The situation
A six-person physio clinic on the Coffs Coast was running a busy mixed caseload: sports injuries, post-surgery rehab, and chronic pain management. Each new patient required a set of intake forms before their first appointment, covering medical history, consent, and service-specific questionnaires. Reception was emailing these forms manually after each booking was confirmed.
The problem was follow-through. Roughly 40 percent of patients returned their forms by fax or on paper, which meant a staff member had to re-key the data into Halaxy before the appointment. The rest either replied by email or forgot entirely, and reception spent most of Monday mornings chasing outstanding paperwork by phone. Across six clinicians with staggered schedules, that added up to about eight hours of avoidable admin every week.
The flow we built
A Make.com automation now runs the moment Halaxy confirms a new booking:
- A Microsoft Forms link specific to the booked service type is sent to the patient within two minutes of confirmation.
- When the patient submits the form, the responses are automatically attached to their Halaxy patient record.
- A summary card posts to the relevant clinician's Microsoft Teams channel, showing the key intake fields and flagging any items that need attention before the appointment.
- If the form is not submitted within 48 hours of the booking, a gentle reminder goes out automatically.
Paper returns and fax submissions still come through, but they are now the exception rather than the rule, and reception handles them in a single daily batch rather than scattered across the week.
The platforms
Halaxy for patient bookings and clinical records. Microsoft Forms for the intake questionnaires, with separate form versions per service type. Microsoft Teams for clinician notifications. Make.com for the automation logic, routing, and retry logic. The clinic is on a Professional Bot Care tier, and when Microsoft updated the Forms API response format three months in, the connector was patched within the same day.
The results
Reception admin for intake forms dropped from eight hours a week to roughly 20 minutes, used for reviewing the small number of exception cases. Clinicians now arrive at each first appointment with the relevant history already loaded and any red flags already noted in their Teams channel. The re-keying work that was consuming a significant portion of Monday mornings was eliminated entirely.
The broader shift was in how the clinic presents to new patients. An automated, professional intake sequence that arrives within minutes of booking sets a different tone to a manual email that may or may not arrive the same day.
What this could look like for your allied health practice
If your reception team is chasing intake forms and re-keying data that patients have already written down somewhere, there is a cleaner path. We build patient intake automations for physio clinics, occupational therapy practices, speech therapy services, and other allied health settings.