Questions Before You Onboard
Straight answers to what a dental practice asks before signing up. Grouped into twelve topics. Anything not covered here: contactus@pragatisolutions.com or +91 90086 55118.
1 · Pricing & what you pay
How much does it cost? Two published plans: Starter — ₹799/month (up to 2 dentists, 1 branch) and Professional — ₹1,799/month per branch. No setup fee.
Is there a per-appointment or per-message charge? No. The monthly plan fee is the whole cost — nothing per booking, per patient, or per WhatsApp message.
Do I pay for each staff login? No. Create as many admin and dentist logins as you need at no extra cost. Plan limits are on dentists offered to patients and on branches, not on user accounts.
What counts as a branch? A physical clinic location with its own address and chair schedule. On Professional the monthly fee is multiplied by the number of active branches.
My practice sits between the two plans. Can you do a custom deal? Yes — a negotiated dentist cap, branch cap and price set for your clinic specifically.
How is payment collected? A Razorpay subscription — card, UPI or netbanking — that you set up yourself from inside the dashboard. It renews monthly until you cancel.
Will I get a GST invoice? Yes. One GST tax invoice is generated automatically for every charge, with the CGST + SGST or IGST split worked out from your state, downloadable as a PDF. The plan amount shown is GST-inclusive.
Is there a contract or minimum term? No minimum term. Billing is monthly and you can cancel at any time.
2 · The trial & getting approved
Is there a free trial, and do I need a card? 14 days, free, no card required. You only enter payment details later, when you choose to subscribe.
What happens when the trial ends and I haven't added a card? The account pauses unsolicited patient messaging but you can still log in and add a card. After a further grace period it is suspended. Nothing is deleted — adding a card reactivates it.
Do I have to get on a sales call to sign up? No. You create the account yourself. Every new clinic is reviewed and approved on our side — usually the same day — but that is a review step, not a call you have to book.
How is my identity verified? A one-time code sent to the owner's own WhatsApp number. No document upload, no video call.
How soon can we take bookings after signing up? Same-day approval in most cases, then a 15–20 minute guided setup, then you print your QR. Live the same day is normal for a single-branch clinic.
3 · The shared WhatsApp number
Is this a real WhatsApp number my patients message? Yes. From the patient's side it is your clinic's WhatsApp: every message is headed with your clinic name, and there is no MediBook branding anywhere a patient can see. No app to install.
Do all clinics share one number? Could my patients see another practice? There is one Meta-verified number underneath, shared across clinics. Every message is routed to your clinic by a private code embedded in your QR. There is no clinic directory and no “search for a clinic” — a patient can never browse to, or land on, a competitor.
What if someone messages the number without scanning my QR? They can type your printed 6-character code instead. With neither a scan nor a code they get a neutral prompt asking them to scan their clinic's QR — they are never dropped into someone else's clinic.
Can I have my own dedicated WhatsApp Business number instead? Not today. The shared-number model is what removes Meta Business verification, the waiting period and a second SIM from your setup.
We already run our own clinic WhatsApp. Can we keep using it? MediBook replaces it with the shared number and your QR. What you gain is that every patient message is then visible to the whole front desk in one place, with the day's schedule attached — instead of sitting in one staff member's personal chat list.
Does my QR code ever expire? Can I reprint it? The code is permanent. Reprint the same QR on as many cards, posters and invoices as you like. It only changes if an admin deliberately regenerates it.
What if we haven't printed the QR anywhere yet? Then patients can't reach you yet — the QR is the only way in. It needs to be visible where patients look: reception, appointment cards, invoices, your Google Business profile.
4 · Reliability & lock-in
What happens if WhatsApp or Meta has an outage? The dashboard keeps working completely — bookings, schedules, payments, reports. Only patient messaging pauses. You run the day from the dashboard and the phone until it clears.
If the shared number is one clinic misbehaving away from being blocked, how am I protected? Sending discipline is enforced by the platform, not left to each clinic: per-patient message budgets, trial send caps and throttles. One clinic cannot over-message its way into degrading delivery for everyone else.
Can I get my data out if I want to leave? Yes, at any time and without asking us. From the dashboard you can export patients, appointments (full history) and treatments.
Is there a status page I can check? Yes — a public one reporting database health, background-job freshness and the WhatsApp connection state.
5 · Data security & privacy
Is my clinic's data isolated from other clinics'? Yes. Each clinic's data lives in its own separate database schema, and every query is validated so one clinic's requests can never read another clinic's rows.
Is patient medical history protected? Blood type, allergies, chronic conditions and medications are encrypted at rest. If a record ever fails to decrypt, the dentist is shown an explicit error, never a falsely-empty record.
Are backups encrypted? Yes. Every backup file is AES-256 encrypted and replicated to independent off-site storage.
Do you sell, share or mine patient data? No. WhatsApp (Meta) is the only third party in the message path. There is deliberately no email and no SMS channel.
Is there a Data Processing Agreement and Privacy Policy? Yes, both are published on this site and cover what is processed, sub-processors, security measures and your rights.
If we leave, can our data be permanently deleted? Yes. You request deletion from the dashboard; there is a 14-day window in which it is fully reversible, and then the schema is permanently deleted.
6 · Setup & onboarding effort
How long does setup actually take? A guided wizard: clinic details, your treatment list, your first dentist and their weekly hours, and then your QR. Around 15–20 minutes for a single-branch clinic.
Do I have to enter every dentist and schedule by hand? Each dentist is added once (or imported from a CSV), and their weekly sessions are entered once. A working day is a list of sessions — e.g. 10–1 at one branch and 5–9 at another on the same day.
Can it handle visiting or part-time specialists? Yes — this is a core design case. A dentist can be set to work specific weekdays at specific branches, and specific weeks of the month: alternate Tuesdays, 1st and 3rd Saturday, and so on.
What about clinic holidays and individual dentist leave? Both are honoured automatically when slots are generated. A holiday at one branch does not close the day the dentist spends at another branch.
Can the front desk still book manually and fit patients in? Yes. The slot grid is a guide, not a cage. Staff can book any dentist, add walk-ins into gaps, and when a date is genuinely full the patient is offered a callback rather than being turned away.
7 · How patients experience it
Do my patients need to install anything? No. Everything happens inside WhatsApp. They scan your QR, a chat opens already addressed to your practice, and they book by replying.
Do patients have to remember a booking ID? No. They are recognised by phone number. Replying My Appointments shows everything booked under that number.
What can a patient do in the chat? Book a consultation, reschedule, cancel (with an offer to move the appointment first), see the clinic's address and phone number, view their appointments, and opt out of messages — and opt back in.
Can a patient book any of our dentists? Only the ones you mark as online-bookable. A visiting orthodontist can be kept off the patient-facing menu while the front desk still books them normally.
What if the bot can't help and the patient needs a person? Every “please call us” message includes the branch's phone number. The patient can also ask for a callback, which pings your front desk on WhatsApp.
8 · Reminders, volume & reviews
Does it send appointment reminders automatically? Yes — a 24-hour reminder. Reminders and booking confirmations are never suppressed or rate-limited: a patient with an appointment tomorrow always gets that message.
Will this spam my patients? No. Discretionary messages — feedback requests, recall reminders, treatment nudges — are capped at six per patient per seven days across the entire system.
Does it ask patients for Google reviews? Optionally. When you set a Google review link, only patients who rate you 4 or 5 are invited to post a public review. Ratings of 1–3 stay entirely internal.
How often is feedback requested? At most once a month per patient — not once per visit — and it is keyed to the patient, so a father's treatment does not silence his daughter's first-visit feedback.
Can tomorrow's reminders double as our evening call-list? Yes. The schedule report for a future date carries each patient's reminder reply and a “confirmed / to call” count.
9 · Treatments, recalls & recare
Does it handle multi-visit treatments — root canals, implants, braces? Yes. A treatment plan is the head of the course; each visit carries the plan and a visit number. Cost, payments and balance are tracked on the plan, and progress is derived from the actual appointments — so a cancelled visit correctly drops back onto the “advised but not booked” list.
How does a patient book the next sitting of a course? The first sitting is booked at the desk. For every one after that, the patient gets a nudge and replies Treatment; the branch, treatment and dentist are pre-filled from the plan.
Won't nudging a braces patient every week for two years be annoying? Orthodontic plans run on a slower cadence — one nudge about 30 days after the last sitting, resetting each time the patient actually attends.
What are recalls? The six-month check-up loop. A recall is created automatically when a visit is marked complete, and the system closes any recall the patient has already acted on before sending — so it never chases someone who has already re-booked.
Can it show treatment that was advised but never booked? Yes — as a worklist, and as a headline number in the weekly owner summary. A plan is flagged stalled when work has started, nothing is booked, and the last sitting was 30 or more days ago.
10 · Money, day-close & reports
Can I see the day's takings? Yes — the day-close view. Consultation fees and treatment payments are kept separate, each with a by-method breakdown, all computed in IST.
How are consultation fees recorded? Per completed visit: pending by default, then marked paid (which stamps the method and time) or waived. Unmarked completed visits show as an amber “still unpaid” banner.
Is the consultation fee fixed and shown to patients? Neither is forced. You can hide the fee from patients entirely, and when it is shown it reads “payable at the clinic”, which leaves room for a waiver.
Does recording a payment give the patient anything? Yes — a WhatsApp receipt with the amount, method, paid-so-far and balance. It is a payment slip, not a tax invoice, and it says so.
What reports are available? On-demand PDFs printed by the front desk: day schedule (and the confirmed / to-call list for a future date), dues, recalls, lab works, per-dentist activity and a month-end period summary.
Does the owner get a summary without logging in? Yes — a short WhatsApp digest every Monday morning: appointments, no-shows, revenue, and treatment advised but not booked. A week with no appointments sends nothing.
Can each dentist get their own day's list? Optionally, per clinic. Each dentist can receive their schedule for the day on WhatsApp at 07:30, provided their login has a notification number.
11 · Staff, roles & control
What roles are there? Two: admin and dentist. A set of sensitive actions is admin-only, and everything else is open to a dentist login.
What can a dentist login not do? Cancel an appointment, make bulk edits, change patients / settings / staff, regenerate the QR, export patient data, or touch billing. A dentist can record all clinical work: notes, mark complete or no-show, treatment plans, consent, lab work and payments.
Who needs to be an admin? Anyone who works the front desk — walk-in booking, reschedule and cancel are admin actions.
Can we have more than one admin? Yes, as many as you like. The system refuses to remove or deactivate the last active admin.
What if an admin forgets their password? Another admin resets it — this returns a new password once and signs that user out everywhere. You cannot reset your own account this way.
Is there an audit trail? Yes. Consequential actions — QR regeneration, consent capture, billing changes, deletions — are logged with who did it, when, and from where.
12 · Support, changes & leaving
How do we get help? By email at contactus@pragatisolutions.com and by phone on +91 90086 55118.
Can I change plan later? Yes, from the dashboard. An upgrade takes effect immediately; a downgrade is scheduled for the end of the billing cycle. A downgrade that no longer fits your usage is refused, and tells you what to reduce first.
What if I cancel by mistake? Cancellation is scheduled, not immediate, so “undo cancel” genuinely restores the subscription any time before the current period ends.
If we leave, how long until our data is gone? When you request account deletion there is a 14-day window in which it is fully reversible and the clinic keeps working normally. After that the data is permanently deleted, with a final backup taken first.
What does not exist that we should know about? No patient app. No email or SMS to patients — WhatsApp is the only outbound channel. No clinic-name search for patients. No dedicated per-clinic number. Each one either protected the shared number or kept a competitor off your patients' screen.