Your clinic's waiting room,
that explains the treatment

The before/after of the gait closes the assessment. The biomechanical assessment and the custom orthotics are a podiatry clinic's highest-value service, and hard to sell with words alone. Showing in the waiting room a before/after of a corrected gait makes the patient see the problem and the solution, and ask about the assessment in the treatment room. The high-value conversation is opened by the patient.

Prevention retains and creates follow-up. Educating on home care, the right footwear and the diabetic foot adds a value the patient perceives and appreciates, and opens the door to ongoing follow-up. For the diabetic patient, that follow-up is not just recurring business, it is health: the review reminders on screen keep the monitoring that prevents serious complications.

Making services known broadens the treatment. Many patients come for a corn or an ingrown toenail and do not know you also do gait analysis, orthotics or diabetic-foot follow-up. Showing the full menu at reception reveals services the patient needed and did not know you offered, and broadens the treatment of the one you already have in, without reception having to list them.

To be straight with you: we do not integrate with your clinic software (TM3, Cliniko, Pabau). The screen shows the services, the gait analysis and the advice you upload, with the patient's consent for the before/after; the management and records stay in your system. Digisini is the screen layer that closes the assessment and retains with prevention.

So the useful content is not «check your feet» — it is how to check them at all. A mirror flat on the floor. Photographing the sole with a phone, which most people have never thought of and which works. Asking whoever helps with the shopping to look once a week. Feeling inside the shoe with a hand before putting it on, because a stone or a rucked seam does its damage to a foot that cannot feel it. These are twenty-second instructions and they are the difference between a problem found at a fortnight and one found at three months.

And there is an entitlement almost nobody in that room knows they have. Anyone living with diabetes should be getting their feet checked every year, and a great many are not — either it was never offered, or it was offered as a line in a longer appointment and did not register as a thing with a name. Putting that on the wall costs a sentence, does not sell anything, and is the single most valuable thing a podiatry waiting room can say: the whole point of that check is to catch what the patient cannot see.

The wall is also where the title problem gets settled, and it is worth settling. Anyone may offer foot care; only registrants may call themselves a podiatrist or chiropodist. From a pavement the two are indistinguishable, and the patient has no idea the distinction exists, let alone that it can be checked in a minute on a public register. Naming who is treating them, with their registration, is not boasting — it is the only fact in the room the patient can verify, and it costs nothing to display.

One thing to keep off the screen, though: photographs of feet. The clinical before-and-after that closes a gait assessment belongs in a private conversation, not on a wall in a room with strangers in it — for the patient in the picture and for the person waiting with a sandwich. Diagrams do the explaining just as well, and the difference between a clinic that understands that and one that does not is visible from the door.

To be straight with you: we are a screen, not a clinical service. What a foot check involves and who is entitled to what is between the patient, their GP and your own professional body — the point here is only that the person in your waiting room may genuinely never have seen the underside of their own foot, and that nothing on the wall usually accounts for it.