Meet every patient already knowing their history.

No. Pathways runs standalone from day one. The SMS-driven workflow needs no patient management or EMR integration to start, so a service can screen its next elective list without an IT project, an interface engine, or a change window. Integration is available later but is not a precondition.

This is usually the difference between a deployment measured in days and one measured in quarters. Most of the value — screening every booked patient early enough to act — does not depend on a bidirectional interface, so requiring one up front only delays the point at which the first cancellation is prevented.

When you do want it, integration is HL7 or FHIR against your patient administration and EMR systems: automated list ingestion from theatre scheduling in one direction, and write-back of the signed pre-operative summary to the patient record in the other. That is an Enterprise capability, available on Business, and it is scoped after the standalone deployment is running rather than before it.

Days rather than quarters. Because Pathways runs standalone over SMS with no PMS or EMR integration required, a service can begin sending assessments on its next elective list. There is nothing for patients to install and no software to deploy on hospital workstations — the platform runs in a browser.

Pathways has three tiers. Consultant is $125 per clinician per month excluding GST, or $1,250 a year billed annually, for anaesthetists running their own lists. Business and Enterprise are quoted per site or by procedure volume. There is no per-patient charge and no setup fee for a standalone deployment.

A solo anaesthetist and a public health service are buying different things — one is buying back the pre-operative phone call, the other is restructuring a pre-admission service. That is why only the Consultant tier carries a list price: it describes a single, well-defined unit of work. Above it, the price tracks the size of the pre-admission workload rather than a seat count.

For private settings the arithmetic that usually decides it is cancellation cost: a single prevented day-of-surgery cancellation typically covers several months of the platform.

Per site or by procedure volume, so the figure tracks the size of your pre-admission workload rather than a seat count. A short scoping conversation about your lists produces a fixed annual figure. Business is an annual agreement, invoiced yearly in advance.

Seat-count pricing does not describe this workload well. A pre-admission service might have three anaesthetists and eleven nurses, or the reverse, and the number of people who log in says very little about how many patients are being assessed. Volume does.

It also means adding a coordinator to the roster does not change what you pay, which removes a small but real disincentive to putting the right people in front of the queue.

Yes. On the Consultant tier, paying annually gives you two months free — $1,250 per clinician per year instead of $1,500, excluding GST. That works out at $104 per clinician per month. Annual agreements are standard at Business and Enterprise.

The Business and Enterprise tiers are annual by default rather than by discount: they involve configuration, protocol design and clinician training, and a monthly commitment does not leave room to do that work properly.

No. Patients receive a signed, time-limited SMS link and complete the assessment in their phone's browser. There is no app, no login and no password. Links expire, and expired links are visibly dead rather than silently reusable.

Links are signed with HMAC-SHA256 and time-limited. The visible-expiry behaviour matters more than it sounds: a link that silently still works is a data exposure, and a link that fails with no explanation generates a phone call to the practice.

Yes, and it is the usual way to start. Because Pathways runs standalone over SMS with no integration required, a pilot can be a single upcoming list or a single surgeon's patients rather than a whole-of-service programme. That makes the question answerable in weeks with real patients instead of in a demo environment.

The reason a narrow pilot works here is the absence of an integration project. Where a platform needs an interface built before it can do anything, a pilot carries most of the cost of a full deployment, so services quite reasonably resist starting one.

A list-level pilot also produces the number that actually decides the purchase: what the screening found on real patients, early enough to act on, and what would otherwise have surfaced on the morning of surgery.