With the digital revolution, every industry has kept pace with adopting and enabling new features for all their stakeholders. The healthcare industry has incorporated online booking of doctors’ appointments as well as digital consultation sessions to move beyond geographical boundaries. A multinational pharmaceutical company from Mumbai realised that they need to streamline the process of booking doctors’ appointments in a manner that allows patients greater access to doctors from various specialities as well as provides efficient scheduling of appointments.

Why do we need to automate the booking of appointments?

Some of the most common issues faced by doctors involve their calendars being disarrayed due to cases in which patients do not turn up for appointments or come late and cause all subsequent appointments to be delayed. Additionally, due to the numerous platforms available for booking an appointment with a doctor, there could be a mismatch resulting in multiple appointments at the same time.

How did integration address the issues faced?

The company identified that most patients seek doctors in their local areas of residence and as a result cannot obtain treatments from specialist doctors who practice in other areas. Quickwork has helped them address this by incorporating an online appointment system where the appointment is conducted via video conferencing on Google Meet.

The company also identified an issue of overbooking of doctor appointments as well as overlapping appointments due to multiple platforms being used to schedule appointments. To prevent this, Quickwork provided an integrated solution to the company to sync all appointments for a doctor using Google Calendar. Hence, within the doctor’s available hours, all online and offline appointments will be synced in a single calendar.

Realising that patients should be able to find doctors as per their specific requirements, a solution was proposed, consisting of a chatbot with which patients can interact to find doctors as well as see preliminary details such as specializations, consultation charges and availability hours.

Healthcare consultations for long term ailments will require patients to follow up with doctors repeatedly over a period of time, ranging from a few months to a few years. To have a systematic process in place for follow up appointments, the company decided to allow the doctor the freedom to choose a messaging platform of their choice, to interact with patients. The doctor can provide a link to patients via WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger/SMS through which patients can book their next appointments, which will be synced with Google Calendar.

How did the company benefit after using integration?

Using a single calendar will allow doctors to keep track of all appointments during their available hours. This ensures that they are always updated about what is coming up next as well as prevents overbooking or overlapping of appointments.

Google Calendar also allows sharing of calendars which will allow a hospital or organization to see the bookings each doctor has scheduled for the day, in a transparent and efficient manner.

Overall, Quickwork’s integration of messaging apps, Google Calendar and Quickwork Conversations provided a holistic solution to doctors to enable them to save time and energy spent in organizing their schedules to let them focus on other more important activities. It also allowed patients access to easier ways to schedule appointments and avail consultations irrespective of geographical locations.

Get in touch with Quickwork to know more about how you can streamline your business workflows!