Software for dental practices, aimed at the empty chair.

A missed appointment costs the fee and the hour. The hour is the larger loss, because the clinician is paid regardless and the slot could have been sold to somebody on a waiting list.

Practices that measure no-show rate and not revenue per chair hour are watching the smaller number.

Most practices present a plan, the patient says they will think about it, and nothing happens. There is rarely a system that follows up at sensible intervals with the information the patient actually needs to decide.

That follow up is entirely rules based, which makes it the clearest automation case in the practice.

Recall, reminders and waiting list slot recovery as one build sits in the lower half of the £8,000 to £30,000 range. Treatment plan follow up is normally a second phase, and multi site reporting a third, so the practice sees a result before committing to the whole programme.

Where the constraint is that patients cannot book or find you properly, that is web development at £4,000 to £16,000 with booking included. An audit at £2,500 to £6,000 will tell you which of the two is costing you more chair hours.

Revenue per chair hour is the number that matters, and most practices do not track it. No-show rate is the number that gets tracked and it is the smaller story, because a slot filled from a waiting list is not a loss even if the original patient failed to arrive.

Also record how long a released slot stays empty, and what proportion of presented treatment plans are accepted within ninety days. Those two lines usually contain more recoverable revenue than the no-show rate does.

A 30-minute call to hear how the operation runs today, then a paid discovery step: interviews with the people doing the work, a look at the systems and data you already hold, and a ranked list of what would pay back, each with a price, a timeline and the monthly running cost once live. In most dental practice engagements the first thing built is appointment reminders, rebooking and recall that run without the reception desk, because it is measurable inside a month and it funds the rest.

The build runs in weekly demos against your real inputs, including the messy ones. Integration with the systems you already run comes before anything clever, because that is where most of the value and most of the risk sits. Go-live is followed by handover: the code, the provider accounts and the credentials in your name, a runbook, documentation and a recorded walkthrough, plus a session for the people who will use it daily. Every price is fixed in writing before work starts, with a list of what is not included.

A dental practice sits under the Care Quality Commission in England and the General Dental Council for its clinicians, and it holds special-category data about every patient. That shapes the design in three ways. Nothing clinical is decided by software: automation books, reminds, recalls, triages urgency by the questions a receptionist would ask, and hands the rest to a person. Patient data stays inside your practice management system and the approved tools around it, under a data processing agreement, with a DPIA where automation touches health information at scale. And any AI that speaks to a patient says it is an AI, keeps the conversation short and offers a human every time.

Practices that use ChatGPT or similar tools informally for letters and templates should put them on a business plan with a written policy before patient details reach them. Our GDPR guide and policy template cover exactly that.

Our published prices apply to every sector: an AI adoption audit at £2,500 to £6,000 fixed, credited in full against any build; a first AI implementation at £4,000 to £15,000; a custom AI system at £8,000 to £25,000; applications at £8,000 to £30,000 per phase; websites at £4,000 to £16,000; training from £1,200. For a practice that usually means reminders, recall and rebooking as the first implementation, an AI receptionist that answers when the desk is busy as the custom system, and a session for the front desk on what is safe to put into the tools they already use.

The running cost is stated before go-live, per feature, and it scales with volume rather than headcount. From operating our own AI products, the model is rarely the expensive part; the channels around it, telephony and messaging, usually are, and a well-designed workflow sends most of its work to the small, cheap models. Every system we build reports cost per feature from day one and has spending ceilings that were tested by watching them fire.

The economics of a practice turn on the surgery hour. A missed appointment is a lost fee and a lost slot; a phone that rings out at lunchtime is a new patient who books elsewhere. The evidence on reminders is that timing and a real reply channel matter more than the message, and our clinic no-show guide sets out what the published studies actually show. An AI receptionist that answers the overflow, books and rebooks, and escalates pain or bleeding to a person covers the second number.