An emergency dental referral service, built from a blank page

The brief

Dr Yitzchak Haffner had a simple idea. When someone is in dental pain out of hours, they don’t want a list of practices to ring round. They want one answer: who can see me, and how soon.

On the other side, private dentists often have a free slot in the evening or at the weekend and no easy way to fill it. Filling You In needed to connect the two quickly, and earn the trust of both.

What I built

The website is the front door. Behind it is a referral system that runs day and night without anyone having to manage it.

For patients

• A mobile first site with one clear action: enter a postcode, describe the problem and add a photo if it helps
• Each request goes to up to three nearby dentists who are available at that moment, so nobody is left ringing round
• A £20 callback from a dentist, paid online, for people who aren’t sure they need to be seen
• Contact details stay private until a dentist accepts

For dentists

• A private link for each practice to switch referrals on and off and set their weekly hours. Patients are only ever sent to someone who can actually see them
• New requests arrive by email and text with the distance, the problem and any photo
• The first dentist to accept pays a one off introduction fee by card and only then receives the patient’s details. If they don’t pay within 15 minutes, the request moves on to the next practice

For search

• Local landing pages for twelve areas across Greater Manchester, from Whitefield to Stockport, plus a Manchester page that ties them together
• Structured data so search engines understand the service, the locations and the FAQs

The thinking

Off the shelf store locator plugins were the obvious shortcut. They show a list of addresses and let the patient pick. That’s the wrong answer for someone in pain, and it says nothing about whether the dentist is free. So I built the routing around live availability instead of addresses. It cost more upfront, and it’s the whole point of the service.

Taking payment at the moment a dentist accepts mattered just as much. Dentists only pay for the patients they choose to take on, there’s no subscription to sell them, and every referral pays its way.