The five systems, and the part already settled
Semble, Cliniko, Jane, Zanda and Meddbase are the systems sleep clinics run. Four of them — Semble, Cliniko, Jane and Zanda — cover the two appointment types this work begins with, an initial consultation and a study, and will send an intake questionnaire such as the Epworth scale before the patient arrives.
Capability is not the deciding factor. What separates them is how each behaves once your pathway, your capacity and your own website are involved.
Why there is no winner to name here
A ranked table would be dishonest. Whatever suits a two-bed unit running overnight studies is not what suits a specialist who posts kits out and reports the traces.
What is useful is the questions that separate them for sleep work. Ask them on a trial, with your own appointment types loaded. An answer a vendor will not put in writing is itself an answer.
1. Is a home study an appointment at all?
A home study occupies no chair and no bed. It occupies a kit: posted or collected, worn for a night, returned, downloaded, reported. Ask whether the diary can hold that as a scheduled item with the kit as the limited resource, or whether you will book a fictional appointment for it and track the hardware on a whiteboard.
2. Can overnight capacity be expressed as beds?
An in-clinic study is one patient, one bed, one night. Ask how the software says that: whether a night is bookable as a unit, whether your bed count caps how many can be taken, and what happens to the freed night when a patient moves a study.
3. Can a questionnaire block the appointment?
Sending a form ahead is one thing; needing it back before the patient is seen is another. Ask whether intake can be required rather than requested, whether the system chases it unprompted, and whether the answers surface where the clinician will look.
4. Does it collect a referral where one is needed?
Whether a referral is required depends on the route and the country; the website says so plainly and the booking system gathers it. Ask whether an appointment type can demand a document upload or a referrer's details, so a patient who needs paperwork is not accepted and then turned back after taking a slot.
5. Can one patient's pathway stay joined up?
Consultation, study, results, fitting, follow-up: five contacts over weeks, sometimes with a device and a supplier between them. Ask whether the system shows that as one connected episode or as five unrelated diary entries sharing a surname.
6. Where does the data live, and who can open it?
Sleep intake is health information. Patient-data rules, like the rules on advertising and testimonials, differ by country; our rules by country post covers where to check. What a trial can establish regardless: which country the records sit in, which staff roles can open one, and whether opening one leaves an audit trail.
7. What does the embed do to the page?
Every one of these embeds, and this is where clinics stop asking. Some drop a heavy script in and shunt the layout down as it arrives; some size themselves correctly on a handset and some do not. Test yours on a real phone, on mobile data, on the page a tired patient lands on at midnight.
One more, before you need it
Export. Records, notes, documents, appointment history: find out what leaving looks like while it is still hypothetical. A clinic that cannot move systems ends up shaping its website around whatever the one it is stuck with allows.
What to do with the answers
If two of them pass every question, stop comparing. Pick the one reception and your clinicians will open every morning without complaining, because the diary gets used far more than the website does. Then let the site treat it as a component, not a foundation: one page where booking lives, so the pages doing the explaining stay quick.
Where this sits
Every sleep clinic website we build embeds whichever of these five you already pay for, at a fixed price. Test the site you have with the six phone tests, or see what a sleep clinic website costs.