Cliniko AI: What's Built In, What Connects, and What Your API Key Unlocks
Cliniko has not shipped its own AI, and that is a decision rather than a gap. Founder Joel Friedlaender laid it out in Cliniko’s stance on AI: the company is experimenting heavily, but won’t ship AI summarisation or note-taking “to meet the hype” while the accuracy isn’t there, and warns practitioners off pasting health information into consumer chatbots. So when a physio searches “Cliniko AI,” the thing they find isn’t a feature inside Cliniko. It’s an ecosystem of about three dozen AI apps hanging off Cliniko’s API — and, unusually for practice management software, an API that a one-room clinic can actually use.
That last part is the whole story. Most vertical health software locks its API behind a partner programme. SimplePractice is the standard example: its SimpleConnect API is enterprise and partner-gated, so a solo therapist cannot generate a key at all, no matter what an integration blog tells them. Cliniko is the opposite. You generate your own key, in your own settings, in about ninety seconds.
Where you get a Cliniko API key
In Cliniko, click your name and open My info. In the API keys section, flip “Allow yourself to create and use API keys” to Yes, press Update user at the bottom, and confirm with your password or passkey. Then Manage API keys → Add an API Key, name it after whatever you’re connecting, and copy the string immediately — Cliniko shows it once and never again. Archiving that key later is how you cut off the app’s access, which matters more here than in most software.
Authentication is HTTP basic auth with the key as the username and no password, documented openly at docs.api.cliniko.com. The rate limit is 200 requests per minute per user. The key inherits your own permissions — it is not a separate, broader credential — so a receptionist’s key sees what a receptionist sees.
What the API covers is broad: patients, individual and group appointments, appointment types, practitioners, availability blocks, available times and daily availability, invoices and invoice items, billable items, contacts, communications, recalls, referral sources, and patient forms. Treatment notes and treatment note templates are in there too, which is exactly why the scribe market exists — and exactly why you should think hard before handing that scope to a general-purpose automation tool.
The three things people mean by “Cliniko AI”
Cliniko’s AI connected apps directory lists roughly 34 tools, and they cluster into three jobs that barely overlap.
Ambient scribes. Heidi, CliniScribe, PatientNotes, CliniScripts, Clindoc, Perci and others listen to the session, draft the note, and push it back into the patient file. This is the loudest category and the one with the clearest time saving — a physio doing 25 sessions a week gets an hour or two back. It is also the category with the highest stakes, because a note that quietly omits something is worse than no note. Cliniko’s own guidance is that these tools “cannot be 100% accurate or without omissions,” which is the right way to hold them.
AI phone receptionists. Lyngo, Aeva, Summit, AI Jane, BookedSolid and a long tail of others answer the phone, check Cliniko’s available times, and book. For a sole practitioner who’s hands-on with a patient when the phone rings, this is the highest-leverage category and the least discussed. If you’re weighing this lane specifically, the AI receptionist comparison covers what the voice tools actually get right.
Front-desk automation. Re-engaging patients who haven’t rebooked, chasing unpaid invoices, following up on a discharge, getting intake forms back before the first appointment. Routiq, 2care.ai and ClinicExec live here. This is the least glamorous lane and usually the one costing you the most money, because it’s the work that gets dropped when the clinic is busy.
Most clinics assume they need one AI tool. In practice these are three separate purchases, and the third one is the one you can often build yourself against your own API key.
Cliniko and the chatbots: no native connector
Neither ChatGPT nor Claude has a native Cliniko connector, and there’s no sign one is coming — vertical health software is nowhere near the front of either company’s connector queue. There is a community MCP server for Cliniko that wraps patients, appointments, invoices, practitioners and appointment types, and it works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor if you’re comfortable running a Node process and putting your API key in a config file. It is not built or endorsed by Cliniko. If you want the wider picture on what those servers can and can’t do, the MCP servers list maps the whole landscape.
The bigger constraint isn’t setup, though. It’s what triggers the work.
Both ChatGPT and Claude will now do work on a schedule, unattended. Neither reacts to events. A task that runs hourly still finds out an hour late, and one that runs each morning finds out tomorrow — the trigger is the clock, never the thing you actually care about.
For a clinic, that limit is sharper than it sounds. The things you want handled are almost all events: a patient cancels at 4pm for tomorrow morning, an invoice ages past 30 days, someone finishes their sixth session and their care plan needs a review, a new patient books but never returns the intake form. A chat assistant on a timer can check for those on a schedule, which covers a lot — but it can’t react the moment they happen, and it can’t do anything at all while you’re in a treatment room with your phone face-down.
What to keep an automation layer away from
Treatment notes. The API exposes them; that does not mean a general workflow tool should touch them. Clinical documentation is a decision about what your patient consented to and which vendor’s data handling you’ve actually reviewed — it belongs with a purpose-built scribe you chose deliberately, under whatever privacy regime you practise in, not with a generic automation running in the background.
The same goes for anything that reads like clinical judgement. Deciding session counts, flagging conditions, drafting anything that goes in a health record — that’s out of scope for a front-desk tool, and any vendor telling you otherwise is selling you a liability.
That leaves a genuinely large amount of work: scheduling, availability, reminders, waitlist backfill, intake chasing, rebooking, unpaid invoices, and the follow-up you meant to send on Friday.
Where Carly fits
Cliniko isn’t one of Carly’s native connectors, but it doesn’t need to be — you paste your own Cliniko API key at carlyassistant.com/integrations and Carly reaches the API directly, the same way any of the connected apps do. Because Cliniko’s key generation is open to ordinary customers, this actually works for a solo podiatrist, which is not true of most practice software.
What that’s good for, concretely: a Monday-morning agent that reads next week’s appointments and messages anyone who hasn’t confirmed. A daily check for gaps in tomorrow’s diary that texts the waitlist. A weekly pull of invoices past 30 days into a short list in your inbox rather than a report you never open. A follow-up two days after a first appointment for patients who didn’t rebook. A nudge for intake forms that haven’t come back before the appointment.
None of that is clever. All of it is work a clinic owner currently does at 8pm or doesn’t do at all. Carly is free with Zapier-style workflows; AI agents start at $35/month — so the rules-based half of the above costs nothing, and you only pay when you want an agent writing the actual message.
The honest caveat is the same one that applies to every tool above: the clock is the trigger. Carly can check for a cancellation every fifteen minutes; it isn’t sitting on a Cliniko webhook waiting for one. For most clinic workflows a fifteen-minute delay is irrelevant. For same-day chair-filling, it’s the difference between backfilling the slot and eating it.
Choosing between the three lanes
If notes are what’s eating your evenings, buy a scribe from Cliniko’s directory and don’t build anything. That’s a solved problem with real products and you shouldn’t be assembling it yourself.
If you’re missing calls while you’re with patients, buy a voice receptionist. Voice is hard to build and the specialists are ahead.
If the pattern is more like “patients drift away and I notice three months later,” or “I keep meaning to chase those invoices,” that’s not a product purchase — it’s a handful of scheduled workflows against your own API key, and it’s the cheapest fix on this page. Clinics running the same shape of problem in other systems will find the same logic in AI agents for medical practices and, for the massage and bodywork side, the tools breakdown for massage therapists.
FAQ
Does Cliniko have built-in AI?
No. Cliniko has publicly said it is being deliberate about AI in healthcare and has not released its own summarisation or note-taking features. Its AI capability comes through third-party apps in its connected apps directory, all of which run on Cliniko’s public API.
Can I get a Cliniko API key as a solo practitioner?
Yes. Under My info, enable “Allow yourself to create and use API keys,” press Update user, then use Manage API keys → Add an API Key. Copy the key immediately — it’s shown once. This is genuinely open to individual accounts, unlike several competing practice management systems whose APIs are partner-only.
Does ChatGPT or Claude connect to Cliniko?
Not natively. Neither has an official Cliniko connector. A community-built MCP server exists for Claude Desktop and similar clients, covering patients, appointments and invoices, but it’s third-party and requires putting your API key into a local config.
What can the Cliniko API actually do?
Read and write patients, appointments and group appointments, appointment types, practitioners, availability and available times, invoices and invoice items, contacts, communications, recalls and patient forms — plus treatment notes and templates. Rate limit is 200 requests per minute per user, and the key carries exactly the permissions of the user who created it.
Is it safe to connect AI to Cliniko?
It depends entirely on what scope you grant and which vendor you hand the key to. Cliniko’s own warning is blunt: giving someone your API key gives them access to your Cliniko data. Keep clinical documentation with a scribe you’ve deliberately vetted against your local privacy rules, keep general automation on scheduling and billing work, and archive keys the moment you stop using an app.
What’s the difference between an AI scribe and an AI receptionist for Cliniko?
A scribe listens during the session and writes the note. A receptionist answers the phone and books into your diary. They solve unrelated problems and most clinics eventually want both, but buying them as one purchase usually means paying for a bundle where one half is weak.
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