Thanks for providing your expertise, really great article. You mentioned that there are other creative solutions applications that solve scheduling that don't involve APIs/Data standards. Can you please elaborate on what these are? Also really curious if you can please recommend other people or sources who are writing about this topic. Am keen to learn!
Probably a bit too late, but for the sake of posterity:
1) Some vendors may solve schedule/slot acquisition by screen scraping schedules and using that instead of integrations (this is probably more viable with GenAI but still requires a certain amount of semantic mapping).
2) It seems like some online doctors will just take all inbound appointments and then reschedule you to their schedule afterwards after you've already gone through onboarding where you cancellation risk is low.
3) If you just have unlimited virtual capacity, hypothetically speaking the need for an individual doctor is less prevalent and you could fill appointments with any physician available now.
", the dominant (and still existing) method to validate a patient’s identity for Epic’s MyChart is to mail a letter with a passcode to a patient’s known address. "
This isn't true anymore. Many (most?) MyCharts are using Experian to allow new patients to create accounts.
You mention the Slot resource for Epic, but that's only a Read. They're actually using an alternate availability pattern (the Argonaut STU3 Appointment $find)
You're right. Dominant is the wrong word. Prevalent I think is more correct re: patient identify validation. My point (hopefully not lost in clarity) is more that it is hard to expose that identity validation function without a pretty significant burden to the user. I think it's easier to assuage concerns via individual MyChart portals vs. one larger portal for all scheduling like a Zocdoc/Healthgrades/InQuicker.
Thanks for providing your expertise, really great article. You mentioned that there are other creative solutions applications that solve scheduling that don't involve APIs/Data standards. Can you please elaborate on what these are? Also really curious if you can please recommend other people or sources who are writing about this topic. Am keen to learn!
Hey,
Probably a bit too late, but for the sake of posterity:
1) Some vendors may solve schedule/slot acquisition by screen scraping schedules and using that instead of integrations (this is probably more viable with GenAI but still requires a certain amount of semantic mapping).
2) It seems like some online doctors will just take all inbound appointments and then reschedule you to their schedule afterwards after you've already gone through onboarding where you cancellation risk is low.
3) If you just have unlimited virtual capacity, hypothetically speaking the need for an individual doctor is less prevalent and you could fill appointments with any physician available now.
I appreciate you coming back to this after all these years! Happy New Year!
Nice write-up. Couple of minor nitpicky things
", the dominant (and still existing) method to validate a patient’s identity for Epic’s MyChart is to mail a letter with a passcode to a patient’s known address. "
This isn't true anymore. Many (most?) MyCharts are using Experian to allow new patients to create accounts.
You mention the Slot resource for Epic, but that's only a Read. They're actually using an alternate availability pattern (the Argonaut STU3 Appointment $find)
Good tip on the exposure on slots:
You're right. Dominant is the wrong word. Prevalent I think is more correct re: patient identify validation. My point (hopefully not lost in clarity) is more that it is hard to expose that identity validation function without a pretty significant burden to the user. I think it's easier to assuage concerns via individual MyChart portals vs. one larger portal for all scheduling like a Zocdoc/Healthgrades/InQuicker.