Customer Stories
A small team that doesn't break when someone leaves.
How Stride, a private orthopaedic clinic, handled 1,654 patient inquiries with Heron — and handed 4.2 workdays of phone time back to its admin team.
Stride is a private orthopaedic clinic — run by Dr. Ramez alongside a team of four nurse practitioners and several admin staff, caring mostly for hip and knee joint replacement patients and people with ACC injuries. It’s detail-heavy specialist work, and for a lean team, the phone line had become the thing that ran the day — until it couldn’t keep up at all.
By the numbers
1,654
Patient interactions handled (1,116 calls + 538 chats)
33 hrs
Call time handled by Heron — ≈4.2 workdays back to the team
99%
Intent identification accuracy
95%
Call success rate (5% abandoned)
1m 47s
Average call, answered and handled
83%
Of calls with full patient details captured
The challenge
Before Heron, patient communication at Stride ran through one traditional phone line — and it couldn’t keep up. The team was fielding a flood of calls while also looking after patients at the front desk, so calls got missed. Patients left voicemails; if the team was busy and slow to get back, those same patients would ring again, or email. The call flow had simply outgrown the number of staff they had.
The solution
Stride brought in Heron to handle the phones. Heron answers every call, takes the patient’s details, and handles the clinic’s most common questions — trained on Stride’s own FAQs and the responses they want patients to hear. Anything it can’t resolve is tagged for the right staff member and picked up by the team. Patients still reach a person when it’s urgent, and when the team is with someone at the desk, Heron captures the request so no one has to trawl back through voicemails later. Because a request can be tagged straight to the clinician who needs it, there’s far less double-handling between reception, the patient management system, and the clinical team.
The results
The results showed up on the phones and at the front desk almost immediately.
1,654 patient interactions handled — 1,116 calls and 538 chats
33h 15m of call time handled by Heron — roughly 4.2 workdays back to the admin team
99% intent identification accuracy — Heron knows what each patient is calling about
83% of calls with full patient details captured, so handoffs arrive ready to action
95% call success rate — just 5% abandoned
Every call answered and handled in under two minutes on average (1m 47s)
Requests tagged straight to the right clinician — far less double-handling across systems
Enough capacity restored that a staff resignation didn’t turn into a scramble to backfill
"I was able to, in the evening from home after my children had gone to bed, just text them back: 'I know exactly what they want. They want an appointment Wednesday afternoon. I've booked that for you.' Instead of trawling through voicemails and ringing people back."
Theresa Hewlett · Practice Manager, Stride Orthopaedic Clinic
“We’ve had a staff member resign, and we’ve covered some of her hours, but we haven’t necessarily been panicking about replacing her — because we’re managing so much better without having a thousand phone calls all the time.”
Theresa Hewlett · Practice Manager, Stride Orthopaedic Clinic
Full case study
Download the complete Stride Orthopaedic story as a PDF to share with your team.
"Even when we're in clinic and busy with patients in front of us, Heron takes the information — so if we've got 10 seconds, 30 seconds between patients, we don't have to ring people back to find out what they want. We can just say, 'Great, I've booked that appointment for you.' That's amazing."
TH
Theresa Hewlett
Practice Manager, Stride Orthopaedic Clinic