Client: Centre for Sight — one of the UK's leading independent eye surgery clinics
Sector: Healthcare
What we did: The whole CRM, plus every byte of data flowing between it and the patient portal
When a patient chooses vision correction surgery, there's a journey: an enquiry, a consultation, questionnaires, correspondence, a procedure, follow-ups. Centre for Sight needed that entire journey managed in one system — and visible to the patient through a modern web portal.
What we built
The CRM. We designed and built Centre for Sight's patient CRM from scratch in Claris FileMaker: the enquiry-to-surgery pipeline, automated follow-up lists so no enquiry goes quiet, outcome tracking, templated email with merge tags, and full audit logging.
The portal plumbing. The patient-facing portal's interface was built by the team at Klai (formerly FMBetterForms) — specialists in FileMaker-driven web apps. We built everything behind it: all the data flowing in both directions between the portal and the CRM. Registration and secure login, pre-assessment questionnaires (eye conditions, operations and medications, captured once and stored properly), appointments, and a secure message centre where patients and the clinic exchange messages and files — with email notifications so nothing sits unseen.
It's a genuinely collaborative build: their team crafted the patient experience, ours made sure every field, form and file landed in the right place in the clinical record. That's integration work at its most detailed — dozens of coordinated web hooks, validated at every step.
Document handling done properly. Patient documents live in secure cloud storage (AWS S3), served through time-limited signed links — a patient sees their own documents and nobody else's, and nothing sensitive travels or lingers where it shouldn't.
The connections. The CRM shares its data with the clinic's practice management system, so clinical and administrative records agree with each other. And the marketing list stays honest through a nightly two-way Mailchimp sync — consent-first with double opt-in, every change audit-logged.
The answers. Because everything flows through one system, the clinic's dashboard can answer commercial questions most clinics can't: cost per enquiry, per consultation and per surgery by marketing source, conversion funnels, and patient-journey timelines showing where time is spent between first call and treatment.
The outcome
Since going live, the CRM has handled thousands of enquiries and carried a steady stream of them through consultation, surgery and follow-up. That's the point of a system like this: the journey from first enquiry to treatment isn't a mystery — it's a funnel the clinic can see, measure and improve at every stage.
"Flare Software has been an exceptional partner in designing and building our CRM. Their responsiveness sets them apart — every request, however small, is met quickly and thoughtfully. The system has transformed how we track and communicate with patients throughout their entire journey, and the transparent reporting gives us a level of visibility we simply didn't have before. It's made a real, measurable difference to our efficiency as a team."
— Nicola Morgan, Head of Marketing and Business Development, Centre for Sight
Technologies used
Claris FileMaker, Klai (FMBetterForms) portal integration via webhooks, AWS S3 with presigned URLs, practice-management-system sync, Mailchimp API, automated email with templates and merge tags.
Want your systems to work as one?
If your business runs on a patchwork of systems that don't talk — or your customers deserve a proper portal — that's our favourite kind of problem.
Get in touch or call us on 0330 113 0958.