The third scheduling tool Atlas built — and the first one clinicians kept using
Two previous internal tools were abandoned within a year. We shipped one workflow in three weeks and let adoption decide the roadmap.
Results
The challenge
Atlas ran 22 clinics on a shared spreadsheet and a phone tree. Two previous attempts at internal software had been specified exhaustively, built over months, and abandoned because they modelled how leadership imagined the clinics worked rather than how they did.
What we did
Shipped one workflow — a single clinician booking a single patient — to production in three weeks, and watched people use it before building anything else.
Ran fortnightly sessions in two clinics, which surfaced a double-booking convention that every previous specification had treated as an error to prevent.
Built role-aware scheduling with conflict detection, waitlist promotion and audit logging against a HIPAA-aligned data model.
Integrated with their existing EHR through a queue-backed sync so a vendor outage degrades the feature instead of taking down the clinic.
The outcome
94% of clinical staff were using the tool daily within six weeks, against 31% for the previous system at the same point. Scheduling administration dropped from roughly eleven hours a week per clinic to three.
“They shipped a scheduling platform our clinicians actually use. That sounds like a low bar until you've watched three internal tools get abandoned in eighteen months.”
- React
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- AWS