Have you ever tried to use one of the appointment scheduling systems for your patients? What issues have you faced with them?

It means the administrator or practitioner himself should define the schedule in this system separately and make sure it’s up to date and does not interfere with all other systems, that the practitioner is using in his daily clinical practice.

What does it mean in reality? The patient books an appointment for a convenient time, but when then it appears, that the time is already booked by another way (maybe by a phone call to a clinic, etc). Then, someone should contact the patient to find another appropriate time and re-schedule the appointment. It is simply wasting resources and drastically makes the patient experience worse.

To avoid this issue, please, make sure, that the appointment booking engine you use is integrated with all other systems, that might impact the practitioner schedule. And make sure, that this is bi-directional real-time integration (meaning, when some appointment is scheduled - this time will be marked as booked across all systems and vice versa).

Slot management is a part of the system, where you can define when the practitioners are available (days of the week, time ranges, etc), what kind of services they provide, what is the duration for each type of service, what are the prerequisites for each type of the service.

If you are unable to customize these parameters or to define your own, your clinical workflows will be limited to the provided options and you won’t be able to optimize them (more routine actions required to be done by a practitioner, more time spent with each patient, etc).

Pre-check-in flows typically help the practitioner to gather the information that helps to prepare for the appointment and spend time with a patient very efficiently.
Depending on the practitioner's specialization, patient demographics, background diseases, and other related health profile data, different types of information might be required to provide.

If the customization is not supported by the system (you can’t add your requirements, adjust the questions, etc), your staff will highly likely spend this time with the patient when he is already in the facility (before or during the appointment).

These are the main practical issues our customers faced. We learned the lesson and covered all these issues in the Beda EMR scheduling module. Learn more about it at beda.software/emr

What are the main issues you have faced with the appointment booking systems?