Overview

High-impact features

• Automatic detection of cancellations in WebPT
• Texting patients on the waitlist in parallel until a slot is filled
• Booking patients directly into the schedule without leaving voicemails

About the team

Tenet Therapies is an independent physical therapy clinic founded by Ritesh Tripathi in Marquette, Michigan. After building his clinic from scratch three years ago, Ritesh grew into a busy schedule as a single provider with limited front desk support.

“I started as a single provider with no one else in the office. I’m just three years in, and I started with no front desk. Nothing. I did everything from scratch.”

Core problem

As the only provider, Ritesh often faced the challenge of balancing patient care with cancellations and limited admin support. His part-time front desk was only available from 9:00 to 3:00, leaving gaps in coverage.

“My front desk is only between nine to three. So the front end and the back end is empty. If someone calls me in the morning and says, I cannot make it at 10am, I don’t have enough time in the morning at 8am to give calls to other people to fill that.”

When cancellations happened, the existing waitlist process was manual and inefficient.

When support staff were unavailable, last-minute cancellations would often go unfilled.

Why he chose Penciled

For a solo practitioner, the economics of automation had to be clear. Ritesh was originally skeptical.

"I initially discovered Penciled through email marketing and didn't give it much thought. However, after a few months of cancellations and our front desk struggling to fill open spots, I decided to book an introductory meeting with Shawn."

Despite this concern, Ritesh recognized the immediate time-saving benefit of Penciled — especially when patients cancel last-minute and staff aren’t available. He decided to go all-in.

Product

Penciled integrates directly with WebPT to monitor cancellations. When a cancellation is detected, it automatically texts waitlist patients until someone accepts, then instantly books them into the schedule.

For Ritesh, this meant patients could be rebooked even outside of his front desk’s limited hours.

Penciled dashboard for front office monitoring

Penciled features a dashboard which allows front offices to keep track of ongoing waitlist offerings immediately after appointments are cancelled.

Penciled allows the front office to inspect previous cancellations and look into which patients were contacted and which patient accepted the apopintment.

By clicking into the patient, the front office can quickly read the text message thread and even send messages manually to override the AI if needed.

Patient text message conversation with Penciled

By using generative AI-powered SMS, patients can easily reply to the AI assistant and schedule appointments without any portals, logins, or other steps.

Onboarding

Within hours of receiving his onboarding call, Ritesh had immediately begun adding patients to his growing waitlist and quickly excelled in filling cancellations.

"He was incredibly friendly, clearly demonstrating the platform's usefulness and its cost-benefit to our clinic, which made me willing to give it a try. The Penciled team was excellent in setting up our account and was consistently responsive to my questions and support needs."

Results

In just the first two weeks, Penciled filled 8 cancellations for Ritesh.

This not only recovered lost revenue but also freed Ritesh from having to personally call patients before starting his treatment day.

"Since implementing the platform with WebPT, it has become a great asset and a significant time-saving tool for our front desk in filling cancellation spots. I highly recommend Penciled for any small business or single-to-two provider clinics, whether they have a front desk or not."

Discussion

For solo providers, every filled cancellation directly impacts the bottom line. By automating the waitlist, Penciled helped Tenet Therapies:

• Recover revenue from last-minute cancellations
• Keep the provider’s schedule consistently full
• Reduce reliance on limited front desk staff

In these cases, an AI front office assistant can be an incredible value-add when staffing is limited.

Conclusion

Penciled's AI front office solution, and its automated waitlist in particular, can help solo practitioners keep their schedules full and avoid lost revenue by automating tasks that a front office team would traditionally perform.