Online booking system for meetings with the doctor

— We think you are assigned to one and the same doctor at every visit — someone you recognize and who knows you. It provides continuity and creates security through all stages of life.

Task

Our client is a medical center in Sweden (the project is under the NDAs), specializing in general medicine with around 20,000 listed patients. Before the project started, appointment booking was inconvenient and time-consuming. The patient needed to come in person and provide their physical ID, and the assistant put them into the queue. After that, the patient had to wait until the doctor accepted their appointment.

The main goal was to streamline and quicken the booking process and shorten patient waiting time. The tasks also included creating a user-friendly interface, designing a landing page for this system, developing a solution for secure registration, and choosing a doctor for new patients.

Challenges

The project unfolded during the COVID-19 pandemic, which required the team to adapt swiftly to changing circumstances. One significant adjustment was the quick implementation of a vaccination appointment booking system. This necessitated frequent updates to the system's logic and workflows to align with constantly evolving health regulations and guidelines. Additionally, the pandemic influenced development timelines and communication, prompting the team to adopt more flexible and remote-friendly work practices.

Another significant hurdle involved the complex logic behind service listings and patient reassignment. Each patient's association with a specific clinic required a robust transfer management system. While crucial for ensuring accurate patient data and facilitating continuity of care, this feature demanded careful planning and implementation to handle the various scenarios and potential edge cases associated with patient transfers between clinics.

Solution

The range of services Stfalcon provides covers full-cycle product development and includes business analysis, user flows, user experience and user interface design, front-end development, backend development, manual testing, quality assurance, and implementation.

The Stfalcon team started working on the project by meeting with the client, outlining the project, and creating the user flows for all booking cases: for a new patient with or without kids, and for a registered patient with or without kids. It helped the team understand the project in detail to make a more accurate estimation.

The booking system includes a few steps:

• Login with banking ID
• Choosing a free time slot for a specific doctor
• Choosing an interpreter (since the system is oriented both at locals and foreigners)
• Payment with Klarna or use FreeCard

To simplify and speed up the developer’s work the design team created a flexible system, which allows adapting screens quickly from mobile to tablet and desktop.

The solution we developed allows patients to initiate reassignment requests to their clinic of choice directly through the platform. The system then facilitates the transfer of these requests to the target clinic and provides clear communication to the patient regarding the status of their request, including confirmation upon acceptance.

Technologies

We have implemented an easy and fast authorization in the application. The best option available was authorization through BankID. The whole procedure goes through the Swedish Banks and makes identifying the client’s identity easy. We used progressive JavaScript frameworks — Vue.js and implemented a plug-in to integrate the described authorization method in this application.

The backend processes REST API queries of the frontend part of the app. The app’s native data are stored in DBMS PostgreSQL; the data exchange is also realized with the client databases — DisplayScreen (Microsoft SQLServer) and J4 (Microsoft SQLServer). To ensure sensitive data safety, most patient information was stored in the client’s databases.

The backend realizes the integration with several third-party services:

• BankID
• Klarna
• Listing
• FreeCard

Online Communication with Doctors

Implementing video call functionality for the first time required significant effort in researching, selecting, and integrating a reliable and secure platform. This involved not only the technical aspects of video streaming and data encryption but also ensuring a user-friendly experience for both patients and doctors, especially those less familiar with telehealth technologies.

For flawless online communication between patients and doctors, we used Twilio service. It provides features like messages and video calls, appointment confirmations, and reminders. Online doctor appointments, as well as offline ones, also offer an opportunity to choose an interpreter, for non-natives.

Payments compensation

For this project, we integrated government compensation for medical bills. The system needed to accurately calculate the patient's out-of-pocket expenses, considering that the state covers costs above a specific threshold. This required implementing a dynamic calculation that could take into account individual patient data and predefined compensation limits.

To enable state-compensated payments, we used integration with the FreeCard service.

Vaccination booking

During the pandemic, the rapidly evolving situation meant that vaccine availability, eligibility criteria, and prioritization guidelines were constantly changing. While implementing the vaccination booking feature, our developers had to adapt quickly to these shifts, frequently updating the system's logic, and appointment scheduling algorithms.

Our agile development approach allowed us to quickly deploy updates and incorporate new requirements as they emerged.

As a result, the service can address multiple patient’s needs:

• Accessible, convenient, and simplified appointment booking
• Secure and streamlined payments
• Medical bills compensations
• Quick and simple vaccination booking
• Reduced waiting time due to streamlined booking and online consultations
• Improved communication with doctors.