A private clinic runs its day on this bot: patient records, invoicing, payments, and expenses, all inside Telegram.

Why a bot and not an app

Clinic software exists. Most of it assumes someone will sit at a desk, log in, and learn a system. That is a bad fit for a small clinic where the same person answers the phone, takes payment, and files the record, usually while standing.

Telegram was already open on every phone in the building. Building inside it meant nothing to install, nothing to log into, and nothing to train anyone on. The interface is a conversation, which is what the staff were doing anyway.

What it handles

Patient records, invoicing, payments, and expenses, in one place rather than split between a notebook, a spreadsheet, and someone’s memory.

How it is built

Google Apps Script and a Google Sheet. No server, no database, no hosting bill.

The bot is an Apps Script web app wired to the Telegram API, and the sheet is the database: one tab per entity, patients, cases, payments, and expenses, with the reports computed off those rows. It sounds like a shortcut, and it is, but it is the right one here. The clinic owns its data in a file it already knows how to open, anyone can audit a number by scrolling to the row it came from, and the whole thing costs nothing to run.

It is in daily use. Not publicly available, since it is tied to one clinic’s data.

The screens below come from a test run on dummy records: adding a patient, filing an expense against a category, and pulling a three-month financial report, followed by the sheet those records land in.