Prepared For
Dr Sarah Kim
A diagnostic of current AI & automation readiness across six operating pillars — with a prioritised 90-day plan, tool stack, and projected ROI tailored to your business.
+3 points above the Dental SMB median of 52. You're tracking ahead of peers, with measurable upside in Process and Data.
Smile Studio Chatswood is running a credible mid-tier dental practice: Cliniko handles appointments, Tyro handles payments, and Xero handles the books. Where the foundation is showing its age is in the connective tissue. Cliniko sits on its own, the patient recall list is still worked manually by reception, and intake forms are paper. None of that is a crisis — but it is the difference between an average $180 appointment captured and one that quietly fails to rebook.
Two pillars are pulling the overall score down. Process Maturity is the first: phone bookings are still 60% of volume and the end-of-day reconciliation is reception's last task most nights. Data Readiness is the second: the appointment data is clean, but the recall workflow that should be using it is paper-and-phone. Both are fixable without disrupting clinical hours — the front-desk team has the temperament for it.
The 90-day plan sequences a recall SMS rebuild, digital intake forms on the website, and a two-dentist clinical-scribe pilot. Combined, those three moves recover roughly 12 hours per week across the team and lift recall conversion by 8 percentage points — worth $34k–$67k of recovered annual revenue against a tooling bill under $500/month.
Cliniko holds clean appointment and patient data, but the rest of the picture is fragmented. Recall lists are exported manually, intake answers are captured on paper and re-keyed, and the practice has no consolidated view of patient lifetime value. The data exists — it is the plumbing between systems that is missing.
Needs work — data silos are the bottleneckPhone bookings still account for around 60% of inbound volume and the end-of-day reconciliation is fully manual. The clinical workflow itself is consistent, but the front-desk operating model is the one a five-chair practice would run, not a three-chair one with a busy reception. There is significant headroom here.
Needs work — manual effort is the constraintCliniko, Tyro and Xero are individually fit-for-purpose and well-supported. The gap is the integration layer — none of the three currently speak to each other, which is why reception is doing reconciliation by hand. The fix is connectors and a small Zapier footprint, not a replatform.
Needs work — stack gaps blocking AIThe principal is genuinely tech-curious and both receptionists are comfortable on a computer. The team has rolled out Cliniko and Tyro without external help, which is the leading indicator for AI tool adoption. The missing piece is a documented playbook so individual habits become practice-wide standards.
Solid foundation — training will unlock fastThree strong candidates already map onto current pain points: clinical-note scribing (45 min/dentist/day), recall SMS rewriting (18% no-show rate), and treatment-plan summaries. None have been scoped or trialled, but all three are well-trodden in the Australian dental market with peer-validated results.
Solid foundation — scope and prioritiseShared reception logins, no 2FA on Cliniko, and no password manager put the practice below the Dental Board's baseline for handling patient records. None of this is expensive to fix; all of it must be in place before any AI scribe or recall tool is given system access.
Needs work — address before scaling