Bonacura: a back office for clinics, built to be shared

A clinic runs on an agenda, a patient file, a clinical record, a cash register and a lot of phone calls. In most clinics those live in different tools, and the reception holds them together by memory. Bonacura is the back office we are building to bring them into one place.

It began as the internal system of a clinic in Lisbon. The first version is complete and running in a test environment in the European Union, with synthetic data. We are now turning it into a product that other clinics can use.

What it does

• Agenda: sixty-minute sessions by therapist and by room, series of sessions, cancellations, no-shows and the rules that go with them.
• Patients: one identity for each patient, with the administrative file kept separate from the clinical one.
• Clinical record: notes, history, attachments, discharge, and the instructions a therapist leaves for the reception.
• Documents: evolution and discharge reports, generated with the clinic’s own brand.
• Payments and invoicing: each session paid and reconciled, with the difference between attended, invoiced and received always visible.
• Management: the daily cash close, monthly reports by therapist and a view of the month for the clinic’s directors.
• CRM: the history of every contact with a patient, and the follow-up after discharge.

Built for health data

Clinical notes are health data. Bonacura separates what the reception sees from what a therapist sees and from what the clinic’s direction sees, and the rules are enforced in the database itself, not only on screen. Every account uses two-factor authentication. Every sensitive action is written to an audit log. The application and the database are hosted in Frankfurt, in the European Union, and backups are not just taken but restored in rehearsal.

Why a product, not a one-off

Every clinic we talk to has the same problems and a slightly different way of working. Building a new system for each one would be slow and expensive, and the clinic would carry the risk alone. A product solves the common part once, properly, and is then configured for each clinic: its rooms, its team, its services and prices, its policies.

That is what we mean by a sector app: a base built for the rules of one sector, tested, and set up for each client. Bonacura is the first. The same approach serves other sectors with their own rules, such as networks of consultants.

What comes next

The first clinic goes live on it once its current data has been migrated and the people who work there have been trained. Assistance from AI, for drafting messages and documents with a person reviewing every one, follows once the clinic is running on it.

If you run a clinic and recognise the problems above, we would like to hear how your day works today.