Heron In Practice: The Silent Exit

When patients can't get through, they don't always complain. They just leave, or disengage. And in many parts of NZ, where closed enrolments mean they can't leave, they check out instead. In this session, Episode 2 of Heron In Practice: The Webinar Series, Rohan Adarkar (Founder & CEO, Heron) sits down with Mark Lee (General Manager, Tamatia Medical Center) to walk through what the patient experience problem actually looks like from the inside, and what one Hawke's Bay clinic did to address it. Featuring: 🏥 Mark Lee — General Manager, Tamatea Medical Center A 45-year-old suburban GP practice in Napier with 8 doctors, 8 nurses, and a 7-person admin team. Mark shares how Tamatea identified their biggest patient experience bottleneck, what they tried that didn't work, and what finally moved the needle, including the internal competition that named their digital receptionist Scout, and the unexpected effect it had on the human team. 📲 Rohan Adarkar — Founder & CEO, Heron Rohan covers the patterns Heron sees across NZ and Australian clinics — fragmented communication, double-handling, and the Monday morning call backlog — and what a unified patient communications workflow actually looks like in practice. In this session: Why patients disengage before they ever say anything The phone bottleneck that no amount of extra staff could fix How Tamatea went from 1-hour hold times to under 10 minutes Why they named their digital receptionist Scout, and what it did for staff culture What to do when two-thirds of your calls are asking the same five questions Q&A: multi-language support, patient consent, clinical triage, phone system compatibility Key results from Tamatea (9 months post-launch): Average hold time: 16–20 min → under 3 minutes Maximum hold time: 1 hour+ → 10 minutes Two-thirds of patients now communicate directly with Scout Drive-in visits caused by phone frustration: eliminated entirely