Patient Intake, Content and Search
Chris! Grateful for your curiosity around this. I've spent some time looking into your website and your model, and I've got some great ideas.
First thing I notice is this:
It seems like the value proposition is speed after discharge — meeting patients within a day or two of leaving the hospital, during the window when they're anxious and their primary care appointment is weeks away. And the first step in that process currently has a two-day lag before anyone has even been scheduled.
That gap is where I'd start. A patient discharged at 6pm on a Friday, sitting at home with questions, should be able to get themselves on your calendar before they've had time to worry about it — or to call someone else.
1. The intake assistant
A conversation on your site that works the way your front office would if it were staffed around the clock. It answers the practical questions people actually have, and it puts the appointment on the calendar immediately rather than adding them to a callback list.
First, the obvious objection
I should deal with this before anything else, because you're almost certainly thinking it: most of these things are awful. A box pops up uninvited, you type a real question, and it either loops you back to the same three canned options or confidently answers a question you didn't ask. It's the phone tree at your bank — where everyone ends up saying "representative, representative, representative" until a human picks up.
I don't like them either, and I'd rather say so than pretend. But I've noticed there's one situation where I do use one: when I want something concrete right now, and the alternative is filling in a form and waiting a day to find out.
That may well be the situation a lot of your patients are in. Discharged on a Friday evening, holding a folder of instructions, wanting to know whether you can actually see them and whether their insurance covers it — and the alternative is waiting until Monday to find out.
Why this one wouldn't be like those
| The problem | How this is built instead |
|---|---|
| They exist to deflect you | The ones you hate were installed to keep people away from staff — every conversation "contained" was a call the company avoided paying for. This one is measured the other way round: appointments booked, and how fast. If it's keeping patients away from you, it is failing at its job. |
| You can't find the human | "Talk to a person" sits in plain view at every point in the conversation, not buried three menus deep. Making the exit obvious is exactly what makes people willing to try it at all. |
| It interrupts you | It doesn't pop up, chime, or slide across the page. It waits, quietly, and only speaks when spoken to. |
| It's a script, so it breaks | The frustrating ones match keywords against a fixed decision tree and fall apart the moment you say something the script didn't anticipate. This reads what's actually written. "My mother was discharged from Penrose yesterday and I don't know if she should be seen before her doctor can fit her in" is handled as easily as "do you take Medicare." |
| It pretends to know | When it doesn't know something, it says so and hands over. Confident wrong answers are worse than no answer, and in your field considerably worse. |
| It pretends to be a person | It doesn't. It says plainly what it is. People forgive a machine for being a machine; they don't forgive being fooled. |
| Nobody ever fixes them | You can read every conversation it has. If it's ever annoying, you'll see exactly how — in the patient's own words — and it gets fixed that week. The chatbot at your bank has never once been improved because someone found it irritating. |
The honest test is simple: a patient should come away thinking that was easier than calling. If they come away thinking I wish I could have just called, it isn't working and I'd want to know.
What it does
- Explains what the clinic is and, just as importantly, what it isn't — you're not replacing anyone's primary care physician, and patients need to understand that before they book
- Confirms the person is actually a fit: recently discharged from a hospital or facility, in your service area, in the gap before their PCP appointment
- Handles insurance and cost questions in plain language
- Explains what a virtual appointment involves and what to have ready
- Books directly into your providers' availability
- Notifies your team the moment someone books, with everything they need
- Answers in Spanish as readily as English
What it deliberately does not do
An assistant that stays firmly on the logistics side of the line is genuinely useful to your patients, defensible to your malpractice carrier, and dramatically simpler to operate under HIPAA. You would review and approve exactly where that line sits before anything goes live.
On HIPAA
Anything a patient tells you — including the fact that they were discharged from a particular hospital — is protected health information. That has real consequences for how this gets built, and I'd rather put them in front of you now than discover them later:
- I would sign a Business Associate Agreement with the clinic before touching anything patient-facing
- Every vendor in the chain has to be under a BAA too. I confirm that is available and in place before any patient information reaches that vendor — not after
- Conversation records are encrypted, access-controlled, and kept to a retention schedule you set, not one I pick
- The system collects the minimum necessary to book an appointment and nothing more
I'll scope the build to stay well clear of the line, and I'd want your input — and your attorney's, if you want that — on the data-handling plan before we build.
2. The content engine
I mentioned the idea of keeping up a regular blog on a website when we talked, and you seemed to like it. For a physician this is a genuinely different proposition than it is for most businesses, and a much better one, because you have something not many people publishing health content online actually have: a board-certified pulmonologist and critical care physician putting his name to it.
Google's own published guidance is explicit about this. Its systems give more weight to content that demonstrates real expertise on subjects that can affect someone's health — it calls them "Your Money or Your Life" topics — and it specifically encourages bylines that lead to genuine background on whoever wrote the thing. Content authored and reviewed by a named, credentialed, locally-practising physician is exactly what that guidance is built to reward — and I doubt many private clinics around here are producing anything like it.
How it would work
| Step | What happens | Your time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | You talk into your phone for three or four minutes about something you explained to a patient that week — what to watch for after a COPD exacerbation, why the follow-up window matters, what questions to ask at discharge | 4 min |
| 2 | It comes back as a finished draft in your voice, structured for search, with a matching post for your Google listing | — |
| 3 | You review and approve it. Nothing publishes without a physician reading it first — that rule is absolute | 5 min |
| 4 | It publishes under your name and credentials, with a review date | — |
Roughly ten minutes of your time for a piece of content that would otherwise take an afternoon, or a copywriter who doesn't know medicine. Do that every couple of weeks — call it twice a month — and within a year you'd have a body of local, physician-authored material that would be hard for another clinic to match.
3. Other things worth doing
| What | Why it matters for you specifically |
|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | When someone searches "doctor after hospital discharge Colorado Springs," the map results appear above everything else. Categories, services, service area, weekly posts and review strategy all move that. This is the cheapest thing on the page and I'd do it first, at no charge. |
| Pages for referrers and their patients | I'd imagine a good deal of your growth isn't patients finding you — it's discharge planners, case managers and hospitalists remembering you exist. So a pair of pages per referral partner: one written for them, explaining plainly how to send someone your way and what happens next — and a matching one written for the patient they're sending, which a planner can point to or hand over on the day of discharge. Each pair tailored to that facility and what its patients tend to need. That's a different job from a general patient page, and it's usually the one nobody builds. The first pair is the real work — after that each additional partner is a variation on it, which is why they cost a fraction of the first. |
| Search visibility | Pages built around the way people actually search after a discharge, and for the facilities and areas you serve. |
| Site performance | Your site is well put together. Worth a pass on speed and mobile, since a recently-discharged patient is probably on a phone, possibly not feeling well, and not inclined to wait. |
4. Founder pricing
I'm early in building my AI architect business, and what I need right now is a small number of clients I do exceptional work for, who will tell people about it honestly. You're one of them, so these are founder numbers and I won't be able to repeat them once I have a few case studies behind me. The right-hand column is roughly what this work runs elsewhere.
| Item | Founder price | Typically |
|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile setup and optimization | No charge | $150–400 |
| Intake assistant — scoped, built, tested, live and booking | $1,600 | $3,000–6,000 for healthcare |
| Content engine — voice-to-draft with physician review workflow | $1,200 | $1,500–3,000 |
| Referrer + patient page pair, tailored to one referral partner plus a printed leave-behind for that partner · then $50 for each additional partner |
$250 first pair $50 each after | $600–1,200 |
| Search pages — facilities and areas you serve | $750 | $1,000–2,000 |
| Ongoing care — running costs, monitoring, weekly Google post, review replies, monthly report | $250/mo | $400–800/mo |
| Anything else, hourly | $75/hr | $100–150/hr |
You saw me twice without a bill, because I'm a pastor. You didn't make anything of it at the time and you've never mentioned it since.
So — the first three months of ongoing care are on me. If you decide a care plan isn't for you, that same amount simply comes off whatever you do choose instead.
Nothing here is a package you have to take whole. The Google profile work is free and useful on its own, and each of the rest stands alone.
5. What you would own
Every account is in the clinic's name, on the clinic's card. The domain, the hosting, the AI account, the Google profile. I operate with access you grant and can revoke in one click, without asking me — and if you do, nothing of yours stops working. You simply lose the ability to have me make changes.
Every patient conversation is yours, exportable at any time. So is the written record of how your practice explains itself — which tends to be useful well beyond the software.
6. How we would start
- You add me as a manager on your Google Business Profile — about thirty seconds, and revocable whenever you like. I begin that work at no charge so you can see how I operate before any money is involved.
- We sit down for an hour on whichever piece interests you most. For the assistant that means the practical questions your office fields all day; for the content engine it's just picking the first three topics.
- I write up exactly what it will and won't do, and you approve it before I build anything.
Happy to talk any of this through, and equally happy to tell you if something isn't worth your money.
— Daniel