PrestoMD—A Practical Way of Dealing with Patient Appointments

The last two years have been transformative for all of us. They have changed how we work, socialize, travel, etc. It was all due to the pandemic, the most extraordinary phenomenon the world has witnessed in generations. The health industry was, naturally, one of the hardest-hit sectors and had to reinvent how it operates.

Not knowing how to tackle this new beast called Covid-19 and how it behaved, we were being extra careful, erring on the side of caution. We did everything to avoid hospitals or dental clinics for the last two years unless it was something major: Regular checkups were postponed, and dental visits became anathema considering the risk they posed for the transmission of the disease.

Now that “the new normal” has set in, it is back to business as usual, albeit in a more hesitant way. The previously postponed visits are back on the schedule. However, you may be surprised to find out that getting a medical appointment may have become a little bit harder compared to the pre-pandemic experience you had. All that postponed demand has come to overwhelm the phone lines. There are still restrictions in place regarding the number of people allowed in closed spaces, which further complicates how the demand needs to be managed. It might get quite stressful for the front desk staff at a clinic as they try to maximize the number of patients served while struggling to accommodate requests from patients as to the timing of their appointments.

An online appointment app makes things easier for all the stakeholders involved in such situations. Such an app lets patients check the time slots available to them days and even weeks in advance and choose the most convenient slots for their schedules. Doctors and other health personnel get a chance to see the upcoming workload and plan ahead. The front desk staff can focus on tasks other than answering phone calls as they no longer have to help patients schedule their visits on the phone. An online medical appointment app also allows administrators of medical institutions to be on top of the incoming demand in the near future. Using this information, they can make better decisions on the procurement of supplies and leave requests from the personnel.

Bearing those points in mind, Code2 recently published the PrestoMD template, which lets users quickly access the basic functionality they expect to see from a medical appointment app. With PrestoMD, patients can easily pick a date and time slot on the calendar and make an appointment. It eliminates the need for patients to wait on the phone for minutes or deal with an answering machine. PrestoMD caters to the needs of the administrative staff at a medical institution as well. The template allows administrators to add and remove doctors and view the appointments made.

A clumsily executed appointment process gives rise to misunderstandings and double bookings, causing patient churn and loss of revenue. PrestoMD is the cure to that problem—a straightforward, easy-to-use alternative to lengthy phone calls and cumbersome appointment books kept in drawers.