A recap of “Ask Joel Anything”

Last week, Cliniko founder Joel did a little “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) over on the Cliniko Community forum. It was a great chance for Cliniko users to ask Joel, well, anything—from how the Cliniko team works, to upcoming plans, to Joel’s best coffee-brewing tips (he’s quite the coffee aficionado!).

While you can read the entire AMA over on the Community, we’ve consolidated some of the most popular questions and answers right here on the Cliniko Blog. Read on for a high-level overview of the types of questions that were asked, and Joel’s straight and honest (his words!) answers.

It’s all in the money: online payments, HICAPS, Xero, and more

Some of the common finance-related questions included:

• Are there plans for integration with HICAPS or Tyro?
• When will Cliniko be integrated with Medicare?
• When will prepayments sync to Xero?

“HICAPS yes, Tyro not currently,” Joel said. “We’re getting very close on Medicare integration now, then we’ll be looking at HICAPS shortly after. The integration with Medicare is looking really good.”

Joel was also able to share a demo of what the Medicare integration will look like in Cliniko! (It will change slightly before the official release, but should give a general idea of how things will work.)

It was also asked when Cliniko will have better recording of patient credit (i.e. prepayments, when someone pays in advance), and if, and how, those would sync to Xero. Currently, prepayments aren’t sent over to Xero as part of the integration.

“We have a large task designed to improve our Xero integration in many ways (including this),” Joel said. “However we have not begun work on it, and it’s not prioritised at the top now either. I would be surprised to see it happen this year.”

While it might not be the answer everyone was hoping, it’s the straight and honest truth—something that Joel and the entire Cliniko team really value.

Speaking of online payments, one of the popular questions was how long until they become a part of Cliniko!

“My best guess is 8 - 12 weeks,” Joel said. “This comes with a very heavy disclaimer though that I can be off by a fair bit, and often am.” It’s hard to make a formal estimate with much of the development work that the team is working on, because there are so many variables—which leads into the ever-popular “Does Cliniko have a feature roadmap” question!

Managing appointments, patients, and general day-to-day activities

People were curious about a few key features:

• Are there plans to make online bookings be more customisable (i.e. only allowing certain appointment types to be booked during certain hours)?
• Can the patient details be modified (such as adding custom fields or removing non-applicable ones)?
• Can appointments be marked as “confirmed”?

Joel was able to provide some insight into how he envisions these different components working.

“I do have this quite high [in the list of priorities] though, so I hope it’s not too far off,” he said of marking appointments as confirmed. “We’d like to combine it with the ability for clients to reply yes/no to SMS reminders and have it confirm them automatically.”

With regards to making online bookings more customisable, he said, “We’ve had this request quite a few times now, so I’d say likely we will do it. We don’t have any current plans for this though, so although it’s likely to happen at some point, I’d guess quite a while away still.”

As for allowing more modifications to the patient page—“We did begin work on it, then it got shelved for other higher priority tasks,” he said. “I am not sure right now when we will return to it, but it is high on our priority list. I couldn’t give any idea on timeframe now.”

Feature requests and a product roadmap

Many folks were curious about how Cliniko prioritises feature requests and what the long-term plans are for the software. “I’d like to ask what method you are using to prioritise your feature roadmap, and what role we as customers can have in that process,” one person asked. “How can we help you to make a better product, and a product that assists our ongoing needs?”

The answer? It’s complicated—and there are a lot of things that go into it.

“That’s a very good question, and hard to answer,” Joel said. “Warning, you’re going to get a lengthy answer here. For me personally, there are some parts of running a company like Cliniko where I find there’s no right answer and I’m always battling for that epiphany moment where things make sense and I’m certain. Prioritising tasks is easily up there in my top 3 of these.”

The full (and lengthy) answer can be viewed right here on the Cliniko Community!

Lots of great questions!

It was great to hear all of these questions from the people that use Cliniko every day. We hope that it was helpful to read all the Q’s and A’s!