Clinicbook Blog

Last night we added doctor management for Clinic administrators. You can now find doctors listed in our database and add them to your clinic’s listing.

This is another feature, along with public user accounts and reviews, which has been created in preparation for our online appointment booking in October.
We want you to be able to find a clinic that is convenient, see what other patients think of it from their reviews, check the schedule for the doctors and book a confirmed appointment online without ever having to pick up a telephone.

We’re currently creating partnerships with 25 Dentists in Vancouver in preparation for our pilot launch coming this fall. We still have some spaces available for dentists on the pilot project. If you’re an interested dentist, please contact us.

Keep in mind, every service we provide to the public on clinicbook is free of charge. Our goal is to improve the health-care process.

Last week Clinicbook was selected as part of a new UBC initiative to travel to Plug and Play’s tech center in Silicon Valley and present to a panel of Venture Capitalists. We’ll be traveling down with UBC’s President as well as the Dean of Applied Science, Dean of UBC’s Sauder School of Business and 5 other UBC student or Alumni founded companies.

Our company along with the 5 others making the trip were selected to represent the University’s entrepreneurs out of a pool of 56 companies who applied. My two co-founders, Joel Matsumoto and Winnie Lai are recent UBC graduates and I also attended UBC for several years before working full-time on Clinicbook.

We’re pretty pumped to be traveling down to the Bay area and spreading the word about Clinicbook as well as hopefully getting some valuable feedback from many of the local web gurus. You can read more about the opportunity on Techvibes

Google has recently added street view functionality to their Google Maps API and we’ve taken advantage of that. Clinicbook’s clinic pages now allow users to use street view to check out what the clinic looks like and look for familiar landmarks to help them find it.

To check street view, click on the clinic icon on the map on any clinic page like this page for Dr. Sam Winter

Street View on Clinicbook

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve now added reviews to clinicbook! The past week we’ve been working on public user accounts and review functionality and we just went live with it last night. You can now have your very own clinicbook account and post reviews to let others know what you think of a particular clinic or doctor.

We’ve also integrated clinicbook with “facebook connect” so, with one click, you can use your facebook login to connect to clinicbook instead of having to create a new account.

Reviewing clinics will help other people in your community find the best possible health-care. We’re really looking forward to creating a health-care community and we hope you share our vision so get our there and start reviewing!

You can create a new account or connect using facebook by going here

For the past month we’ve been working on creating an interface for clinic staff to claim and edit their information. We added these new features early this morning and they’re live and ready to use.

If you are a clinic owner or staff member and you haven’t already claimed your listing, we encourage you to do so! You can find and claim your clinic by visiting this page: www.clinicbook.ca/register/services

If you would like more information on the benefits of signing up, click here.

We’ve incorporated a telephone verification system which helps insure that you’re authorized to be editing the clinics information by calling the clinics number and reporting a 4 digit pin which is then used to finalize your account. After this is complete you are able to edit your information such as hours of operation, services provided and more.

Please drop us an email at info@clinicbook.ca if you come across any bugs in the new system. We’ll get to them as quickly as possible.

As for what’s coming next, we’re going to be adding more medical clinics to the search directory. About 30,000 more in fact. We’ll need your help to confirm which clinics are just family practice and which take walk-ins so please don’t hesitate to flag them if you recognize incorrect information (use the link on their listing). We also will be adding an SSL Certificate to the clinic admin interface.

Don’t forget, you can also email us with suggestions and requests for new features!

We are looking for a full-time developer and/or co-op developer to join the Clinicbook team immediately.

Position Identification:
Position – Developer
Location - Downtown Vancouver, BC
Company – Clinical Media Ltd.

Job Summary:
The Selected individual will be taking on a key role in developing a new feature of Clinical Media’s main product: Clinicbook. The individual will be involved in most aspects of the development process including interface design, database design and testing. The development process is under some time constraints and the individual will be required to meet deadlines for certain development milestones of the project.

Company Status:
Clinical Media is a technology based startup company developing a health-care website that will incorporate online health-care tools for the public and for health-care providers. We currently have a team of 3 full-time individuals. As an early employee in a tech startup there are great opportunities for taking leading roles in the company as it grows.

Project Related Competencies:

• Previous Experience with Ruby on Rails
• Comfortable with Relational Database design particularly with MySQL
• Can design user interfaces and can handle basic HTML/CSS tasks an asset
• Is versatile and enjoys the freedom and excitement of working in a small company
• Comfortable working with linux based systems

If you see yourself as this developer, send your resume to jobs@clinicbook.ca

How inconvenient was it to book your last appointment with your dentist?  First having to find your dentist’s phone number, dialing that number, staring at the ceiling for several minutes while you’re on hold as the receptionist is busy on the line and then spending 5 minutes going back and forth between the receptionist on an available time that fits your schedule.  How time consuming is that?  Or worse, the appointment that you made 6 months ago at your last dental visit doesn’t work out with your schedule after all and you have to end up cancelling it.

Bottom line is : making appointments over the phone is tedious and time consuming.  According to reports, over 77% of patients want to book appointments online.  Since people want it, Clinicbook is going make it.

Clinicbook is launching an online dental appointment booking service in the fall of 2010 for dental offices in Greater Vancouver.  Like in OpenTable / Expedia-style, users will be able to search and view all appointment openings, and select the one that fits best with their schedule.   While your dental office is open from 9am to 5pm, Clinicbook is available 24/7 so you can make appointments whenever you want.

If you’re a new to town or don’t have a dentist, no problem! Clinicbook offers dentist reviews that allow you to pick the most suited dentist.  And of course all these great features to our users.

The Clinicbook team is working hard to build a easy-to-use appointment booking system.  We want to hear your thoughts, so feel free to leave us a comment.

If you are a dentist, you should sign up with us and get happy customers coming your way:

In medical school we learn that 80% of diagnosing problems depends on the history i.e questioning the patient.  We need to know what is happening now as well as what has happened in the past.

Top of the list are symptoms, time frame and relevant past history.  Start off telling the doctor about your main symptom or complaint. Then add how long it has been going on and whether you have ever had similar symptoms before.

It is a lot more useful to say that you have a constant very sore throat than to guess that you have Strep throat.  If you did have Strep throat before and it feels the same add that after describing the symptom and how long it has been going on.

Of course the history for many issues is a lot more complicated but it is amazing how long it can take for some people to get around to telling the doctor these three simple points.  If you start with these simple points and give the doctor a clear brief description you will be getting off to a good start.

This is the official blog of Clinicbook.   The Clinicbook team will be posting updates about developments as well as posting health-related articles. Please feel free to post any comments or suggestions you may have using the comment box under each post.   We also have a RSS feed that you can subscribe to.