Comparisons
Orla vs a paper diary and a spreadsheet
The most common system in Irish clinics is still a paper diary, a spreadsheet of balances and a phone that rings all morning. It works, until it does not — and here is exactly where the seams are.
The honest competitor for most clinics is not another vendor. It is a paper diary or a shared calendar, a spreadsheet of outstanding balances, a notes system that lives somewhere else, and a phone that rings all morning.
That combination has a real advantage nobody selling software will admit: it is free, everyone already knows it, and it never has an outage. Plenty of good practices run on it for years.
It also has seams, and they are always in the same places.
Where it leaks
The ten minutes between treatments
A cancellation comes in at 11:42. Somebody has to notice it, decide who to ring, find the number, ring, get voicemail, try the next person, and give up because a patient has arrived. The hour is lost — not because anyone did anything wrong, but because nobody had ten minutes.
Do the arithmetic with your own figures rather than an industry average we do not have: your standard fee, times the cancellations last month that nobody refilled. Then the patients on a care plan with sessions left and nothing booked, times the same fee. At most clinics the second number is the larger. The long version.
Double-entry
The same appointment gets written in the diary, mentioned in a text, recorded in the notes and typed into the spreadsheet. Four chances to disagree, and eventually two of them do. The one that is wrong is usually the money.
"Who changed this?"
A paper diary cannot tell you who moved an appointment, and a shared spreadsheet will not tell you who read a patient's balance. Under GDPR, patient records are special category data, and the questions that get asked after an incident are exactly the ones neither can answer.
The date that flips
A spreadsheet will happily read 03/04/1978 as the third of April or the
fourth of March depending on who opened it and where. In a clinical record
that is not a formatting preference.
What Orla replaces it with
- One diary the whole clinic reads — practitioner lanes, rooms, classes and care plans together, with rooms booked with the appointment.
- A booking page that only ever offers slots the clinic can genuinely honour, because it reads the same availability engine as the diary — online booking.
- A waitlist that fills itself. Cancellation at 14:02, offered to everyone who matches, filled at 14:06, nobody rang anybody — auto-fill.
- One patient record — history, care plans, notes, documents, consents and balance — with reads journalled as well as writes.
- Money that reconciles, with invoices carrying the practitioner and CORU number an Irish patient needs for a health-expenses claim.
- Dates that read
dd.mm.yyyyeverywhere, and a clinic timezone that decides what "today" means.
What it costs you
Also honestly:
- Setup time. An hour or so to get clinic details, services, practitioners, rooms and hours right — in the order that works.
- A change of habit. Software that runs the day only helps if the day is actually in it. A diary half in Orla and half on paper is worse than either.
- A dependency. Paper never has an outage. Software does.
- Money, where the spreadsheet was free. Pricing is not published here and is discussed directly.
When paper is still the right answer
If you are a single practitioner with a steady, mostly-returning caseload, few cancellations and no staff to coordinate, the overhead of any system may genuinely exceed what it saves you. Some of the best-run small practices in the country are on paper, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to make a sale.
The seams open with scale: more practitioners, more rooms, more cancellations, more people who need to see the same thing at once.
If that sounds like where your clinic is heading, we are looking for build partners.