For consultant paediatricians
Joining Bright Futures
What the platform is, what you would need in place, and how the practice runs day to day. Written for a consultant paediatrician deciding whether this fits their way of practising.
Start here
A preventative paediatrics platform, not a clinic group
Bright Futures Health was built over seven years by Dr Martin Gray and Dr Margarita Burmester, both Consultant Paediatricians. The clinical model is built around the American Academy of Pediatrics Bright Futures® Programme — structured, protocolled childhood health supervision. Roughly 40% of the work is well-child clinics; the rest is general paediatrics.
What we do
• Preventative and wellness-based care across childhood and adolescence
• Longitudinal health surveillance on age-specific frameworks
• Consultations for non-acute problems
• Evidence-based anticipatory guidance for families
What we deliberately do not
• Acute or urgent care
• Inpatient work
• On-call or emergency cover
A design choice, not a gap. It is what makes the work predictable and lets it sit alongside an NHS job rather than compete with it.
You join as an independent practitioner
Not employed, not a partner, not on a percentage. You keep control of your own clinical work and schedule, use your own consulting rooms, and hold your own practising privileges. This keeps governance responsibility clear and where it belongs — with you — and avoids unnecessary CQC complexity.
An active practice
An established brand with national reach, a high-ranking website, active SEO, and presence on Doctify, Google Business and social. You join something that already exists rather than a blank page.
Administration
A practice manager, centralised patient enquiries and booking, and operational processes refined over several years. This is the hidden labour that otherwise quietly consumes clinician time.
A digital practice
Clinical record, telephony, automated patient communications, templates and policies — already running. See steps 2 and 3 below.
Billing
In-house, integrated with the record, with a measurable reduction in aged debt against third-party providers.
What it does not include, by design: consulting rooms, practising privileges, or employment. We are glad to make introductions to facilities — HCA among them — but those contracts are yours. It keeps overheads low and professional independence intact.
Whether it suits you
It tends to suit paediatricians interested in preventative and longitudinal care, who value structure and evidence-based frameworks, who want private practice without building everything themselves, and who want to complement rather than replace NHS work.
It tends not to suit those seeking acute private work, high-volume episodic consultations, or an employed model. We would rather say that plainly than have you find out in year two.
What we ask in return is small but real: respect the preventative health focus, practise to the standards and ethos of Bright Futures, and contribute to a shared professional reputation. This is about coherence, not control.
Step 1
Before your first clinic
What must be in place, and who owns each. Most of it is yours — we help where we can, but these are not things a platform can hold on your behalf.
• GMC registration with licence, on the Specialist Register — You
• Consultant post or equivalent standing — You. Usually a prerequisite for privileges.
• Indemnity covering private practice — You. NHS indemnity does not cover private work. Check the scope explicitly covers paediatric private outpatients.
• Practising privileges at your site — You. Normally the longest pole. Start it first.
• Consulting room — You. Contracted between you and the facility. We can introduce.
• Insurer recognition — You. Bupa, AXA, Aviva, WPA, Vitality and others each run their own process. Several take weeks.
• Healthcode account — You. Needed before you can invoice insurers. See step 4.
• ICO registration as a data controller — You
• Enhanced DBS, current — You
• Appraisal and revalidation up to date — You
• Clinical system and email account — BFH. Set up for you.
• Photography, website biography, profile — BFH. Covered by the one-off onboarding fee.
Start the privileges application first
It is the step most likely to hold up a first clinic, and it runs on the facility's timetable rather than ours. We currently have the strongest relationship with HCA Chiswick Outpatients and are glad to make the introduction — but the application is made by you to the facility. Tell us early and we will help you sequence the rest around it.
Step 2
Your digital setup
A working digital practice, already running. You are not asked to choose or configure any of it.
• Semble — the clinical record: consultations, notes, letters, tasks, bookings. The only system of record for patient data.
• Google Workspace — your Bright Futures email, calendar and shared documents.
• Heidi — AI scribe for consultation notes and letters.
• Telephony — an in-house AI call agent handles inbound calls. You rarely touch it.
• Healthcode — electronic invoicing to insurers (step 4).
• Doctify — independent reviews. Patients are invited automatically after each visit.
The one rule that matters
Patient-identifiable data lives in Semble and nowhere else. Not in spreadsheets, not in documents, not in chat tools. Semble carries the audit trail; nothing else does. This is what keeps the information-governance position defensible for every clinician on the platform, not only the one who moved a file.
On the call agent. Across the full call log, enquiries handled by the AI agent convert to a booking at around 29%, against under 2% for calls that reached voicemail. Families who get a responsive answer book; families who get an answerphone mostly do not. It is the least glamorous part of the platform and one of the most valuable.
Suppressing automated email for a family
Apply the "No Email" label to the patient in Semble. From the next overnight run all automated emails for them stop. No code change, no request to anyone. Use it for bereavement, safeguarding, or simple preference.
Step 3
What happens automatically
A system connected to Semble runs continuously in the background, handling the routine communication and clinical administration that otherwise takes manual effort — or does not happen at all. You do not need to do anything differently in Semble.
The patient journey, end to end
• Registration: patient added and booking confirmed
• Next morning: welcome email — practice overview, the AAP visit schedule, clinic locations
• Day before: appointment reminder — time, location, doctor, what to bring
• Day of visit: patient attends. Nothing changes in how you work.
• That night: four items appear in Semble (below), a recall email goes to the family, and the CRM updates
• 72 hours: post-visit follow-up — "how did it go?", with a Doctify review link
• 6 weeks: one gentle chase if no booking has been made. Once only.
• 44 weeks: a final reminder for children aged 3 and over. Once only.
What appears in the record
After an attended well-child consultation, four things are created automatically: a recall task with the full age-appropriate screening checklist and guidance topics, due-dated to the next recommended visit; the correct visit-stage label; the Well Child label; and a formatted recall letter, ready to review, edit, or send to the GP.
Three things worth knowing
Recalls are for the next visit, not the one just attended. A child seen for their 2-year visit is recalled for the 3-year.
Only well-child appointments trigger the recall pipeline. Acute and admin bookings are skipped entirely — no task, no label, no email.
There is an 18th-birthday hard stop. Patients on or after their 18th birthday are skipped completely, and the 18-year recall warns the family of the date.
Step 4
Billing and getting paid
Billing is run in house rather than outsourced, integrated with the clinical record. That is deliberate: it has produced a measurable reduction in aged debt against third-party providers, and it removes the chasing, invoicing errors and admin friction that otherwise land on the clinician.
There is a clean separation between your clinical income and platform costs. We take no percentage of what you bill.
Semble
Clinical record and charge capture
Healthcode
Electronic invoicing to insurers
Self-pay
Invoiced directly
Set up Healthcode early
Healthcode is how invoices reach insurers electronically. You need your own account and site ID before you can bill them, and it sits behind insurer recognition rather than in front of it. It is frequently the step that delays a first clinic.
Know your agreed rates before you invoice
Each insurer sets its own fee schedule and runs its own recognition process. Discrepancies between what you believe you agreed and what an insurer will pay do happen, and they are far easier to resolve before an invoice than after. Check the schedule for each insurer you sign with, and raise a difference rather than absorbing it.
Step 5
Scope, standards and escalation
Clinical scope
In scope: preventative and wellness care across childhood and adolescence on the AAP Bright Futures framework, longitudinal surveillance, consultations for non-acute problems, and anticipatory guidance. Out of scope by design: acute and urgent care, inpatient work, on-call and emergency cover. Where a family needs something outside that, the answer is a clear signpost — NHS urgent care, their GP, or an emergency department — not an attempt to stretch the model. Framing the boundary as a deliberate choice rather than an apology is both more accurate and more reassuring to parents.
Governance sits with you
You practise as an independent practitioner. That means your own indemnity, appraisal, revalidation and CPD; your own practising privileges and the governance obligations of the facility you work in; your own responsibility as a data controller; and your own clinical decisions. We do not employ you and do not supervise your clinical practice.
Safeguarding
Safeguarding obligations follow you, not the platform. You will be seeing children privately, often in families not known to local services, and usually without the NHS scaffolding you are used to having within reach.
Before your first clinic, know three things: the local authority safeguarding route for the borough your clinic sits in, your facility's own safeguarding lead and policy, and how you would escalate out of hours from a private consulting room. If you would like to talk any of that through, ask — it is a conversation we would rather have early.
Writing to families
Plain language. Acknowledge the concern before giving the information. "Your child", not "the patient". Respect their time. Warm and direct.
Where things go
• Clinical concern about a child: your clinical judgement and the facility's route; NHS pathways as needed
• Safeguarding: local authority for the clinic's borough; facility safeguarding lead
• Something odd in the automation: Martin, directly
• Billing query or rejected claim: practice manager, then Martin
• Patient complaint: Martin and Margarita
Step 6
Your profile and marketing
You are joining an established practice with existing reach, not starting a page from zero. The one-off onboarding fee covers building your presence within it: professional photography, a website biography and profile, and inclusion in the practice's existing search, Google Business and social presence.
Behind that sits a high-ranking website with active SEO work, a Doctify profile, ongoing digital marketing, and a centralised enquiry and booking flow that routes patients to the right clinician.
Reviews
Every family receives a follow-up email 72 hours after a well-child consultation with a Doctify review link, and reviews appear publicly on the practice profile. Review volume is one of the clearer levers on local search visibility and an area we are actively working on. You do not need to chase them — but do mention it in the room when a family says the visit was useful.
How we write
UK English. Confident but understated — the practice has been built quietly over seven years and leads with substance rather than superlatives. Collegial with clinicians, warm and direct with parents. And deliberate about scope: what we do not do is an intentional design choice, never an apology.
Step 7
Who to ask
Dr Martin Gray
Co-founder, Consultant Paediatric Intensivist (GMC 4013396) — the platform, the systems, anything unclear.
Dr Margarita Burmester
Co-founder, Consultant Paediatrician — the clinical model and patient care.
Practice manager
Bookings, patient enquiries, billing, day-to-day administration.
If something in this page is unclear, or you want to test it against your own circumstances rather than the general case, that is the more useful conversation and we would rather have it.
Let's talk
No obligation. No hard sell. Just a discussion between colleagues about whether this platform fits your way of practising.