Building AI-Powered Schedule Gap Prevention for Healthcare

I've been working on an interesting problem: automatically filling cancelled appointments in dental practices. The domain is healthcare, but the engineering challenge is broadly applicable to any booking system.

The Problem Space

When a patient cancels a dental appointment same-day, practices have a narrow window to fill the slot. Traditional approach: receptionist manually calls waitlist patients one by one. Fill rate: ~20-30%.

The constraints are interesting:

Time pressure : Often < 2 hours to fill the slot

Sequential bottleneck : Human can only call one person at a time

Match complexity : Need to match treatment type, duration, insurance, and patient availability

High cost of failure : Each empty hour ≈ €200-300 in lost revenue

The Architecture

The system monitors the practice management software for schedule changes via webhooks/polling.…