Introduction
Your pharmacy’s website is the ideal channel to help manage flu vaccination appointments. Done correctly, your website can securely help to schedule, record consent, and gather personal information efficiently and remotely.
Brought to you by the IPU and developed by Refill Assistant, the Pharmacy Services Booking Engine helps you to implement an online appointment booking service quickly and easily. It is a self-service tool for patients to schedule an appointment, provide personal information, authorise to be contacted and agree to the service specific consent in question, for example a flu vaccination injection for adults.
Easy to Install on any Website
The booking engine is easy to install on any website. Whoever adds content to your website can follow an easy guide to paste 2 lines of text into the website.
It can be set-up to appear as a book appointment button, image, or link; styled according to your brand and positioned anywhere on your website. Once complete, updates are automatic and no further web changes are needed.
From your website, patients will see the appointment types you provide and be able to book available time slots to attend for vaccinations, or consultations. Vaccination specific consents are built into the tool as well as contact consent.
The booking engine supports multi-location pharmacies, allowing different services or schedules, or availability to be configured for each pharmacy. The same simple procedure is followed to install the booking engine on a multi-location website.
Patient Experience when Booking Online
With the click of a button, the patient goes through simple steps where they select an appointment e.g. flu vaccination, read and agree they understand the vaccine information, pick a time slot, and give the service specific consent.
Note: the patient stays on your website.
On selecting an appointment type, the patient must agree that they have read and understand all the information about the service before being allowed to progress with the booking.
The IPU has provided the default content for vaccinations.
The next step is to select the date and the appointment time.
Previously booked appointment times and dates will not be displayed and cannot be selected by the patient.
After selecting an appointment time, the patient enters their personal details – name, PPSN and mobile number as well as agreeing to be contacted about the appointment.
The PPSN field can be configured as a required or non-visible field. For flu, it is useful to make the PPSN a required field.
Once personal details have been entered, the patient must provide consent to the specific service being provide i.e. flu vaccination.
The default consent text has been provided by the IPU.
Once consent is given, the patient can click the Book an Appointment button to complete the booking.
On completion, the patient will receive an on-screen and SMS text confirmation with the appointment and pharmacy contact details.
Pharmacy Workflow
The booking engine is delivered with an associated online pharmacy portal to securely view and manage appointments.
When pharmacy staff log into the pharmacy portal, they have access to the Appointments tab which lists the booked appointments. The pharmacy can filter the dashboard view (1) to look at appointments for today, next week, 7 days etc.
The dashboard also includes a way to review (2) the booking engine configuration before inserting into your website using the set-up instructions (3).
On clicking View (4), the appointment details screen appears.
The appointment details screen displays personal information (1) including a record of the specific, contemporaneous consent given and the appointment history (3).
At the time of writing, the action buttons (2) enable the pharmacist to
- Add internal notes about the appointment.
- Send additional text messages to the patient.
- Cancel the appointment.
All Pharmacy Services are Supported
The pharmacy can set-up and use the booking engine to manage bookings for all its services. It is possible to configure
- Pharmacy services available to be booked
- Appointment availability
- Appointment duration
- Service description
- Consent text
So, for example, a 30-minute flu vaccination could be set-up for Mondays and Wednesdays between 10am and 3pm whereas a 15 minute cholesterol test could be set-up for Fridays.
Interested?
IPU Member Price: €100 set up + €50/month. Please enter coupon code FLU to get the IPU member discount.
Irish Pharmacy Union
