A concierge that never sleeps.

No — and not because we asked it nicely. Fern is scope-locked to intake and routing. She listens and routes; she never diagnoses or prescribes. Anything clinical is handed to your team, and true emergencies fire a fixed 911/ER script the model can't override.

You stay the clinician of record — the College expects that, and nothing here changes it. What changes is your exposure: Fern never diagnoses, speaks only from facts your team approved, refuses when she's unsure, and logs every exchange — so she's engineered to reduce the risk of an after-hours misstep, not add one. She's an intake layer that always hands to a human, reviewable end to end.

HIPAA is US law and doesn't apply to an Ontario practice — that's the giveaway question for a vendor who hasn't done their homework. Fern is built to PHIPA (Ontario) and PIPEDA, the privacy law that actually governs you: data minimised, kept on Canadian servers, never sold or pooled, and auditable line by line.

Deterministically — the language model is never in that loop. Airway trouble, facial swelling, uncontrolled bleeding, trauma: hard-coded tripwires fire a fixed “call 911 or go to the ER now” script and flag your on-call path. Fern can't decide to handle an emergency in conversation, because the model never gets the chance.

She says so. Fern is closed-book: if an answer isn't in the knowledge your team approved, she doesn't improvise — she tells the patient she'll have someone confirm and logs it for follow-up. And that knowledge is yours to edit, line by line; nothing goes live until you've read and signed off. A clean hand-off beats a confident guess, every time.

No. Fern is one invisible embed on the site you already have — deployed at the edge (a Cloudflare Snippet or Worker) without touching your origin host, and she doesn't plug into or migrate your PMS. Hand-offs land in the inbox your office manager already watches — urgent by SMS, routine by email — so there's no new dashboard, no login to hand out, and nothing to learn on Monday.

Today Fern hands your team a fully-formed booking request — name, reason, insurance, preferred times — in seconds, deliberately without writing to your chart, so there's less to secure and nothing to misfire. If you want true self-booking, voice, recall outreach, or a specific integration, that's the advantage of owning the build rather than renting a fixed product: we scope it to your practice and add it when it earns its place — and if voice is ever one of those, it's the deterministic kind that routes and captures, never a recorded call. You start with the after-hours front door that pays for itself, and you're never boxed into someone else's feature list.

Yes — Fern answers in your patient's language, with the same grounded facts and the same honest refusals in each one. She launches in English, French, and Spanish, each built on a knowledge vault your team reviews and approves — never machine-translated on the fly, because a mistranslated health answer is exactly the risk we design out. Need Arabic, or another language your community speaks? Because you own the build, we add it deliberately, held to the same human review.

A calm, on-brand concierge that matches your site — not a generic chatbot dropped on top. Fern introduces herself in plain language as your practice's after-hours concierge; she never impersonates a person or a dentist, so patients always know what she is — and always have a clear path to a human. That's exactly what the RCDSO's AI guidance asks of you: tell patients when they're speaking with AI. Fern does, by default.

You own it. Fern is built as a bespoke asset — code, content, and conversation logs are yours to keep, even if we ever part ways. No perpetual license that evaporates the day you stop paying. The full three-year economics come with the proposal.