the page it came from, the campaign that paid for it, and the exact wording of what the person agreed to.
The two design decisions worth explaining
The states only move forward
Captured, contacted, scheduled, attended — then converted or lost, and those two absorb. A record cannot go back. It makes some days feel rigid and it makes the month-end number trustworthy: a patient counted as attended cannot quietly become a new enquiry three weeks later.
Consent is stored against a version, or not at all
When a person ticks a box, the system records the exact text they were shown and the version of it. If the version is unknown, the submission is rejected rather than saved with an empty consent field — because "they consented" is not a claim anyone can make later without knowing to what.
- The wording, the version, the timestamp and the channel are stored together.
- An unknown version is a rejected request, never a silent downgrade.
- This is the difference between a compliance record and a checkbox.
What arrives with every enquiry
Who
Name, phone, and email when they gave one. Phone is required, because that is how a practice answers.
When they can come
Morning, afternoon, evening or any — the question a practice asks first anyway.
Where they came from
Source, medium, campaign and the landing path, captured at the moment of submission.
What they agreed to
The consent text and its version, or an explicit absence. Never an assumption.
What they said
The message, if they wrote one. Bounded, so a paste of a novel cannot break the record.
Nothing about other practices
The public endpoint answers about your submission and nothing else. A public response that leaks tenant state is one that enumerates tenants.
About the inbox
Does it send the patient a message automatically?
Not on its own. Anything drafted for a patient channel carries an explicit authorship label and waits for a human step. In a health product, who wrote a message is a trust question, not a styling one.
Is this a CRM?
It is deliberately smaller than one. Six states, one record per enquiry, and no pipeline builder. A one-dentist practice does not need stages it has to configure.
Where does the data live?
In the practice’s tenant, held on the practice’s behalf, and exportable. It is their patients’ data before it is anything of ours.
Bring an enquiry you received last week
The clearest way to see the difference is to put a real one through it and look at what is attached.