Patients tell you early when they cannot come, book when the appointment is due, and come back when they need to rather than when the diary says. Nobody buys a session to get there.
THE PROBLEM
Too much booked capacity goes unused
It goes in three places, and none of them needs a new clinic to win back.
- Appointments cancelled too late to fill
- At Imperial College Healthcare, 150,000 late cancellations came inside 48 hours.
- Follow-ups booked by the calendar
- Reviews at three, six and twelve months fill clinics whether or not the patient needs one.
- Clinics carrying less than they could
- Templates are set once, usually without data on how much a clinic can take.
SCHEDULING SUITE
Patients book once it is due
Scheduling Suite invites the patient when the booking window opens, so nobody books a year ahead on a guess.
FROM THE PODCAST
What Imperial did to unlock capacity
Milica Stjepanovic, Deputy Divisional Director of Operations at Imperial College Healthcare, talks to our CEO Tom Whicher about choice booking and the gap between what was booked and what was attended.
SMART CENTRE
Your booking team makes the calls worth making
No team can ring everybody. Once communications is running, Smart Centre ranks who to ring first and Voice Agents take the routine calls.
Clinic Optimiser and DNA Prediction
Clinic Optimiser works out how much more a clinic can carry. DNA Prediction ranks patients by how likely they are to miss.
Voice Agents
An automated caller answers and makes routine booking and rebooking calls, in the patient's own language.
The ranking shows where to start
Your team rings the patients most likely to miss first, messages the others again, and sees which clinic can take a little more.
ACROSS A SYSTEM
A freed slot goes to whoever says yes first
Waiting is rarely even across sites. Our platform asks patients what they could get to, so the answer is theirs rather than a guess on a spreadsheet.
Ask what patients can get to
Two-way messaging asks whether a patient could travel, be seen at another site or take a different day, and the answers come back in one place.
Offer the gap
When a slot frees up, the offer goes out and the first to say yes takes it, without anyone working down a list.
Book each yes
DrDoctor books each yes, and the answers that need a person go to the team.
PATHWAY TRANSFORMATION
Reviews when patients need them
Pathway Transformation brings forms, PIFU and automated write-back, so what a patient reports decides when they are seen. Patients who do not need a slot keep a route back.
PEER REVIEWED
New appointments rose seven times over
A peer-reviewed evaluation of rheumatology at Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust covers January 2019 to December 2024. DrDoctor is one of two named technology providers in the paper.
WHEN PLANS CHANGE
Changes arrive in time to reuse the slot
When a consultant is off or a list moves, patients change or cancel from the message itself.
The calls that stop
At Homerton, basic rescheduling avoided 5,500 phone calls that would otherwise have reached the team.
Slots that come back
A cancellation two weeks out can be filled. The same cancellation on the morning usually cannot.
Your team get a rest
Routine rebooking runs first. The clash, or the patient who needs a person, still comes to the team in a work list.