In the early stages of setting up their occupational therapy business on New South Wales’ picturesque South Coast, Claire and Nathan Carson already had their practice management software Cliniko up and running.
What they didn’t have, though, was an easy way to streamline all the contracts and referral forms that were chewing up their small team’s precious time.
Running a small business with a large footprint
As an occupational therapist for more than 10 years, Claire saw the need for locally-based occupational therapy (OT) services in her beloved Shoalhaven region.
Having lived in the Shoalhaven for most of their lives and now raising their three children in the local area, the couple wanted their local community to be able to access much needed OT services without having to travel to Wollongong, Sydney or Canberra.
With her partner, Nathan, taking on the role of business manager, Claire established Shoalhaven Occupational Therapy in 2020, servicing clients of all ages with a wide range of diagnoses.
What was the business challenge?
“We were at the start-up stage,” explains Nathan.
“Looking at ways to streamline our contracts and referral forms, and something that integrated with Cliniko.”
Nathan said they browsed through the list of connected apps on the Cliniko website, and trialled a few to see what worked best for their needs.
We’re trying to support local.
He said they also wanted to find an online form provider that integrated with Cliniko and was Australian-owned and operated – like Snapforms.
“There were a couple we found that we canned early on that do integrate with Cliniko,” he says.
“But we’re trying to support local – like Cliniko. Cliniko is really good for a small practice like us.”
“With Snapforms creating forms was simple – it was the ease of use – we trialled a few and Snapforms just seemed to work and we were happy – so we decided to go down that path.”
How was the solution implemented?
Before discovering Snapforms, Nathan says they were struggling with Word Docs and PDFs, manually creating contacts each time they wanted to add a new client.
The ability to now pull data out of Cliniko and into Snapforms has transformed the way they add clients to their system, reducing manual data entry and duplication.
We went one step further to prefill the form with data out of Cliniko.
“Creating the form and syncing our data into Cliniko was really easy,” Nathan explains.
“We went one step further to prefill the form with data out of Cliniko – playing around with Cliniko to create a custom URL – which we’ve got working quite nicely now.”
“We’ve also created an online referral form which I’ve embedded into our website.”
“The referring GPs or plan managers fill out the data for the new client which automatically sets them up in Cliniko.”
“We’ve had positive feedback, particularly from the support coordinators and plan managers for the NDIS – the clients’ representatives – they’re really happy with the online forms that we’ve set up.”
It just saves so many phone calls and emails.
“They’re happy to just go onto our website and fill out the forms – it just saves so many phone calls and emails.”
“We’ve been using Cliniko since November, and Snapforms extensively for the last 6 weeks – and already we’ve created 150 contracts or service agreements off that – it’s working really well.”
One of the features Nathan finds very useful is the ability to pre-populate a form using URL parameters.
This Snapforms feature allows you to send the same form link to multiple people or groups, and have some of the fields prefilled with different information for each user.
“For each of our clients we generate a URL which prefills all their contact details numbers, dates of birth, license, et cetera – so we don’t have fill that in each time.”
Nathan says he also uses Snapforms to collect digital signatures from most clients, with only a small minority still opting for the paper-based scribble.
“For signatures, we’ve got the iPad, but some clients still want the paper copy so we can manually print that – but it’s maybe one in ten clients that want that – so it’s pretty flexible.
Next up, Nathan says they plan to convert the long and cumbersome paper-based client assessment forms into online multi-page versions using conditional logic.
“I want to use tick boxes and set up multiple-choice questions to calculate a score for each client assessment – that’s something that Snapforms can do.”
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