You have already paid for the appointments you never get to use.
Every slot is funded and staffed in advance. When a patient does not arrive, and nobody else takes it, that money buys nothing. Add the hours spent answering a phone that never stops, and there are two numbers worth putting in front of your board. This page works out both.
A model for each of the four products.
Choose the product, then the service closest to yours, the sliders rescale to suit it, because a dental practice and a health board do not share a set of numbers. Every figure is arithmetic over the inputs on screen.
Your service
Pick the closest match. The sliders rescale to suit it.
Confirm & Backfill · GP practice. Arithmetic only, over 48 operating weeks. An estimate to open a conversation, not a forecast.
Recovered capacity is not cash. It is clinical time put back into use, which usually shows up as more patients seen against the same budget rather than as money returned.
Time released is not posts removed. Front Door and Cancel & Rebook free hours across a team; they are not a headcount business case, and every call Front Door takes creates a short clinician review we have not netted off above.
Every assumption, on the table.
We would rather you trust a smaller number you can defend than repeat a bigger one you cannot. Here is exactly what each model does.
- Front Door: calls a week × 48 × the share handled × minutes per call, converted to hours.
- Welcome Call: new appointments a week × 48, then × the share confirmed in the conversation; letters avoided valued at your own per-letter cost.
- Confirm & Backfill: appointments a week × 48 × your missed-appointment rate, valued at your cost per missed appointment, then × the share recovered.
- Cancel & Rebook: sessions cancelled a month × 12 × patients per session, then × staff minutes per rebooking for the hours, and × cost per appointment for the value protected.
That is the whole model. There is no adjustment factor, no benchmark curve and no assumed uplift working quietly in the background.
Where the recovery default comes from. Twelve months of appointment data from a UK dental practice, September 2025 to September 2026, in which 18% of appointments were cancelled or missed and 43% of the cancelled slots were refilled with no automation at all. Refill ran at 47% where the cancellation came more than three days ahead and 35% where it came later, and 90% of the patients who took a freed slot attended it. Those are the practice’s own numbers, not ours: they say the mechanism works and that notice is the lever, which is why the slider defaults to a share rather than to anything we have claimed for ourselves.
It is not a forecast, a guarantee, or a cashable saving. Recovered capacity is clinical time put back into use, which usually shows up as more patients seen against the same budget, rather than as money returned.
It is a starting point for a conversation with your finance and operations colleagues, and a hypothesis a pilot can test against your own data.
The numbers we measure with you from week one.
Agreed before deployment and reported against throughout, so the business case is built from your service rather than from our marketing. Which of these apply depends on which of the four products is in scope.
Confirmation rate
The share of appointments where the patient has actively confirmed, declined or rebooked, rather than simply been sent a message. This is the leading indicator: everything else follows from knowing the truth earlier.
Decline lead-time
How far ahead of the appointment a patient tells you they cannot come. Moving this from hours to days is what makes a freed slot usable. A cancellation at 8am on the day is not the same asset as one three days out.
Backfill rate and time-to-refill
What proportion of released slots were taken by another patient, and how long that took. This is the number that turns a reduction in missed appointments into recovered clinical capacity.
Administrative time released
Calls your team no longer has to make or take. Measured with the service rather than estimated for it, because the honest figure is more useful to you than a flattering one.
Calls answered, and how fast the patient hears back
Where Front Door is in scope: the share of inbound calls answered rather than abandoned, and the time from a patient ringing to being told their appointment. The second number is the one patients actually feel, and it is the one most services have never been able to see.
Recovered capacity is productivity without new workforce.
CliniCall does not add clinicians, theatres or beds. It makes more use of the ones that are already funded, which is the specific thing the current policy environment is asking providers to do.
Productivity, efficiency and digital investment figures come from the 10 Year Health Plan for England and the 2025 Spending Review. The waiting list figure is the published NHS England referral-to-treatment measure, which counts pathways rather than people, so a patient can appear more than once. All four are cited as context for the problem, not as claims about CliniCall.
Model this against your real data.
Send us your specialty, your appointment volume and your published missed-appointment rate, and we will come back with a worked estimate you can put in front of your board, whether or not you go any further with us.