Our GTM team has been speaking with hundreds of clinics every week. And we keep noticing a recurring pattern.

Doctors with a roaring practice often tell us, “I am already very busy. I don't think I am losing patients because my clinic can't answer every phone call promptly.”

Doctors with a more modest practice usually have a different perspective. They are still building their word-of-mouth reputation and believe that, with time, their practice will naturally grow.

What many don't believe is that there are patients who actually wanted to book an appointment but, because they couldn't get a prompt response, simply went elsewhere.

I don't blame doctors for this.

It is hard to understand something that you cannot see or verify with data.

So, we decided to test this.

The GoCliniq team wanted to find out whether clinics were actually losing patients because patients had to call to book an appointment.

So, we tested the same clinic in two different ways:

First: Patients could book an appointment directly from Google Maps.

Second: Patients could only call the clinic to make an appointment.

We did this across clinics in both metro cities and smaller towns, so that the results were not influenced by the size of the city.

The results were surprisingly clear.

Clinics where patients could not book online received, on average, 6 fewer bookings every month.

Six bookings may not sound like a lot.

But think about those six patients differently.

These could be six new patients who may come back multiple times.

If a clinic misses 6 bookings every month, that's 72 patients in a year.

And if each new patient visits the clinic three times during their treatment, that's potentially 200+ consultations lost.

That is a material loss for a clinic.

And the interesting part is that most clinics don't even see this loss because they never know those patients were looking for an appointment in the first place.

The fix is actually very simple

Make it possible for patients to book an appointment when they are ready to do so.

That's why GoCliniq Online Booking is free forever.

You may be wondering: There are no free lunches in this world. So why is GoCliniq giving online booking away for free?

At GoCliniq, our goal is to modernize private clinics in India.

Online booking is the basic building block. We are happy to give it away for free because we believe that once clinics experience how simple it is to run their clinic digitally, many will want to move to GoCliniq Complete.

GoCliniq Complete helps clinics manage their entire workflow — Bookings, Billing, Tele-consultation, Patient Records, Treatment Plans, Immunization, Patient Communications and Google Reviews.

And we continue to build more capabilities based on feedback from the clinics using GoCliniq.

For us, the starting point is simple:

Don't let a patient who wants to see you go somewhere else simply because nobody picked up the phone.

Online booking is no longer a luxury for a private clinic.

It is becoming basic infrastructure.