Medical Appointment Scheduling Systems Synchronization

Client

A digital networking and booking service
that empowers patients and doctors to better connect

Industry

Healthcare

Services

Intelligent Automation

Tech

Python, Selenium + AutoIt, CV (computer vision) library

Challenge

The advent of multiple medical appointment scheduling platforms has drastically improved healthcare experience for medical staff, healthcare providers, and patients, simplifying the entire process of booking a doctor’s appointment and maximizing utilization of the available resources. However, one problem still remains. Using different unsynchronized EMRs (electronic medical record systems) for scheduling appointments, doctors have to manually enter appointment data in all of them so that patients can get an accurate view of available time slots and scheduled visits no matter what system they use. As a result, too much time is wasted on routine work, which is rather frustrating for doctors. To that end, the client asked us to come up with an automation healthcare solution to provide two-way synchronization between their booking service and the eCW (eClinicalWorks) platform which is the most popular EMR among clinicians.

We took on the following challenges:

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Create RPA solution to synchronize appointment scheduling between the booking service and eCW

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Integrate doctors’ schedules into both EMRs

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Scrape the data on scheduled appointments from the eCW website

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Fetch the data on doctors' timetables from the eCW desktop app

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Populate the eCW timetables with appointment data extracted from the booking service

Solution

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An RPA solution that automatically synchronizes patient appointment data between the booking service and eCW EMRs

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A dynamic queue of script executions implemented in Python, which allows executing tasks synchronously

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The solution consists of a web scraping tool and eCW desktop application interactions

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The web scraping tool is responsible for extracting data from the eCW website and pushing data to the client's API

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Integration with the eCW desktop app to fetch timetable data

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Populating the eCW system with appointment data pulled from the client's API

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The RPA solution was selected as the simplest and most cost-efficient way to meet the challenge. It allows working with the blackbox (eCW) without having to change its source code or pay fees for using the eCW API to communicate with the system

Medical Appointment Scheduling Systems Synchronization case study

Impact

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Our RPA solution has helped the client automate the synchronization of data between their booking service and eCW, thereby adding consistency to patient scheduling

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Synchronization is working fast and smoothly without human interaction and hence, errors

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Clinicians are freed up from spending their precious time on entering data

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The solution helps avoid double-booking and reduces the chance of patients having to cancel the appointment because of a time conflict caused by human error

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Our RPA solution was a huge cost saving for the project as the client didn't need to hire highly expensive eCW developers or pay fees for eCW API