01 · The problem
Every patient's wait started at the front desk, on paper.
Intake was walk-in only: patients arrived, filled out paperwork on-site, and waited while the front desk processed it in sequence. On a busy day that queue was the whole bottleneck, average wait ran around 20 minutes before a patient was even seen, and no-shows were high enough that the clinic was effectively scheduling around its own churn.
There were already two competing proposals on the table for fixing it before I arrived. Neither had buy-in from the staff who would actually have to run whatever shipped, which is usually the real reason a fix stalls.
02 · The work
Embed first, then design the smallest system that fixes it.
Spent the first stretch embedded in the clinic's operations rather than designing from a brief, watching how patients actually moved through the door, what the front desk did with each form, and where the paper process broke down under volume. That mapping is what made it possible to win buy-in over the two existing proposals: the design followed the observed workflow instead of assuming one.
Designed and rolled out a pre-arrival digital intake system so patients completed registration before they walked in, moving the bottleneck out of the waiting room entirely. Trained the front-desk and clinical teams on the new flow, then ran a 30-day post-launch KPI cadence directly with leadership so the change was measured, not just shipped and assumed to work.
03 · Outcome
Half the wait, fewer no-shows, same headcount.
04 · Behind the work
Notes from the engagement.
Winning buy-in over two existing proposals mattered more than the intake system itself. The team had already seen ideas come and go; the thing that got this one adopted was showing up, watching the actual workflow, and designing around what staff were doing rather than what a slide deck assumed they were doing.
The 30-day KPI cadence was the other piece that made it stick. A launch without a follow-up readout is easy to quietly abandon under day-to-day pressure. Reporting the numbers back to leadership on a fixed cadence kept the new process the default instead of a pilot that faded.