Your first week
A running order for setup — what has to be true before the next thing is worth doing.
Nothing here is mandatory and none of it is long. The order matters more than the speed: each step assumes the one above it, and doing them out of order is how people end up with an assistant confidently offering slots that do not exist.
Day one — make the calendar true
- Working hours. The outer boundary of every slot.
- Specialties, then doctors. Patients think in specialties; the calendar thinks in doctors.
- Appointment rules. Minimum notice and booking horizon are the two worth setting deliberately.
Stop here and book a test appointment on your own calendar. If that works, everything downstream — the widget, the assistant, reminders — is working from a correct picture. If it does not, nothing downstream can be right.
Day two — money and people
- Services and prices. Seeded services start as "on request"; make the common ones real.
- Invite your team with the narrowest role that lets them work.
- Set your default currency before you record a single transaction.
Day three — let patients in
- Write four or five FAQ entries. This is the cheapest improvement you will make to the assistant all week.
- Review what the assistant may answer and add locked answers for anything where a paraphrase would be a problem.
- Install the widget and restrict it to your own domains.
- Talk to it yourself, as a patient would. Ask the awkward questions.
End of the week — the things you will forget
- Notification preferences — decide who gets told when a patient is waiting for a human, before the first one waits.
- Quiet hours, so the clinic does not email itself at 3am.
- Data retention — unset means "keep forever", which is a choice, not a default you have made.
- Reminders — check the count matches how much contact your patients actually want.
Do not import your whole patient history on day one. Run the clinic on it for a week first — every clinic discovers something about its own setup in the first week, and changing it is easier before there are ten thousand records leaning on it.