AI scribe and clinic software for urgent care and walk-in clinics

A complete urgent care note at walk-in pace

An urgent care note is short and has to be complete. The structure is the same whatever the complaint, presenting complaint, history, observations, examination, the score or rule applied, diagnosis, treatment and disposition. wai drafts it in that order from the consultation and suggests risk scores for the clinician to apply. For a sore throat, NICE asks clinicians to use FeverPAIN or Centor criteria and says not to offer an antibiotic at a FeverPAIN score of 0 or 1 or a Centor score of 0, 1 or 2.³ The draft records the score as the clinician stated it and the advice that goes with it.

Safety netting is part of the note. For a feverish child under 5 with amber features and no diagnosis, NICE asks for a safety net of one or more of verbal or written information on warning symptoms and how to get further care, follow-up at a set time and place, or liaison with other professionals so the child has direct access if needed.² wai runs a safety-netting check on every draft, so a note that sends a patient home without advice on what to watch for is flagged before the clinician signs.

wai suggests ICD-10 and SNOMED CT codes from the note, each beside the line it rests on, for the clinician to confirm. Typical WHO ICD-10 codes in urgent care are J06.9 for acute upper respiratory infection, unspecified, J02.9 for acute pharyngitis, unspecified, N39.0 for urinary tract infection, site not specified, S93.4 for sprain and strain of ankle, L03.1 for cellulitis of other parts of limb and H66.9 for otitis media, unspecified. J06.9 and N39.0 read the same in ICD-10-CM in the US, while injuries add characters for side and encounter, so a first visit for a sprain of an unspecified ligament of the right ankle is S93.401A. Procedure codes for wound closure or splinting, CPT in the US and OPCS in the UK, stay with the clinic's coder.

The GP message, the patient's summary and the onward referral

Every episode ends with a message. NHS England's standards say the patient's registered GP must be told the clinical outcome of an urgent treatment centre visit through a post event message, and that for children the episode should also reach the health visitor or school nurse, where known, within 2 working days.¹ Private walk-in clinics are not bound by those standards, but the GP still needs to know. wai drafts the discharge letter to the GP with the diagnosis, treatment, prescriptions and any action the GP needs to take, for the clinician to sign. Signed letters download as PDF, and the note copies as plain text into any other system.

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges recommends that most letters are written to the patient with a copy to the GP.⁵ In urgent care the patient's summary carries the diagnosis, the treatment and the safety-netting advice in plain words, so a parent leaving at 9 in the evening knows which signs mean come back.

When the patient needs more than the clinic can offer, a referral letter carries the reason, the findings, any investigation already done and the question for the receiving team. UK fit notes are completed on the official form. See emergency medicine for the next step up, and GPs for the practice that receives the letter.

Safety netting in the patient's own language

wai works in 60 languages, among them English, Arabic, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Mandarin. English can be mixed in one consultation with Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Dutch, German, Hindi or Japanese, and the other languages are captured in that language. The signed note is written in English for the record, or in another language the clinic chooses, and the patient's summary can be translated into their language beside it, with crisis and emergency numbers kept exactly as written.

Urgent care sees whoever walks in. NHS England asks urgent treatment centres to provide British Sign Language, interpretation and translation services for people with communication challenges.¹ wai adds the patient's summary in their own language beside the English note, which matters most for safety-netting advice read at home, and it does not replace an interpreter where one is needed. In a systematic review of 33 studies, 76% found at least one outcome better when patient and physician shared a language other than English.⁷ The multilingual scribe page shows how capture works.

Clinic software for urgent care clinics, walk-ins and booked slots together

NHS England asks urgent treatment centres to see both booked and walk-in patients, and not to prioritise walk-ins over booked appointments routinely.¹ A private walk-in clinic runs the same mix. Booking links read each clinician's calendar in Google, Outlook or Apple, so patients who can wait choose a slot, cancellations backfill from the waitlist and reminders go out. Calls, email, web forms and WhatsApp land in one thread per patient, and wai drafts each reply in the clinic's voice for a person to approve.

Payments run through the clinic's own Stripe account, with payment links, invoices, memberships for families and corporate clients, and insurer invoices. Results reach the patient with the clinician's own comment and a plain explanation of each marker, so a urine culture or a blood test arrives explained. In the UK, pathology orders and results run through TDL, and private prescriptions are issued and signed through SignatureRx.

After the visit, the signed plan goes home in plain words, and each prescription, referral and follow-up is tracked until it is done. Recalls go out for the wound check or the repeat test, each message approved by a person. Before each visit, the clinician sees a sourced brief of any earlier attendance, each fact traced to the letter, result or visit it came from. The full desk is on the clinic management software page.

One walk-in visit, start to finish

Take a 4-year-old brought to a private walk-in clinic at 6 in the evening with two days of fever and a sore ear. Her father speaks Spanish and some English, and the consultation moves between the two. The clinician records a temperature of 38.6, checks for red and amber features and finds none, sees a red, bulging left eardrum, and explains ear infection, pain relief and when to come back. After discussion, she gives a back-up antibiotic prescription to use only if her daughter is not improving.

The draft fills the urgent care template, with the history, observations, the traffic light features checked, the examination, a diagnosis of acute otitis media, the treatment and the safety-netting advice. wai suggests H66.9 beside the line it rests on. The safety-netting check flags that the advice gives no timeframe, and the clinician adds when to return if there is no improvement. She also corrects the side, which the draft gave as the right ear, confirms the code and signs.

Two documents go out. The patient summary, in English with a Spanish translation beside it and the emergency numbers kept as written, goes to the father through the wai Profile app. A discharge letter, signed and sent as a PDF, tells the GP the diagnosis, the back-up prescription and that no action is needed unless she returns. At the front desk, a payment link goes out through Stripe and a check-in message is set for two days later asking how she is, approved by a person before it is sent.

The evidence behind wai's method

The note is one part of the day the evidence measures. In a randomised trial of 238 outpatient physicians across 14 specialties at UCLA Health, the ambient scribe with a significant effect cut the time spent writing each note by about 41 seconds, against 18 seconds in usual care.⁶ At The Permanente Medical Group, 3,442 physicians used an ambient scribe across 303,266 encounters in its first ten weeks.⁴ In a clinic seeing patients back to back, those seconds add up across the shift, and wai takes on the GP letter, the patient's summary and the replies as well as the note.

Urgent care guidance turns on what happens after the patient leaves. NHS England requires the GP to be told the outcome of each visit,¹ and NICE sets out what a safety net must contain.² A safety-netting check on the draft, and a GP letter drafted from the same note, make both part of the visit rather than an afterthought.

A draft stays a draft until a person signs it. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges says the clinician checks every document a scribe produces.⁵ wai holds every draft until the clinician signs it, and every reply until a person at the clinic sends it.

Measured in a working clinic. At The Wellness in London, which runs on wai every day, every clinician has 15 hours a week back, as published in the customer story.⁸

Where to start

Start with one clinician on one shift pattern. Load a single urgent care template, with fixed fields for observations, the score applied, safety netting and disposition, and run it for two weeks. Count how often the safety-netting check fires and what it catches, and time the gap from the last patient to signed GP letters.

In the second week, add the translated patient summary and switch on payment links and check-in messages. Read whether AI scribes save time to set a fair measure, see every specialty on the specialties hub, and read about the scribe on the clinical page.

Frequently asked questions