Informatica

For anyone curious as to when patients book appointments, here's a quick analysis based on the last few months of data in Appointments Online:




You can't see it from the graph but between midnight and 1am there's been a single booking and the same for 1am - 2am. After 2am there's no activity until 6am.

To get real benefit from Appointments Online as soon as possible, you should aim to first signup the patients that make the most appointments. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that 10% of your patients could be responsible for 50% of your appointments. These are the patients that should be targeted initially for signup to Appointments Online. Using FrontDesk this segment of patients can be identified by running the Appointment Regularity report.

In answer to the question "What are the best features of Appointments Online?", beta testers replied:

Simple to use for patient, clear instructions for patient, seamless integration with Frontdesk, top class support.

Configurability, ability to apply embargoes so that appointments become available at exactly the same time both online and in-practice, facility for patient to say why they need appointment - clinicians find this very useful indeed.

The appointments book on the web and the repeat requesting on the web modules. These should enable us to deliver a better service to patients without needing more staff.

All of it. Excellent system and support.

"I'm gob-smacked at the changes you've made in the time I've been away - we specially like the web booking alerts by appointment type.  Having done a full testing session today we're now recruiting as fast as we can."

Thanks to the feedback from the beta testers we decided to improve the way that the patient requests their repeat medications. Instead of simply requesting each medication individually, they are now requested all together and the patient can choose where to collect the prescription from and add any additional notes that may help the prescriber:

"We are using [Appointments Online] and have a fair few patients signed up and the reports back so far are that the patients like it - a lot!"

So far, so good!

A small private beta test of Appointments Online has been going for a number of weeks now. We're at the stage where we are happy to step up the testing and next week will be opening up the beta testing to all FrontDesk customers. We'll be sending out an email on the FrontDesk forums early next week with details of how to sign up to the beta programme.

That's how many patients one of our beta practices already has signed up to use Appointments Online in less than one week. Outstanding!

Congratulations to Simon Guy of the Burn Brae Medical Group for being the first to accept patient bookings over the web using Appointments Online. It's great to have the system now accepting real-life appointment bookings and we look forward to the other beta testers getting up and running as well.

The invites to the initial set of beta testers have gone out. Are you one of the lucky ones?

If all goes well in the coming week we will be releasing Appointments Online for a limited beta test with FrontDesk customers the week after next. The initial beta programme is by invitation only but we will open it up to a wider audience as soon as we are satisfied that everything is working as it should.

We are now putting the finishing touches to the integration of FrontDesk and Appointments Online. Here are a couple of screenshots from the FrontDesk side of things:

Registering the Practice to Use Appointments Online

Appointments Available for Web Booking

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.

"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.

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:

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...

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!

It's been a while since the last post. So to make up for it here's a screenshot of the patient home page after logging into Appointments Online:

After successfully signing in the patient is presented with this personalised home page. At a glance the patient can see what their booked appointments are, what medications they have on repeat, any messages that they have left but are as yet undelivered to the practice and their personal details.

This is the page that the patient sees after choosing to login from the practice home page. The patient must supply their identifier and PIN code to continue to their home page.

This page lets you find a patient and display their audit trail. Appointments Online keeps an audit trail of all the actions that a patient has taken in case you need to resolve a query they may have.

Over the coming weeks we will be revealing some more information about Appointments Online. In this first post here is a screenshot of the initial patient welcome screen when visiting a practice's home page: