Informatica

There are two ways for a patient to signup to use Appointments Online:

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• Turn up to the practice in person with some proof of identify. The practice staff can then grant the patient full access to Appointments Online using their practice management system.
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• Go to the Appointments Online signup page for their practice and apply for access over the web.
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I want to outline the second process in more detail. We are trying to strike a balance between accessibility and privacy. We want to make it as easy as possible for someone to begin using Appointments Online without opening up the possibility that someone might gain access to another person's records. Our intention at the moment is for patients signed up over the web to have only minimal functionality once they login to Appointments Online. These patients will only be able to book appointments and view appointments that have been booked via Appointments Online and not directly with the practice frontdesk. They also will not be able to post or read any messages nor will they be able to request repeat medication. If a patient with restricted access wants to use these other features of Appointments Online then they will have to present to the practice in person with relevant proof of identity. We believe that this process will make it easy for patients to book appointments over the web but hard for them to hijack someone else's identity and gain access to their personal information.

Here's the actual web signup process. First of all the patient goes to the home page for their practice on Appointments Online (the practice can link to this from their web site) and clicks on the "sign up" link:



Next the patient must provide some personal details. This will allow the practice staff to link this signup request with the relevant patient record from their clinical system:



After clicking "Sign Me Up" the patient is presented with a confirmation page. At this point the signup request is sent to the practice for verification where the practice staff will either accept the request and link it with a patient record or reject it because they cannot reconcile the personal details in the signup request with an actual patient record.



Once the practice has approved the request by the patient then an email is sent to the patient to allow them to complete the sign up process:



Clicking on the link in the mail brings up the web page to complete the signup process. At this point all the patient needs to do is select for themselves a unique user name and password:



And finally the patient has (restricted!) access to Appointments Online:

In addition to the standard message text displayed when the patient takes some action a practice now has the ability to define some custom messages when a patient books an appointment. A practice can also define some helper text to be displayed to the patient on the home page about leaving messages and requesting repeats.

Here's the page that the practice uses to define the instructions:



Here's the booking instruction:



Finally here're the repeat and message instructions displayed under their respective headers:

I am happy to announce that you can now sign up as a patient of our demo practice. This will allow you to see how the service works from the perspective of a patient. More details on how to sign up for demo use of the service can be found here.

We are almost ready to open up access to Appointments Online a little to let you get a feel for what we will be offering. Initially we will be giving you the ability to signup as if you were a patient, on our test server. This will allow you to see the facilities that patients will be offered when the service goes live and will hopefully provide us with some feedback from you on what needs improving.

There will be an announcement next week giving some instructions as to how to sign up to the test service. Until then have a great weekend...

Appointments Online will now also be made available to users of the INPS Vision 3 system. We're currently working with INPS on providing seamless integration between the Vision 3 appointments system and our Appointments Online web booking service for patients. If you are a Vision 3 user you can get more information by contacting INPS directly.

A few more screenshots for you today, this time showing the booking process.

The first screenshot shows the appointments booking page. You can see that appointments can be filtered by the clinic, the date, the clinician and the location. By default, appointments for today with the patient's preferred clinician (if known) are initially displayed.

Clicking on 'Book This' for a particular appointment then shows the booking confirmation section where the patient has the opportunity to enter some notes and confirm the booking or decide not to book the appointment:

Once an appointment is booked, the patient is returned to their home page with the appointment now listed:

Have a great weekend!