TL;DR
- Anthony Dearman, Senior Director of Clinical Services at Sunday Health, a medical practice focused on preventive, diagnostic, and ongoing cognitive care, built a follow-up readiness tracker in Canvas Studio. The tool gives the care team visibility into outstanding labs and imaging so follow-up visits can be scheduled around the patient’s actual readiness for the next visit, rather than when the patient expected their follow-up items would be complete.
- It's the latest of many tracking spreadsheets he's transformed. By his count, 8-10 operational tracking spreadsheets now live as tools he built in Studio. This one went from first prompt to daily use in a single day.
Why it matters
At Sunday Health, patients often scheduled follow-up visits based on when they expected to have their labs, imaging, or other testing completed. But those timelines did not always go as planned. Labs might still be pending, an MRI might take longer to schedule, or other steps in the care plan might take more time than anticipated. By the time the team realized a patient wasn’t ready for the follow-up, the appointment was often just a week away, leaving little choice but to reschedule. That could mean losing the original appointment time and making it harder to fill the newly opened slot.
Anthony was very familiar with this pattern. “Patients were often scheduling their follow-ups based on when they expected to be ready, but sometimes the labs or imaging took longer than anticipated,” he says. “We’d get to the week before the visit and find out they still weren’t ready, so we’d have to reschedule the appointment.”
His fix was to put readiness where the schedule lives:
- Every follow-up is a ticket in Canvas
- Ordered labs and imaging sit on the ticket
- The tracker turns green as results arrive
Once staff could see what was still outstanding, the practice began using that information to better align follow-up scheduling with each patient's care timeline. . "We reserve scheduling follow-up visits until we know the patient has either completed the items, like labs and imaging specifically, or we know the date that they've scheduled it," Anthony says.
The tracker is one of many tools Anthony has built to replace the practice's spreadsheets. "Basically every spreadsheet that we had for tracking... I built into some kind of tool in Studio," he says. Most of his builds start as a question he types straight into Studio by asking "Is that possible? Could it do that or not do that? And you just put it in and it just does it. It figures out a way to do it."
What is Canvas Studio?
Studio is an AI plugin builder inside the Canvas EMR, built on the Canvas SDK and powered by Claude Code. You describe the workflow you want in your own words, and Studio builds it, showing you a plain-English plan first and waiting for your approval at every step. It runs in the browser, it never ships on its own, and whatever it builds becomes a repo your team owns.
The workflow: follow-up readiness tracking in the chart
What it is: Staff work from a follow-up queue that shows every patient due for a next visit, and the same tickets open from inside each patient's chart. Whoever is in the chart doing prep can mark a lab received right there, and the queue updates to match.
How it works:
- A clinician's task flags that the patient needs a follow-up. Staff turn it into a ticket with the next visit type, what's been ordered, and a due date.
- As lab and imaging results come in, staff mark them as received. When every item is green, the patient is ready to schedule.
- Tickets age autonomously, so a ticket within a week of its due date moves to "due to outreach," and one three days past that moves to "overdue."
To build your own version, start Studio with a prompt like this one.
We need to track follow-ups better. Let staff turn a clinician's task into a ticket for the patient's next visit: the visit type, what has been ordered such as labs and imaging, and a due date about three weeks out. When a result comes in, mark it received from the patient's chart. When everything is green, we are ready to schedule. Show counts up top for on the list, ready to schedule, and overdue, and age the tickets automatically: due for outreach within a week of the due date, overdue three days past that.
Why it's worth copying: Rescheduling can happen when patients book follow-ups based on when they expect their labs and imaging to be complete, but those timelines change. By making outstanding items visible, the practice can schedule around actual readiness and reduce avoidable rescheduling.
What to try this week
Still tracking prep in a spreadsheet? Pick the list you refresh most and ask Studio for a tracker version of it, with tickets, ordered items, due dates, and statuses. Starting with the list you touch most means you see the difference in your first week of using it.
Already built something in Studio? Start your next tool by asking Studio to copy a table from an earlier plugin as the foundation. That is how Anthony started this tracker, and editing something that already works takes far less describing than a blank prompt.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need engineering support to build Canvas plugins?
No, Anthony built the tracker and keeps improving it himself, in plain language, while running clinical operations and billing. Because Studio shows a plan and waits for approval at each step, he reviews every change in plain English without reading code.
How long did this take?
The first version was in use within a day of Anthony starting it. It kept changing over the following week as the team worked with it, and they added the green-checkmark readiness view during that stretch.
What changed in how the practice schedules?
The practice now schedules follow-up visits once the ordered labs and imaging are either complete or have a confirmed scheduled date. When testing is complete and results are still pending, the follow-up is typically booked about two weeks after the testing date, giving time for results to become available before the visit.
