Cathy S.
This is by far the WORST user…
This is by far the WORST user experience I have ever had with a scheduling system. 1. Dates are not clearly shown when searching for an appointment. So if you are looking for an appointment on the 23rd - it shows 3 dates at the top ie. 22-24 or 23-25. When you select a time it locks in your appointment on the 29th or some random date in or out of the date span listed at the top. So easy peasy just return to the previous selection screen, right? NO- you have to start all over and answer the 40 questions that got you to the selection screen! After doing this multiple times I finally scheduled an appointment. That’s when I found out one of the most important questions is ignored completely- so I had scheduled at a facility that currently does not have staff who can fulfill the service. I had even called the call center and their visibility was perhaps worse than mine. After ending up with 3 cancelled appointments at facilities that could not accommodate my service, I finally talked to a staff member who noted I should not have been able to schedule there as that is not a service they currently are staffed for. They were able to tell me the 4 facilities that could accommodate me - and what specific days at each facility. All 3 prior appointments made through open doctor did not match that criteria. To be clear open doctor offered 13 facilities and only 3 of those shown could accommodate me and only on specific days of the week. This last appointment, I drove to the facility to confirm after booking . 2. Open doctor overlooks key questions when showing available facilities and times, causing facilities to cancel erroneously booked appointments 3. Once a facility cancels an appointment it disappears from the portal. So when a user has moved it to their calendar, the appointment is still valid. 4. A text is sent to confirm the appointment (often multiple times). A cancellation text may or may not be sent, but on an entirely different thread(number) than the confirmation if it is sent at all. So the facility must call you directly or text you - or they don’t. If you log back in to the system there is no notification or record of you ever having an appointment. If you are a “customer”, you have no idea if the system is glitching or any idea you were cancelled. Let’s be honest, how often do you recheck a clunky system, after you have a text or multiple text confirmations that you have followed through on? Cancellations due to inappropriate scheduling are a complete failure with this system. 4. Staff users have no way to correct the errors. Call center employees don’t have access to staff schedules. Facility staff are very clear when they discontinued the service, but system doesn’t share info with call center staff. The scheduling system should talk to the employee scheduling system to prevent errors in customer scheduling due to lack of staff. 5. The lack of visibility to customer service staff means they cannot fix the scheduling problem as they have no more information than a first time user. So if the system is faulty, so is the customer service team who must try to fix the problems created by opendoctor. In the end, I drove to a facility. This business does not provide phone numbers to reach a “real person” in the facility, but uses an overseas call center who also cannot reach real people running the business. I have never in my life felt the need to drive to a facility to confirm my 4th (let alone my first) attempted appointment. This system is so horrible that I probably would have failed on my 4th - 10th attempt at scheduling as even the customer service staff repeatedly offered appointments at facilities with inappropriate staff for my service. Thanks to talking to a real staff member, I had the info I needed (that open doctor should have also had, but didn’t) so I am keeping my fingers crossed that this 5-6 hours (driving to facilities, online scheduling attempts, sorting issues like authorizations being attached to my record, etc.) lead to an actual appointment. 6. I nearly forgot when the erroneous facility cancels your appointment. The authorization does not stay with the patient record. The system creates a “new” order and does not move the “authorization” from the original order to the “new” order. In other words double the work for the customer service/ admin staff if they are not aware it was already authorized. As we in the US medical field know, nearly everything needs an authorization or referral prior to service commencing. So this is a major point of pain if you are considering purchasing this software