Eyeworld

10 Ophthalmology Business • September 2016 DermWarehouse, got the idea to use the program Zocdoc from his daughter. "She lived in New York at the time and was booking doctors' appointments through their website. She told us about it and said it was great," he said. Fast forward 4 years and Dr. Parks is happy with the system, although he's surprised that only about 10% of patients use it to book appointments. However, the prac- tice gets an average of about 70 new patients each month from Zocdoc. "When people are looking for a dermatologist, they go to Zocdoc and can see not only the closest doc to them but the many reviews written about the practice and the doctors," he said. When a patient uses Zocdoc to find local doctors, they create a username and password to set an appointment. The site shows var- ious participating doctors in their geographical area and offers several available appointment times. "We get the information sent to us on our end, and we check it every hour. We then load the appointment and the patient's information into our sched- ule and confirm the appointment," he said. That means that the office needs one person in charge of checking Zocdoc at least once an hour to load new appointments into the schedule and add the patient information into the system, Dr. Parks said. Some- times, they must call the patient if there's a problem with insurance; they also will make the typical re- minder calls. Dr. Parks sees online appoint- ment-setting software as a nice convenience for millennials who are glued to their mobile phones. "I think that since we have an older, established practice, many of our patients are older and are used to just calling," he said. Yet with time, he thinks more people will use the service. username and password to start the appointment-setting process. It looks to patients as if they are scheduling within his site, but they are actually on the Salon Transcripts server, he said. At this point, 18% of his patients use the online booking system, and he said that percentage is growing. The program enables staff to spend less time on the phone sched- uling consults because more patients are using online booking. Patients can also use the system to reschedule and cancel online. Dr. Kaplan advocates using a program that offers true online book- ing. "If you receive an email from a patient through a service checking to see if you actually have that time available, that's not true online book- ing. You need a system that syncs with your calendar," he said. Using one program to build volume Dermatologist Alan Parks, MD, Eastside Dermatology & Skin Care, Columbus, Ohio, and founder of Taking a clue from hair salons Not all great ideas for appointment management come from within health care. Plastic surgeon Jonathan Kaplan, MD, Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery, San Francisco, was look- ing for what he called true online booking, where patients could see appointment options in real time, based on the actual practice schedule. When he went to get a haircut in town, he was impressed by the ap- pointment software they were using, called Salon Transcripts (Orlando, Florida). "When I saw their system, I realized that it was true online book- ing," he said. "I wanted a software that synced with my calendar so that what the consumer saw online was representative of what our schedule showed was or was not available." When his patients go online to set an appointment, they follow a process not unlike that with other medical-focused software programs. They go to his website's contact page and are prompted to create a continued from page 8 On the other side: A closer look at one digital health platform Z ocdoc, which was founded in 2007, is a digital health marketplace available for medical and dental practices and health systems. The providers that use Zocdoc cover 60% of the U.S. population; oph- thalmologists and optometrists perform particularly well on the site because of the universal need for eyecare, said a company spokesperson. When a practice is considering the use of Zocdoc, the company checks to make sure the doctor is licensed and in good standing with medical boards. They also analyze the patient demand in the zip code and specialty level, to make sure that use of Zocdoc will benefit the practice. Executives at Zocdoc recommend that practices update their profile regularly because patients often review a variety of information about doc- tors before ever setting an appointment. This can include keeping hospital affiliations, insurances accepted, and real-time availability current. They also suggest that practices consider verified reviews. Zocdoc's closed-loop verified review system ensures that every patient review is written by an actual patient who made an appointment through Zocdoc and has seen the doctor. This provides a more representative sampling of the experience with a given office or doctor, they explained. Practices pay a subscription fee of about $300 a month to use Zocdoc.

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