Blue Tree Clinic is a UK-based, consultant-led psychiatry and psychology practice delivering personalised, discreet mental healthcare to adults and young people, online and in person.
“We care for the full spectrum of adult and child mental health presentations, with a focus on clinical precision and continuity of care,” said Dr Mark Silvert, Founder, Medical Director and Consultant Psychiatrist. “We’re redefining private mental healthcare, combining the highest standards of clinical expertise with a calm, contained, thoughtfully designed patient experience.”
Blue Tree Clinic has been getting paid with GoCardless since 2017, and Dr Silvert can hardly imagine where the business would be without it.
“Before GoCardless we used direct invoicing and credit card payments, both of which were extremely painful and time-consuming,” he said. “GoCardless has been transformational. We now automatically collect several hundred payments every month. We have visibility into the cash coming in and how we’re trending, and — the best part — we almost never need to talk to clients about money.”
Invoicing = a waste of time
Blue Tree Clinic invoices patients monthly for their psychiatric sessions and mental health therapy. When the clinic was first established, it did things the traditional way: emailing an invoice after treatment and waiting for the patient to send a BACS transfer. And waiting. And waiting some more.
“Many patients were very reluctant to deal with invoices, so we might not get paid for weeks or months — or at all,” said Dr Silvert. “Chasing patients for payment is also uncomfortable and it isn’t part of being a doctor. Yet our admins were spending up to a day a week doing exactly that and it was getting to the point where we might have to hire another, which I didn’t want to do.”
Blue Tree Clinic also tried collecting payments on the spot by credit card. But no-shows meant unused appointments and missed revenue, with the cost of staff time swallowed by the clinic.
“Cashflow was becoming an issue,” said Dr Silvert. “We didn’t know when we’d get paid, and we still had to pay our rent and staff.”
Cashflow is up, admin is down — and the patient experience is better
GoCardless solved everything. Blue Tree Clinic now signs patients up to Direct Debit payments as part of their registration process, and the rest takes care of itself.
“I set up GoCardless at home on my laptop in five minutes, tested it, and we were off to the races — we collected our first payments within a week,” said Dr Silvert. “It’s a simple copy and paste job to send patients a Direct Debit sign up link, we get notified when they’ve completed it and then most of the time it never has to be touched again. It also means no more payment conversations in the clinical space, which makes for a smoother experience for both patients and our team.”
“We know we’ll get paid for every appointment. As a start-up, that meant we could worry less about rent and staffing costs. Now we’re more established, it means we’re a more stable business.”
And, even as payment volumes have grown, admin hasn’t.
Since we started using GoCardless, we’ve gone from two to 20 clinical staff, turnover has increased significantly and we’re processing several hundred payments a month — and yet our payments admin is negligible,” said Dr Silvert. “GoCardless reduces our operational costs because we don’t need to hire another full-time admin to handle payments.
The dashboard turns payments into insight
The GoCardless dashboard gives Blue Tree Clinic visibility into financial performance that they could previously only dream about.
“The dashboard clearly shows key financial information,” said Dr Silvert. “A recent update means I’m getting more analytics, and the monthly email reporting on what we’ve turned over has been really helpful. I can see how we’re trending. Are we growing? Are we slower this week or this month — and why? It gives me all the insight into our payments I could need.”
Can’t imagine payments any other way
Of course, reliable payments were the minimum Dr Silvert expected from GoCardless. But the wider package has been a welcome surprise.
“The friendliness and responsiveness of the customer service isn’t something we get from our other technology partners,” he said. “And the platform itself is rock solid — it doesn’t go down, it doesn’t glitch.”
This all adds up to a payments setup Dr Silvert can’t picture running any other way. “Other clinics and businesses struggling with chasing payments and the impact of late payments on cashflow should just go for it — get GoCardless in,” he said.
We’ll have been with GoCardless for 10 years soon and I can’t think of any other way we’d ever take payments now.
