Content team member: “Let’s write a useful blog on the appointment booking system for clinics as it is a basic need of every clinician.”

Content team lead: “People have written a lot on the healthcare appointment booking system. Write something more valuable and unique that people haven’t read before. [After a pause] Write fun and innovative alternatives to the typical age-old online patient booking system.” 

Business analyst team lead: “Yes. Great idea. But don’t forget to mention we are not just limited to innovative ideas. We can help them build a typical online appointment booking system too!”

This is how we decided to write something rare but innovative as appointment booking is too boring! 

After all, we’ve been fascinated by healthcare innovation and always attempt to make a simple healthcare solution innovative enough that it makes us proud of our skillset and makes our healthcare clients proud of the healthcare solution they own!

And yes, before we move further, let me tell you - on the special request of our business analyst team lead -  we're an Ontario-based healthcare-focused IT company and capable of building any sort of healthcare solutions including a typical appointment booking system! 

He must be happy reading this! 

Now, let’s leave typical things behind and talk about innovative and fun things! 

Our other fun and valuable resources:

• Top cancer care startups
• HIPAA testing for web app
• Top healthcare investors
• Pharmacy workflow automation

3 more engaging, innovative and fun ways to let patients book appointments with clinicians 

Whichever the great ideas we are about to share, we can easily achieve them all. So, don’t worry about execution!  

1. Appointment booking system with Tinder-inspired UI

Don’t raise your eyebrows. Tinder is a great source of business motivation and learning! 

One of the major reasons Tinder is able to continue dominating the market is the way it allows users to make choices by simply swiping right and left. 

This is the easiest and engaging way a platform can ever give to its users to quickly satisfy their intent. 

Imagine what if users themselves had to find profiles on Tinder?  They would never have used it on the scale they are using it now! 

This is the power of ease of use and engaging app navigation! 

You can apply the same concept in your appointment booking system. Here is how it works. 

>> Doctors create their profiles by adding all important information. 

>> Patients also create their profiles by adding all personal and health card information. 

>> Patients swipe doctors’ profiles similar to Tinder. 

>> Patients explore the profile of each doctor along with other details such as fees, availability, language etc. 

>> Patients swipe right to send an appointment request with preferred time and date to the selected doctor. 

>> Doctor approves or rejects the appointment request. 

Following is the UI we recently designed to give you a better idea. 

To make your Tinder-inspired appointment booking system for clinics feature-rich in addition to fun and innovative, you can consider adding telemedicine features with EMR/EHR integration that results in seamless and real-time data transfer between EMR/EHR and your healthcare appointment booking solution. 

2. Patient appointment booking with virtual assistant or chatbot

Appointment booking with clinicians can be time-consuming and tedious for many patients if they are seeking any urgent but non-life-threatening care. 

Many waste more time in finding a clinician they are looking for as per their availability and medical need.

To free patients from all such time-consuming tasks, a virtual assistant or chatbot plays a crucial role. 

It asks a few questions to patients with suggested answers that patients just need to select to explain their clinical requirements and availability. 

Based on these given inputs, the virtual assistant itself understands the actual needs of the patients and books appointments with the clinician who is available on a patient’s time and most suitable. 

This entire process takes hardly 2-3 minutes as every time-consuming and tedious task is managed by the virtual assistant which works faster and accurately than patients! 

To make this idea even more epic, you can add voice control to let patients book appointments by just giving voice commands! 

3. Instagram-styled appointment booking solution

If you are planning to build an appointment booking solution for clinics in 2021, you must prioritize patient-doctor relations and add features around it. 

Because, in a typical healthcare scheduling system, there is no way doctors can manage good relations with their patients. 

It is also crucial in the post-pandemic world to let doctors and patients connect for more than just clinical purposes. 

An Instagram-styled appointment booking platform is the most innovative solution here. It enables patients to not just book direct appointments with the clinician but also be part of the clinician's life by following him along with their other favourite clinicians. 

Similar to Instagram, clinicians can share images from their clinical and non-clinical life where patients can react and establish a strong connection with clinicians with a private chat option. 

Clinicians can also conduct a live stream and talk to their group of patients to sustain a good patient-doctor relation. 

This way, the Instagram-styled appointment booking platform not only serves a direct appointment booking purpose but also empowers clinicians with an image-based knowledge-sharing and patient engagement platform. 

Conclusion 

There is always a way to do it in a better way.  

If you find it, we are happy to technologically achieve it. 

And when we find it (like today’s better appointment booking ways), we can of course technologically achieve it! 

But the question is, will you dare to step out of comfort and embrace a better way to run medical practice?