Automation of Appointment Schedules for Doctors and Patients

Description

A medical ward turned to Altoros to develop an automated and scalable system for scheduling biannual appointments for the employees of multiple companies.

Brief results of the collaboration:

• The healthcare institution automated time-consuming and inefficient manual processes around biannual physical checkups of corporate employees in Norway.
• With the delivered automation, the ward can now provide healthcare checkups to 100+ companies, being able to serve up to 750,000 patients.
• Based on the early feedback from pilot users, the customer is working on white-labeling the system to get an additional revenue channel by offering this product to other medical institutions.

The customer

Established in 1986, the customer is a medical ward based in Oslo, Norway. The organization offers several medical services: health checkups, laboratory tests, surgical operations, etc. The institution also provides biannual checkups for the employees of multiple organizations across the country.

The need

Twice a year, corporate employees in Norway have to go through obligatory physical checkups. The medical center was delivering this service to 20 companies. Initially, appointment scheduling was conducted manually via phone calls and by using spreadsheets. This was inefficient, time-consuming, and led to human error and conflicts between schedules. As a result, it was impossible to neither provide a quality service, nor fully focus on other daily routines. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these issues escalated due to the increased burden on medical staff.

With a view to expand its business and cater to more corporate customers, the institution relied on expertise at Altoros to automate the scheduling procedure.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

It was important to ensure that medical workers with no technical background could easily manage tasks such as addition of new doctors, their vacations or sick leaves, etc. The ward collects, processes, and stores personal data of European Union citizens, so the system had to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The solution

Engineers at Altoros delivered a web-based system designed to automate the process of scheduling appointments and sending out notifications. Our developers created a script that automatically assigns available time slots in a doctor’s schedule to a patient.

The team enabled corporate administrators to simply upload a list of employees with their contact details. In case a doctor or an employee finds the time slot unsuitable, they have an option to reschedule. Patients can do this simply via a link in the e-mail sent out by the system.

By delivering an intuitive admin panel, our developers enabled medical workers to easily add new doctors, track their vacations and sick leaves, mitigating any risks of conflicting schedules or absence of an expert.

Using Amazon Lightsail, the engineering team ensured that the system scales up to accommodate over 750,000 patients for 100+ corporate accounts.

To achieve compliance with the GDPR, developers at Altoros implemented a mechanism requesting consent from an employee to store his/her information. Consent can be withdrawn at any time, resulting in the deletion of the information upon request.

To improve transparency and enable analytics, our team delivered report-generation functionality for doctors and corporate administrators. For instance, doctors are able to generate reports that illustrate the number of appointments within a specified time frame.

To notify corporate employees of the appointed time slot, experts at Altoros integrated Amazon Simple Email Service. This also handles all other notifications sent out by the system, including patient questionnaires to collect medical history.

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer automated time-consuming and inefficient manual processes around biannual physical checkups. As a result, the ward can now provide healthcare checkups to 100+ companies to serve up to 750,000 corporate patients. Now, the healthcare institution can deliver a timely service without interrupting its other daily routines, saving hundreds of hours for medical staff.

In the future, the customer plans to white-label the delivered system and offer it to other medical organizations seeking this kind of automation, building an additional revenue channel.