The diary that fills itself.
The clinic OS for allied health — booking, clinical records, billing, growth and a patient portal on one patient record, with the front desk automated rather than staffed.
Built in Ireland · Hosted in Germany · GDPR Article 9-native · EU data residency
This is the public overview of Orla by Relay Labs. The application itself is developed in a private repository — if you'd like a closer look or pilot access, get in touch.
Small clinics do not lose money on treatment. They lose it in the ten minutes between treatments — the call that arrives mid-session and rings out, the 14:15 that cancels at 14:02 and stays empty all afternoon, the care plan with three sessions left and nothing booked.
The practice-management systems those clinics use are good filing cabinets. They were built to record the clinic day, not to run it, and almost all of them are Australian, Canadian or British — which means the patient records follow the vendor home.
Orla is built the other way round.
- The whole clinic, one product — diary → clinical record → invoice → recall → review. No swivel-chair between five tools, no re-keying, no patient who exists three times.
- Automation is the product, not an add-on — waitlist auto-refill, recall sequences, reminders that ask for a yes, deposits that hold the slot. These are core surfaces, not a marketplace integration you have to wire up yourself.
- The diary is sacred — every feature is judged on one question: does it fill slots, or protect a practitioner's time? If it does neither, it waits.
- European by construction — application, database and patient files on servers in Germany. Per-clinic isolation enforced at the database level. An append-only audit log that records who read a record, not only who changed it.
- Honest about AI — the assistant always says it is an assistant, never invents a price or a policy, and hands over to a human the moment it should. Clinical note drafting is a regulated medical device under EU law, and Orla treats it as one.
flowchart LR
A["14:02<br/>Mary cancels<br/>her 14:15"] --> B["Orla matches<br/>the waitlist"]
B --> C["Five patients<br/>get one link each"]
C --> D["14:06<br/>Cathal taps first,<br/>pays the deposit"]
D --> E["Slot filled.<br/>Nobody rang<br/>the clinic."]
A patient cancels. Within seconds, everyone on the waitlist who actually fits that slot — right service, right practitioner, right room — gets a text with a one-tap link. The first to tap gets it and pays the deposit. The rest are told plainly that it went. The owner gets an email telling her the diary closed its own gap while she was still in with a patient.
That is the demo, and it is also the product.
| # | Stage | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Book | Patients book themselves on a branded page — service, practitioner, time, deposit — or the desk books from the diary with rooms and equipment checked as it lands. |
| 2 | Confirm | Reminder sequences over SMS, WhatsApp and email that ask for a yes, with quiet hours and confirm-by-reply. Deposits hold the slot. |
| 3 | Arrive | A flow board for the day: waiting, in treatment, ready to pay. The desk can see the whole floor at a glance. |
| 4 | Treat | SOAP notes from templates, a body map, outcome measures, documents and letters — beside the diary, not in another system. Signed notes lock. |
| 5 | Take payment | Checkout at the desk, invoices, packages, vouchers, missed-appointment fees that are always one deliberate click. |
| 6 | Refill and return | Waitlist auto-offer, recalls when a care plan lapses, campaigns that respect marketing consent, review requests. |
| 7 | Account for it | Reports on utilisation, no-shows, revenue and rebooking rate — and a patient record a patient can ask for and receive. |
Diary and scheduling Day and week views with practitioner and room lanes; rooms and equipment booked with the appointment rather than after it; group classes with their own capacity and waitlist; care plans that know when they have lapsed; bank holidays and annual leave that beat the weekly pattern; drag to reschedule with conflict checking.
Patient-facing Branded online booking with deposits; reschedule and cancel links that enforce the clinic's own policy; intake forms with e-signature sent on booking; a magic-link patient portal for documents and history — no app, no password.
Clinical record Note templates and signing, with amendments rather than edits once signed; body map; outcome measures; documents and letters; problems and treatments; a full record that exports on request.
Money Deposits at booking, saved-card missed-appointment fees, point-of-sale checkout, invoices with a gapless number sequence, packages, vouchers and credit notes.
Growth Waitlist auto-refill, recalls, campaigns, loyalty, discounts, review requests and referral tracking — all gated on the right consent, all in the same record.
Comms A unified inbox for two-way SMS and email, with templates, STOP handled properly, and every message attached to the patient it belongs to.
Operations and governance Role-based access — front desk staff cannot open clinical note bodies; two-factor authentication enforced for owners; an append-only audit journal covering reads as well as writes; per-clinic configuration of services, rooms, equipment, templates and policies.
| Platform | Modern web application (Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL) — continuously typechecked, linted and tested |
| Hosting | Application, database and patient documents on servers in Germany |
| Isolation | Every clinic's rows are separated at the database level by row-level security, not by a filter in application code |
| Clinical integrity | Signed notes are immutable — enforced by the database itself; amendments are tracked and append-only |
| Audit | An append-only journal of roughly sixty action types, including who opened a patient record |
| Consent | Privacy, appointment reminders, marketing and AI interaction are separate, revocable grants |
| Data subject rights | Article 15 export and Article 17 erasure are shipped, tested features, with a written receipt of what was kept and why |
| Posture | GDPR and the Irish Data Protection Act 2018; SI 336/2011 for marketing messages; EU AI Act transparency duties treated as design inputs |
Now Diary, clinical record, billing, growth, portal and the automation layer are built — and we are recruiting our founding pilot clinics in Ireland to run it with us before launch.
Next Deeper integrations where clinics already work: accounting, exercise prescription, calendar. Migration tooling and a parallel-run service, because the competitor that wins most often is not another product — it is a paper diary and the cost of a Tuesday afternoon spent moving.
The AI layers — gated on revenue, not on hype A front-desk assistant that answers texts and books into real slots; then dictation; then voice. Each is gated on the previous layer being paid for by real clinics, and each ships under one contract: the assistant proposes, a named human confirms, and the audit log records both. The assistant always discloses that it is an assistant.
Clinical note drafting from dictation is a Class IIa medical device under EU MDR Rule 11. Orla's position is to integrate a certified scribe rather than build an uncertified one — the device liability belongs with the party holding the notified-body certificate.
European health data The European Health Data Space (Regulation (EU) 2025/327) regulates EHR systems as products from 2027–2029. Orla's record is being shaped now so a standards-conformant patient summary can be derived from it, rather than retrofitted later.
Orla is built by Relay Labs (Dublin, Ireland), by a founder who spent almost a decade inside hospital administration watching clinical time disappear into the desk.
Interested in being a founding pilot clinic, or just in a walkthrough?
© 2026 Relay Labs Ltd — Dublin. All rights reserved. Orla is proprietary software; this overview is provided for information only and grants no rights to the software. Orla is practice-management software and is not a medical device.