Referrals Filed to the Right Patient, Without the Retyping.
Clinic Referral Inbox reads every referral PDF that lands in your clinic inbox. It finds the patient in Cliniko and asks your front desk to confirm. Then it files the referral onto the right record. Your staff press one button instead of downloading, searching and uploading by hand.
What Clinic Referral Inbox Is
Clinic Referral Inbox is a referral automation service for Australian allied health clinics that use Cliniko. It reads the referrals that arrive in your clinic’s email inbox, matches each one to the right patient in Cliniko and files the PDF once a staff member approves. Backbone Automation builds, sets up and supports it from Devonport, Tasmania.
Key facts
- Works with: Cliniko, and the email inbox your referrals already arrive in.
- Reads: GP referrals, care plans, NDIS plan pages and specialist letters. Invoices and newsletters are recognised as not referrals.
- Who decides: your staff. Nothing is filed without a person pressing File it.
- Built for: physio, psychology, OT and NDIS providers with 1–5 practitioners.
- Price: $1,497 setup + $199/month for founding clinics. Standard price $2,497 + $249/month. AUD, excluding GST.
- Page last updated: .
Where the Referrals Get Stuck
The Inbox Piles Up
GP referrals, care plans and NDIS paperwork arrive all day. Every one waits until someone has time to open it.
Filing Is Slow and Risky
Download, search the patient, upload, rename, repeat. Two patients with the same surname is all it takes to file a referral on the wrong record.
A Waiting Referral Is a Waiting Patient
Until the referral is on file, nobody rings to book. The patient waits, or books somewhere else.
How Cliniko Referral Automation Works
A referral arrives
An email with a PDF lands in your clinic’s referral inbox, as it does today. Nothing changes for your referrers.
AI reads the paperwork
It pulls out the patient’s name and date of birth and the referring doctor. It flags a referral as urgent only when the document itself says so.
It finds the patient
It searches Cliniko by surname and checks the date of birth. If more than one patient fits, or none does, the referral goes to a person.
Your staff approve it
Reception gets a message with three buttons: File it, Wrong patient or Skip. Press File it and the PDF goes onto the patient’s record in Cliniko.
A Person Approves Every Filing
Filing a referral to the wrong patient is a privacy breach. So the system suggests and your staff decide.
Nothing Is Filed Without a Button Press
Every match waits for a staff member. A missing date of birth always goes to a person, never to a guess.
Admin Only
It never creates patients and never judges anything clinical. It reads paperwork so your team doesn’t have to retype it.
Nothing Gets Lost
Every email ends up labelled: filed, needs a person, or not a referral. A daily summary shows what’s still waiting, and the same email is never filed twice.
Proven on a Full Test Clinic
We built a test clinic in Cliniko with fake patients. It includes the cases that catch filing out: two patients with the same surname, and two with the same name but different birthdays. Then we sent it 18 fake referrals.
Referrals read correctly: patient name, date of birth and document type.
Matched to the right patient, or correctly sent to a person when the match wasn’t clear.
Times it followed instructions hidden inside a document. One test referral tried, and the system ignored it.
Clinic Referral Inbox
Referral Inbox for Cliniko
For allied health clinics with 1–5 practitioners
Founding price for our first three clinics, with the monthly price locked for 12 months. After that, the standard price is $2,497 one-time + $249/mo.
- Set up on your referral inbox and your Cliniko account
- A separate Cliniko user for the system, with only the access it needs
- Staff approval buttons, email labels and a daily summary
- Monitoring and fixes included in the monthly fee
Built for physio, psychology, OT and NDIS providers.
The fine print
- Cliniko only, for now. If your clinic runs Halaxy, Splose or another system, tell us at your audit.
- You supply your own accounts. Your Cliniko subscription and your email account stay yours. We set up the connection, you own it.
- Privacy first. Before it handles real patient details, we agree in writing how your clinic’s data is handled and stored.
- No lock-in. Cancel the monthly plan with 30 days’ notice.
- All prices are in AUD and exclude GST.
- Independent service. Cliniko is a trademark of its owner. Backbone Automation isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by Cliniko.
Questions Clinic Owners Ask
Does the AI make any clinical decisions?
No. It reads names, dates of birth and referrer details so the referral can be filed. It never triages, summarises or interprets clinical content.
What kinds of documents can it read?
GP referrals, care plans, NDIS plan pages and specialist letters, in different layouts. If an email holds something that isn’t a referral, such as an invoice or a newsletter, it’s labelled as not a referral and nothing is filed.
What if it picks the wrong patient?
It can’t file anything on its own. Your staff see the suggested match and press Wrong patient if it’s not right. Unclear matches go straight to a person.
Will it create new patients in Cliniko?
Never. If the patient isn’t in Cliniko yet, the referral waits for your staff. Once they add the patient, one button tries the match again.
Where does patient information go?
The PDF is read by an AI service, then filed into your Cliniko account. The system keeps its own short record of each referral so nothing gets lost. The patient details in that record are cleared 7 days after the referral is finished. Patient details never go into logs, alerts or error messages. Before go-live we agree in writing how your clinic’s data is processed and stored.
Is it running in clinics already?
Not yet. It’s fully built and tested on fake patient data, and we’re looking for our first clinics. Founding clinics work directly with the person who built it.
Can you add other clinic automations?
Yes. Missed-call text-back and an AI voice receptionist are already built and can be set up for clinics. See all services.
Ready to stop filing referrals by hand?
No lock-in contracts. No jargon. A person approves every filing.