About
→ An ERP for Small to Mid-Sized Businesses
Concept
A new way to manage the patient–doctor relationship. In the long run, William Clinic aimed to be a platform that enabled doctors to attend to patients remotely with the assistance of artificial intelligence—without replacing them.
Target Market
William Clinic leveraged William Support to offer two interfaces. On one hand, it provided a patient-management service for clinics, and on the other, the William system, with a chat interface for patients.
Clinics
Clinics faced the challenge of having staff without technical expertise who could easily fall behind due to the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence. The assumption was that these clinics were aware of this gap and sought to make the most of AI technology. Additionally, today there are “PMS” (Practice Management Systems) that are outdated but widely used in the industry because they contain embedded specialized knowledge that makes clinic management possible. William Clinic aimed to be a modern alternative to these PMSs.
Patients
William Clinic offered a chat interface powered by the clinic’s ERP system. This enhanced the capabilities of William Support (a previous project) to provide a white-label interface capable of answering specific questions tailored to the patient’s profile or medical history. To avoid handling personal data, an ID was assigned to each user, linked to an email address in the clinic’s database. Since there was no connection between sensitive data (such as name, address, or phone number) and conversations, it was impossible to link a person to their medical history.
Approach
Despite all the functionalities offered by both platforms together, the goal was to find a design partner willing to use the platform as a patient-care service post-consultation. That is, the doctor would track patients on their platform, the William Clinic ERP system would connect, and this would allow the doctor to offer a service to the patient after their consultation. The aim was to reduce the time each doctor spent attending to each patient (by answering treatment-related questions), assist doctors in educating their patients to make them more receptive to new treatments, and send reminders to patients.
Monetization
Being a B2B platform, there were many monetization alternatives, some of which included:
- Cost Per Patient
A fixed fee was charged based on the number of patients using William. The dashboard was offered for free, and this fixed fee was sufficient to cover (on average) the platform’s per-patient cost. - Doctor-to-Patient Fee
With a commission-based system, doctors could offer the product at an additional cost. The doctor served as the point of sale, while the patient was the final consumer. In return, the doctor received a percentage of sales for each patient transaction, and the patient gained access to William’s enhanced capabilities through the PMS. - Installation and Support Fee
The PMS platform was offered for free, and only an installation and support fee was charged. Initially, this option did not include offering William Chat to the doctor’s patients—only the modern PMS platform, with the possibility of later upselling AI-powered features. - Licensing
Another monetization approach was a licensing agreement. The challenge with this method was that the product needed to be solid, generalized, and specialized for each field of medicine.
Conclusion
At first, I loved the idea of William Clinic. It was the right idea at the right time. The problem was that there was no way to solve the most basic issues of this application—the workload and technical debt were beyond my capabilities at the time. Additionally, the cumulative approach of using William Support, while effective, was also a challenge, as bugs accumulated across applications.