Watch our recording of Cliniko & Coffee—Special edition

Cliniko & Coffee looked a bit different this time around. Our founder, Joel, hosted a live Q&A event as usual, but rather than diving straight into your questions, he started with a special demo of something new that’s coming to Cliniko! Cliniko redesign is a project we’ve been working on behind the scenes for several years and is almost ready to launch in beta phase. This session was the first time we’ve publicly shared so much detail.

In case you missed it (or want to relive the fun!) here are some of the highlights from the session. In addition to chatting through the improvements you’ll see when Cliniko redesign rolls out, Joel also talked about what’s next in terms of new features, and our evolving stance on AI.

Introducing redesign

First up, Joel gave some context for redesign and why we embarked on the project. In short, we wanted to upgrade the technology on which Cliniko is built and rewrite our code behind the scenes to allow for faster and more stable development in future (this is called removing technical debt). The goal was to rebuild the interface our customers use, improve usability, performance, and security. Not exactly a small task!

How will the beta work?

“Beta” is a transition period in which Cliniko redesign will be gradually rolled out to a portion of customers at a time. We’ll expand access slowly to give us a chance to incorporate customer feedback and iron out any kinks.

When beta is enabled on your account, you’ll see a “beta features” button at the bottom of your sidebar. It’s your call as to when you switch it on—it’s an opt-in system that each user controls for themselves, for each device. Give it a go whenever you’re ready and take your time to get used to the new design. You can also switch it off or toggle backwards and forwards as much as you want.

Eventually everyone will transition to redesign, which will replace the current version of Cliniko entirely, but we’re not going to surprise you with this! We’ll give you plenty of warning before we make any final changes, and you’ll have ample time to get used to the new look.

In the beta features area, you’ll find options to give feedback or submit a bug report. If you see anything that looks amiss or isn’t quite working, please let us know—we definitely want to hear about it!

What’s changing?

When it comes to the upgrades you’ll see, there was a lot to talk about. These are some of the highlights that Joel demoed:

• Changes to navigation
  How replies work on your dashboard is changing—these will now open into a window as you write. A new toggle button lets you hide the main navigation panel and frees up some screen space. Profile and practitioner settings have moved to an easily accessed button at the top right of the screen, and you can chat with our support team from there as well. Lastly, keyboard shortcuts aren’t hiding away anymore! They’re much more visible in the menu, so you can be sure you’re making use of all of Cliniko’s secret passageways.
  
• New lists, filters, and tables
  Joel demoed some helpful additions that are coming to all pages that display information, such as Patients or Invoices. A new sorting button makes it easier than ever to manage your lists, letting you choose how the data you see is displayed. This could be by name, appointment, date created, or last updated, and whether they are ordered forwards or backwards—whatever works for you, you have control! You can also select which columns are shown and hidden on these pages, and filter which entries you’re shown (for example, you might only view patients who have an appointment on a certain day or with a particular practitioner).
  
• Updated Patient details page
  Because this page is where practitioners often spend the majority of their day, it’s had the most upgrades. There’s an expanded sidebar that remains in place and stays open no matter what part of the patient’s record you’re looking at. We’ve also amped up the functionality of this sidebar, with treatment notes, letters, files, and forms all easily accessible from this section. This makes it much easier to keep track of everything you need to know about a patient, all in one place. The sidebar is collapsible, but also scrolls independently of the main section, so you’ll never lose your place when you’re in the middle of something.
  
• Many usability improvements
  A new action menu lets you do more without going into Patient details each time, allowing you to make quick changes when you need. We’ve also moved the patient record navigation to the top for ease of use and made better use of horizontal screen space. We’ve tried to be respectful to the design of the Cliniko you know and love with our changes—everything we’ve improved is for a reason, rather than simply making changes for the sake of them, and we promise you won’t have to relearn how to use Cliniko from scratch!

What’s happening with AI in Cliniko?

This one’s always a controversial and complex topic. We’re continually revising our thoughts on AI, so this one is hard to answer in a nutshell. This is part of why Joel proposed running a Cliniko & Coffee: AI edition session, which was met with some enthusiasm in the livestream chat—we’ll keep you posted as we organise this.

While we’ve been trialling AI features for years, we haven’t ever been happy with the results, so we’ve usually scrapped most of what we’ve worked on. We strongly believe that AI needs to be accurate and reliable, especially when it’s being used in healthcare.

We’re currently working on AI-generated letters, which may or may not end up being released, but at this stage, it’s looking promising. Again, any AI features we release have to be safe and ethical—we always want to do right by you and your patients. But in the meantime, we do also have connected apps that provide AI functionality if you’re wanting to incorporate this into your practice, though we don’t endorse these and encourage you to do your due diligence before signing up to anything.

These days some of our developers also use AI to help with coding. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that we won’t be using AI in our customer support; you can be assured that you’ll always have a human to help if you have questions when you’re using Cliniko.

What about new features?

Custom security roles and permissions should be coming soon. Once redesign is rolled out, we’re aiming to release some changes to let you configure your permissions yourself, rather than using our default groups.

Among other things, we also want to improve the wait list with automations when we’re able to, though this isn’t currently being worked on.

An abrupt ending

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to wrap up the Cliniko & Coffee session the way we would’ve liked. We were as surprised as our audience when the livestream suddenly cut out and couldn’t be restored. This was an issue beyond our control with YouTube, who incorrectly flagged the video and (to our immense frustration) immediately pulled it. The recording has since been reinstated, but it certainly wasn’t the ending we’d intended.

A positive session overall nonetheless

We’re grateful to everyone who attended, as well as to those who asked questions. We were joined by people all around the world, including some folks who’ve been using Cliniko almost since we started 15 years ago—that’s a serious commitment, and we love that you’ve found Cliniko helpful for so many years!

You might’ve also noticed that there was no coffee making on camera this time (though Joel had pre-prepared a Colombian brew to sip on). But rest assured, we’re just as enthusiastic about coffee as ever.

We’ll be chatting more about redesign in coming weeks and months, so stay tuned. You can also read more about it in our initial announcement. We can’t wait to keep sharing more!