Case Study: Scheduling Application
How can technology serve over 4 million expectant parents each year?
Multiple departments in a hospital support an expectant mother throughout the pregnancy and birthing process. For starters, expectant mothers need to shop for the facility that is right for them. Once they've found it, there are many options for classes and tours that equip them for pregnancy, delivery, and parenthood.
With so many births each year, it is easy to picture the number of hours spent on the phone with people to schedule, reschedule, and cancel birthing tours and classes.
We were approached to develop a self-service online system that allows expectant mothers to schedule and manage relevant birthing tours and classes on their own.
"Can I take care of this myself?"
The human touch is very important in a journey as intimate as the birthing process. Rather than developing technology that would take the place of a thoughtful and experienced professional, our goal was to free up that professional to spend more time on the quality of the experience for expectant mothers.
We spent quite a bit of time understanding the people and processes that were actively supporting class and tour registrations. Here's some of what we've learned and built into the system.
- Qualify Learners: Asking some simple questions during registration helps filter irrelevant options, thus simplifying the process of picking relevant classes and tours.
- Scheduling Should Be Flexible: Everyone who has had to move or miss a meeting understands that life sometimes requires us to change our plans. This system needs to give expectant mothers the ability to schedule, reschedule, reschedule again, and maybe even cancel a class or tour in the most convenient and quickest way.
- Make It Easy to Pay: People have preferences on how they pay for things. This system needs to account for expectant mothers' preferences around where and how they pay for their registrations.
- Helpful Reminders: The period during pregnancy and birthing is full of appointments. This system needs to proactively reach out to expectant mothers and remind them of their registration so that they can plan to attend or reschedule.
The Outcome... "I loved it!" ~ expectant mother / system user
Our client was able to use technology to deliver a more convenient experience for expectant mothers, while also transforming staff time spent on administrative tasks into time spent on core business functions.
- Resource savings were realized through time furnished back to employees who manually managed this scheduling process.
- Cost savings will be realized through a more efficient fixed costing model.
- Convenience for expectant mothers was delivered by allowing them to manage this aspect of their birthing experience with a click of a button.
- Conflict reduction was made for the client and system users as the solution qualifies each user and class selection to prevent well-known sources of conflicts.
Do you have questions about this case study?
Would you like to talk with our engineers about how our application development capability could serve you?