Informatica

Appointments Online now also supports the latest version of the Opera browser, 9.2.

We've just added the hCalendar microformat to the patient home page for their booked appointments. Using something like the Operator Firefox plugin a patient can now automatically add their appointments into their (for example) Google calendar:






As usual let us know what you think.

We have been having troubles getting the application to work in the very first version of IE6 that was released in Windows 2000 in 2001. This is now resolved. Yay!

It was tempting to exclude the support of this version of IE6 as an edge case but we know that there are people out there running it and so we persevered and solved the problem.

So now Appointments Online fully supports IE 6 & 7, Firefox 1.5 & 2 and Safari 2. We're looking at the latest version of Opera but even without it we cover over 96% of the browsers that are in use nowadays.

We've been working on getting integration between Appointments Online and your desktop calendar program so that you can see all of your appointments from the most convenient place. Here's an example of OS/X iCal subscribed to Appointments Online:

This works great on a Mac but unfortunately not very well at all on Windows because of the poor support for the iCalendar standard in the Microsoft world. As most of the people using Appointments Online are bound to be using Windows this has now become a bit of a non-feature so we're going to pull it. Who knows, maybe we will bring it back in the future?

As usual let us know what you think.

Interesting link to the Healthcare 2.0 web sites active in the US.

"OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity."

OpenID seems to be gaining traction as an independant alternative to something like Microsoft's Passport. Is it something that we should be considering for Appointments Online as a way of authenticating patients?

Here are some links on OpenID:

OpenID
Public OpenID Providers
AOL & OpenID
The value of connected identity

Let us know what you think.

"Revolution Health’s objective is to give consumers more choice and control over their health care, enabling all of us to live healthier, better lives."

This is an US site that is backed by Steve Case, one of the AOL founders. It aims to build a community around healthcare and is trying to make 'the patient the centre of the healthcare world'.

Is this something that could work in the UK - what do you think? Let us know.