Ashley and Kelly showcase Cortico’s specialist booking feature and discuss how a clinic is using it now to streamline their booking process.
Ashley 0:04
Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m Ashley from Cortico, and I also have Kelly here from Cortico support who will be showing us how the specialist booking works. Unlike regular online booking, specialist bookings allowed doctors and MOAs to have more control and patients can book their appointments. Now, I’ll pass this on to Kelly who’s going to show us how this is all done.
Kelly 0:25
Okay, thanks Ashley. Now I’m going to share my screen, and talk a little bit about specialist booking. So like what Ashley said, specialist booking is a little bit different from regular online booking. A doctor will create a unique link that they’ll send to the patients, and the patients book using that specific link. What we have here is the specialist booking dashboard, and you can access this page by inserting your Cortico instance, and slash specialist dash booking. You’ll be able to find the dashboard. In the dashboard. you’ll be able to see all the unique links that you’ve created in the past, and their statuses as well.
For you to create a new specialist booking link, you would simply click on “Add specialist booking” and you’ll be brought to this page where you can create the unique link. Just to paint a quick picture, let’s say as a doctor you have received the referral from the other clinic, and you have taken that referral, and added it to the patient’s file. After that is done, you can create this unique link here, We’re going to search out the patient’s file via healthcare number or demographic number, whichever you prefer, and search the patient. So my test patient file has appeared here, and the next step is to select the provider. So depending on how many specialists at the clinic, or any doctors that want to use this feature, they will all be listed here. Just going to go with this doctor here. Next is selecting a specialization. At this connector is a ENT and neurologist, and I’m going to click on ENT specialization. And we also have this checkbox here, just indicating whether this is a new patient. If it’s a follow up appointment, then you can just leave this how it is and blank.
Next, we have setting the booking range. By default, Cortico allows the patients to work from the earliest availability of the doctor, to up to 30 days, so that will be the default. If you’d like to customize that, let’s say we would only want the patients to book starting April, then you can change that to April as well. I’m just going to leave it at default here. Lastly, we have the booking link expiry date. The default on this is one week, so once this link is sent to the patient, the link will expire in one week, so the patient will need to book within that week. If you’d like to extend that, you can click on the calendar and select the date you like the link to expire. After everything is filled, I’m going to add booking and there you have it. It’s the last one right here. I’ve booked with this doctor, this specialization. As soon as the link is created, it will say successfully added, and the unique booking link is sent to the patient already. Now, I’d like to go to the patient’s email, and see from the patient’s perspective how they will be booking through this link.
So now I am in the patient’s email inbox. This is what the email looks like. It’ll say, “Dear patient, you can schedule an appointment with the doctor.” I’m going to click on this big blue button, which will bring me to what looks like a regular online booking page. It’ll indicate that you must book using this unique link. Your healthcare number, all that, will be auto populated, and I’ll proceed with booking here. And, of course, the doctor is auto populated as well. The clinic does have an option to add some questions as well if that’s needed prior to the appointment, and everything else will be the same, such as asking for any notes, selecting preferred pharmacy, and so forth.
And here, depending on what type of appointment types that the doctor offers, that will be shown here. This doctor offers video and phone, so those two are the options here. I’m going to go with the phone appointment, and choose a date, and last thing is going to book the appointment, and there you have it, the appointment is successfully booked. Just to go back to the specialist booking dashboard. Currently, before the refreshed page, the special link indicates that the patient has not booked an appointment yet, it’s still pending. But once I refresh this page, it will update the dashboard, and it will say the patient has booked on March 15. That is a confirmation that the patient has booked the appointment. That’s it for a specialist booking. Specialist booking is useful for appointments that need to be booked further down the road, sort of having it open and patients booking at any time. Specialist booking obviously is not only for specialists, family doctors can use this feature as well.
Ashley 5:52
One thing I really wanted to add was, I think that specialists would really love to know is having a tool like this will reduce no shows because I know specialists and many other practitioners, they absolutely despise when patients no show
Kelly 6:09
Hmm okay, that’s a good point to bring up. Yeah.
Another thing to bring up about specialist booking is that due to the even duration of specialist booking they may be longer than regular appointments. It’s crucial that he specialist bookings are not canceled last minute, and we want to prevent no shows as much as possible, so we hope that the specialist booking feature can reduce and prevent no shows as well. So now, let’s hear from a clinic manager who has been using a specialist booking feature to hear about his thoughts,m and his transition in using this feature.
Jordan 6:48
At Kensington, we have lots of GPs, a few specialists, pediatricians, psychiatrists, clinical counselors, a variety of specialized medicine here. For the GPs bookings and stuff like that, a lot of it was always done through the website, but where specialists do require referrals, it’s a different ballgame. When we get referrals from other offices, we’ll basically input all the data for the patient, and we would always have to give the patient a call. So, since the patient is referred from another clinic, most times when you call them, they’re unsure what you’re calling about, or why this clinics calling in the first place. And, I think that we could have to call probably, two to three times, to be able to get a hold of each patient. And, it’s kind of one of those things where when you first go to call them, they see the missed call, you leave a message, they don’t reply. You get- you call them again, you leave a message, they don’t reply. You call them a third time and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to call you and here you can set up my appointment.” When you finally kind of get them on the phone, it’s- you’re always at the mercy of their scheduling. So it’d be like, “Oh, I’m available these days” and we’re like, “Well, the doctor don’t work- doesn’t work these days. We have these days available.” They’re like, “Oh, well we can do afternoon, evening. Oh wait, I have an appointment.” Like, there’s a lot of back and forth when you finally get patients on the phone. So that’s kind of what the current situation prior to the specialist booking look like, and I think overall, it was a bit of an inefficient system.
Kelly 8:09
Did you also mention that the phone numbers used to be incorrect all the time, as well?
Jordan 8:15
Yeah, so the thing is, is where kind of the information is not something that we collect directly from the patient. Sometimes, we basically get phone numbers, or different things from offices that were incorrect. So you’d have to give them a call. Oh, the phone numbers not in service. Okay. I call the office back, retrieve the correct phone number, and call the patient again. Forseeing in the future, we’ve been getting a lot more emails now. So a lot of doctors offices know that, we’re mostly electronic, we’re mostly doing new things. So we’re getting a lot more email sent to us. And surprisingly, the number of emails that are incorrect is far less than the number of phone numbers that are incorrect.
Kelly 8:49
Right, and I guess there’s updates to phone numbers, and things like that as well. That can be a factor. So just to go over the pain points of booking a specialist appointment. You mentioned that there’s a lot of back and forth from confirming appointments, rescheduling, all that. Let’s say if this appointment was to book on regular booking system, it would be too open and it’s not really controlled. So, I guess that’s where the specialist booking feature comes in to solve these issues. What would you say is the most helpful or beneficial part of the specialist booking feature?
Jordan 9:24
Well, I would say a lot of patients and people in general use email for a lot more things now. More people are prone to be checking their email daily, whether they use it for work, or whether they use it for personal life. Email is something that’s not going away, and is just increasing in the amount of usage. So being able to send a patient an email directly saying, “Hey, we got your referral. We’re ready to for you to book. You can book directly here.” I think it does help us on our end because we can first- the minute we receive the referral, as long as we know that it’s something the doctor can see, we can send them a link. So, instead of trying to call, instead of trying to doing anything, the first step is just to send an email. So then, we have a day or two where we might not get a chance to call, but there’s a possibility even before we call that the patient books. With the specialist booking link as well, it’s nice that we’re able to kind of collect pharmacy information. Because even on the phone when you talk to someone, they know where their pharmacy is, but they may not know the cross streets, or they may not know exactly what the pharmacy’s name is. There’s so many other than Shoppers, London Drugs, Superstore. There’s like Nas’ pharmacy, there’s like Special K pharmacy. Like there’s a ton of different pharmacies out there, so knowing the name right off the bat is difficult. And patients themselves would say, “Oh, it’s you know, it’s in this area here. And it’s kind of like two blocks away from my house.” And I’m like, “Okay, I know what two blocks away from your house is. It’s not that far, but what’s the name of the pharmacy? I can’t just search from your geolocation.” So just kind of even for them to collect the information directly and do it at their own pace is great. Another thing that I noticed with the specialist booking that’s been helpful for us is that, let’s say you have a neurologist that triages their referrals. So you say, I need to book this in three to six months, that’s going to be the triaging for that referral. Well, with the specialist booking there’s actually a way to set the date ranges to three to six months, which is super helpful because it’s not that we wouldn’t book correctly ourselves, but now we have an option to automate it, and do it correctly. So even the ones that are specific, you can still use correctly through the specialist booking whether it be a new patient or follow up.
Kelly 11:24
Right, that’s a good point. Now, maybe before the triage, you know you will have to follow up a few times, maybe check in a month later, and then schedule an appointment, but now that’s already preset, but then they still have this timeframe that they can only book. So that’s a lot more control from the clinic side for when the patients can book. Okay, another question I have is, how was the impact of this feature when you were implementing it and how did the MOAs take it? Was it a easy transition from what you were doing before?
Jordan 11:57
I think like most of our MOAs are pretty used to online booking, and everything like that, and the way the specialist booking is set up, it’s quite user friendly. You really are just copying either the PHN or the demographic number, and pasting it into a specialist booking, choosing which doctor, and sending the link. So from an MOA point of view, it’s- I would say it’s a lot easier, and I don’t think there’s any downsides for MOAs. More or less what it can do is it can save you time, like you can send them the link, they’ll either book online or they don’t. If they book online, you’re saving time. If they don’t, you’re still doing your regular thing. So, it’s it’s only a beneficial factor. I can’t find anything that, more or less, will make it seem like it’s wasting time because you’ll- you’ll most likely get more and more bookings starting people going through online. One thing I noticed is that we kind of started it with the GP Jeremy we had at our office, so I would get the referrals, and I would immediately kind of just say, hey, let’s send out 15 to try it. And what I noticed is in the first kind of couple days, there was probably 10 or 12 of the 15 that booked, so even kind of right out the gate, we can see that patients do like being able to choose their own times. They were able to manage kind of entering in all their own information. They then received an email saying it was booked, and it had all our policies stated directly in it. So, it was just kind of, you send- you set up one link, and you send to the patient, and then the patient does the rest for their appointment. And it’s kind of a very efficient way to ensure that the patient gets the correct reminders, the patient has all their information we need for the appointment collected, and I think they are able to manage their schedule better as well, so they’re happier overall.
Kelly 13:39
Great. Yeah, I also believe that the kind of perks of this is that, from the patient’s point of view, it’s actually very similar to regular online booking, they just get a link. And I like- I think it’s really easy for the patient, as it’s- it’s nothing really new, like not a new way of booking. It’s as if they’re booking on regular online booking, but it’s just direct them with a pre selected doctor. And so, I think they’re also really familiar with the system already, and it’s easier for the patient, and both MOAs through using this feature.
Jordan 14:13
It’s actually nice as well like, now that you mention it, being like the booking. It’s- it’s good in a sense, because it is similar, but they don’t actually have to have their care card, or their date of birth, and everything right in front of them because it is, I believe, embedded in the link or somehow something like that, so I think that attribute of it as well as because the minute they do get that email, they don’t need anything to act on it. They just need to physically go through the link and enter their pharmacy information. So, it’s not like they have to search up their pharmacy because if they type in like Shoppers Langley, it’ll start showing them all the shoppers in Langley, so there’s nothing really for the patient needing to prep to be able to use the link. It’s more or less when they receive the email. They’re kind of able to jump right on and book the appointment.
Kelly 14:52
Exactly. Ironically, it’s becoming- like specialist booking is becoming easier than regular booking as it’s prefilled, and you just pick a date that works for you. Clinics. If you guys are interested in taking specialist booking a try, please let us know, and we can get that set up for you. You can contact us at help@cortico.ca and we’ll see you in the next podcast. Thanks everyone.
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