Lakeshore Medical Partners stopped calling its waitlist — and got its mornings back

The challenge

The waitlist was a person, not a system

Joanna Mireles had built the best waitlist process in the region, and it lived in her head. When a patient cancelled at one of Lakeshore’s fourteen clinics, someone at that front desk was supposed to open the waiting list, work out who could plausibly come in, and start calling. On a quiet morning it worked.

Mornings were not quiet. The same coordinator was checking patients in, answering the phone, and handling insurance questions. The waitlist was always the fourth priority, which in practice meant it was never a priority at all. Lakeshore measured it once, reluctantly: across a month, 31% of cancelled slots that could have been filled were not filled by anyone.

The obvious answer was to hire. Joanna had costed it — three additional coordinators across the group, roughly $132,000 a year — and could not make the arithmetic work against slots worth a fraction of that individually.

The solution

Automate the calling, not the judgement

Lakeshore enabled Brightloom at two clinics in November 2025. The setup took an afternoon: Brightloom read their practice management system and inferred providers, rooms, and appointment types, and Joanna confirmed the list.

What she kept was the judgement. Urgency tiers, which providers a patient could see, no-contact hours, and travel-time assumptions were all set by Lakeshore, reviewed by their medical director before the first message went out. What she handed over was the dialling: Brightloom detects the cancellation, ranks the waitlist against those rules, texts the best-matched patient, holds the slot for twenty minutes, and writes the confirmed booking back.

The remaining twelve clinics went live over the following five weeks, two at a time. No clinic had a scheduling outage, and no coordinator was asked to learn a new screen — the work simply stopped appearing on their list.

The results

Fourteen clinics, six months, measured

• No-shows down 38% group-wide, because a recovered slot is a slot somebody actually wanted.
• 22 front-desk hours returned weekly across the group — measured from outbound call minutes logged in their PMS, not estimated.
• Payback in six weeks on the annual agreement, against a hiring plan that would never have paid back.
• Zero additional coordinators hired. The three open roles were closed, and the budget went to a second nurse practitioner.
• Two clinics added in Weaverville and Arden, both live on Brightloom from their opening day.

Joanna still owns the rules, and reviews them once a quarter. She has not opened a waitlist to make a call since December.