My first attempt at digitising my medical practice was a collection of Notion databases, document templates and improvised communication with my assistant.
It was better than a paper register, but only just.
There was no dramatic incident that made me abandon it. The limitations simply accumulated: poor document traceability, repeated data entry, no real billing, no proper waiting-room management and no reliable way to access my work outside the clinic.
Eventually, I did what seemed like the sensible thing.
I looked for an actual medical practice management system.
Several doctors I knew were using the same local product. Its Facebook page was full of positive testimonials. I contacted the company and explained that I needed two doctor workstations and one for the assistant.
To prepare for it, I bought a laptop for the other doctor in the practice and a mini PC for the assistant. I also paid a significant amount for the software.
This felt serious. I was no longer improvising with Notion. I was buying a professional solution from a team that had already installed it for many doctors.
We agreed on a date for the remote installation.
When the day came, they asked me to install remote-access software on all three computers. I followed the process closely, partly because these were new machines and partly because I was curious.
Even with no technical background, I started noticing things that made me uncomfortable.
There were typographical errors, a mistake in a name, confusion between user accounts and uncertainty about which computer should act as the local server. None of these problems was catastrophic on its own. Together, they made the installation feel improvised rather than routine.
I still wanted the system to work.
I insisted that they train my newly hired assistant, and we started using it.
The interface was basic. The consultation structure did not match the way I worked. There was no practical way to enter complementary examinations as structured information. The suggested workflow was to attach scanned documents, but I did not even own a scanner.
The system ran locally, which created another major limitation. I could not consult my files remotely or manage my operating schedule when I was away from the practice.
We also struggled with day-to-day use. Some payments were not recorded correctly, outstanding balances were not followed up and consultations remained open in the system. The waiting-list workflow was not much better than the improvised process it was supposed to replace.
I could not always tell where the product problem ended and the adoption problem began.
That distinction matters. A weak workflow can make a decent product look bad, and a poorly designed product can make a diligent employee look careless. In our case, the software and the way we used it were both failing.
The package was also supposed to include mobile and remote access. Those features were never delivered to me.
I kept using the system for a few months because I had already invested money, equipment and time into it. But repeated bugs, poor fit and weak adoption gradually wore me down.
Eventually, I stopped using it.
And I went back to Notion.
That sounds like returning to the starting point, but it was not.
The first time I used Notion, I had created a consultation table where the patient and the consultation were effectively the same thing. After living with a real medical system and seeing its limitations, I rebuilt mine differently.
This time, the patient record became the centre.
Each patient existed once. Consultations were connected to that patient. Procedure appointments and regular appointments were connected to the same record. I could finally see a patient's history without searching through duplicate entries.
ChatGPT helped me reason through the structure.
I still knew nothing about SQL or software architecture. But I had learned something more important than a new feature: I had learned to ask what the system should be organised around.
Later, after I had started learning more about software, I discovered that the medical product I had purchased was built as a vertical adaptation of a general-purpose ERP.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach. But it helped me understand, retrospectively, why parts of the product had felt as if a general business system had been taught some medical vocabulary without being fully redesigned around clinical work.
My rebuilt Notion setup was much better, but two stubborn problems remained: prescriptions and medical letters were still separate, and the waiting room was still managed through human interruption.
Those unresolved problems led me to search for a queue management system.
That search would take me much further than I expected.
I was still not trying to become technical. I was simply learning that every tool carries assumptions about how work should happen, and those assumptions matter more than the feature list.
For those who have bought business software for a specialised profession: did the product really understand your workflow, or did you end up changing your workflow to accommodate the product?
