Twelve Questions Worth Asking Any Clinic Software Vendor

Read this as a checklist, not an advert

These are the questions we think you should put to any vendor you are considering — us included. Several of them have answers we are not perfectly happy with, and we would rather you asked than found out in month four.

On your data

1. Can I export everything, on my own, without asking you? Not "do you offer migration support". Can you, logged in, produce a complete export of your patients, their records and their attachments? If the answer involves a support ticket and a quote, your data is leverage.

2. What format is the export in? A PDF of every record is technically an export and practically useless for moving to another system. Ask for structured formats.

3. What happens to my data if I stop paying? Ask specifically: is it deleted, frozen, or downloadable during a grace period, and how long is that period?

4. Where is it physically stored, and under whose law? This one matters more in some jurisdictions than others, and whether a given arrangement satisfies your obligations is a question for your own legal advice, not for a vendor's marketing page. Ask for a straight answer about location so you can take it to someone qualified.

On price

5. What does the bill look like when I add my third doctor? My tenth? Per-seat pricing is fine; per-seat pricing you discover later is not. Ask for the actual number at the size you expect to be.

6. What is extra? SMS or WhatsApp notifications, storage above a limit, AI features, extra branches, support beyond email. Any of these can be reasonable. All of them are unpleasant as a surprise.

7. What happens at renewal? Ask whether the price you sign at is the price you renew at, and how much notice you get of a change.

On daily use

8. What happens when the internet drops mid-consultation? Connectivity is not uniformly reliable everywhere, and a system that simply stops is a system that will lose you a day's notes eventually. Ask what is readable offline and what happens to work done while disconnected.

9. How many clicks to the thing I do fifty times a day? Book a patient. Open the record. Write a note. Ask for a live demo of exactly those, not a feature tour.

10. What do my patients see? The booking page is a patient's first impression of your practice. Ask to see it on a phone, in your language, in the direction your language reads.

On the relationship

11. Who answers when something breaks, and how fast? Ask what channel, what hours, and what happens at 8pm on a clinic day.

12. What is on the roadmap that I am being asked to wait for? If a feature you need is "coming soon", ask whether you are buying it today or buying a promise. Both can be reasonable; only one should be priced as if it exists.

Our short answers

For transparency, on the ones with clear answers: you can export your own patient records including attachments without asking us; the doctor workspace keeps working offline and syncs when you reconnect; per-doctor pricing is published rather than quoted; and the patient-facing booking page works in both reading directions. On data location, ask us — the honest answer depends on which deployment you are on.