Quickstart

Introduction

Penciled is an autonomous AI scheduling system built for physical therapists who use WebPT. The goal of Penciled is to automate repetitive front office tasks with AI. Read why here.

What are Penciled's objectives?

Penciled's primary objective is to book appointments. Penciled books initial exams, follow-ups, and fills cancellations.

What workflows does Penciled automate?

Penciled reviews documentation and communicates with patients to:

Complete new patient intakes
Schedule initial exams
Send confirmations for appointments and handle any cancellations
Review ongoing plans of care, visit authorizations, and flag patients at risk of drop off
Schedule follow-ups with patients who are missing visits
Contact multiple waitlist patients simultaneously to fill cancellations immediately

How does Penciled communicate with patients?

Currently, Penciled executes tasks via text message with patients. Penciled will soon execute the same tasks via phone, which is on our near-term roadmap with a January 2026 delivery.

Penciled deploys new capabilities to our AI system every week. Our customers tell us what workflows they currently perform. If the workflow seems automatable and will increase the number of appointments Penciled can book, we will automate it.

How to start

Don't do it all at once

Introducing automation into multiple workflows of your front office at the same time is daunting and will likely fail. This is usually because there are a lot of settings to understand, and if you try to do it all at once, it will get overwhelming and you'll go back to doing things manually.

Onboarding roadmap

We recommend you introduce automation to your workflows in the following steps:

Waitlists. This lets you immediately start booking visits without much configuration lift.
Plans of care (individual patients). This lets you add specific patients who need to schedule out their visits. This requires you to set up settings for providers and payers. If patients desire, they can add themselves to the waitlist automatically if no times work for them.
Plans of care (automated). This step will automatically enroll all active patients and auto-message them to scheduling unscheduled visits.
Initial exams (individual patients). This lets you add new patients from WebPT and schedule initial exams. If patients desire, they can add themselves to the waitlist automatically if no times work for them.
Reminders/confirmations/cancellations. This step will ask patients to confirm if they are coming, and if not, will auto-cancel and automatically trigger the waitlist to get the slot filled.

Coming soon:

New patient intake on the website. This lets new patients complete intake and even schedule a new visit immediately when visiting your website.
Fax referral automation. This creates new patient records automatically and reaches out to patients to schedule initial exams.
Phone systems. This lets the AI perform all the actions it knows how to do, just on the phone instead of text when patients call into the clinic.

The speed at which you learn and introduce Penciled can be very fast, and we've seen teams rapidly deploy successfully within 1-2 weeks. We just recommend learning each workflow sequentially.

How to get your first appointment booked

To get your first appointment booked via Penciled, we recommend using the waitlist. It is very easy to understand, and it does not require many settings to be set up. If something is misconfigured, it won't have as much of an impact since the waitlist only contacts a subset waitlist patients who match the criteria for a given cancelled slot.

Where to start with the waitlist

If you have a list of patients waiting for appointments, we recommend to move those onto Penciled immediately. If you are using WebPT, you have probably been in business for a while. There are likely patients who want to be seen but simply can't schedule at the times you have available now. Our past clients have migrated waitlists from:

Weave (sometimes front office stores information about who is waiting for a slot in the notes)
Spreadsheets (Google Sheets is a common way that front offices keep lists of patients to contact when a cancellation occurs)
WebPT itself (WebPT has a built-in waitlist that some front offices use to store patients)
Sticky notes & clipboards (patients who've walked in and tried to get an appointment may have been written down somewhere)
In your brain (you may remember certain patients who wanted to get in sooner, but you scheduled them out later because that's all you had available)

Why should I move my waitlist to Penciled?

Patients who are on Penciled's waitlist will automatically get texted when a cancellation occurs in the calendar if that cancellation opening is a fit for their waitlist preferences. If the patient replies affirmatively to our AI, they will be automatically booked into WebPT, saving your front office time and preventing slots from going unfilled.

Once enrolled, patients can also communicate directly to the AI about their waitlist availability preferences, so this reduces the workload on the front office to maintain lists of available days or times for each patient.

After you later set up the rest of Penciled's workflows including scheduling for initial exams and follow-ups, future patients can automatically enroll themselves into the waitlist if no available times work for them during scheduling. Using Penciled's waitlist manually first prevents you from having to maintain two separate waitlists later.

How to grow a waitlist

Identify areas inside of your front office operations to incorporate the waitlist. The waitlist is suitable for any scenario where a patient may desire to be scheduled for a sooner visit.

For example, here are some soft operational rules that front offices have implemented to generate a waitlist:

Whenever a new patient gets an initial exam booked, immediately add them onto the waitlist for the days preceding in case an appointment opens up sooner. Doing this reliably advances total revenue generated by moving up the IE and downstream follow-ups, (b) reduces the chance that the patient finds another PT who can see them sooner and cancels or no-shows, and (c) is better for the patient to get in sooner if they are in pain.
For all patients with unscheduled follow-up visits, add them to the waitlist for all weeks where they don't have visits scheduled.

How to add patients to the Penciled waitlist

Once you're ready to get started using Penciled, add your first waitlist patient by following these instructions.