App demo
Northgate PracticeNorthgate Dental Practice, Boise
Waiting on you
What you do instead of ringing at eight: check what is waiting on an answer from you. The proposed appointment lapses on Monday at 12:00 PM — after that the slot goes to somebody else.
- In the hands of
- Patient with a check-up appointment
- Shown on
- iOS — title centred, swipe bar below
- Replaces
- Replaces the 08:00 call that never gets through, the appointment card in the wallet and the trip to the desk just to ask about a repeat prescription. The desk phone rings less often while four people stand in front of it.
Everything in this demo is laid out and none of it acts: buttons only report that they have no effect in the demo, checkboxes are fixed, input fields lead nowhere. Nothing is stored, sent or fetched.
How Awelior would approach this project
Northgate Dental Practice, Boise is invented — the way it is built is not. None of this is work delivered for a client. It is the shape we would give such a project — with the same depth, but without a client who would have to answer for it.
Where it starts
At Northgate Dental Practice everything runs through the phone on reception: moving an appointment, a repeat prescription, a question about an invoice. At eight the line is engaged, and whoever gets through interrupts somebody who has a patient in the chair. The share of those calls that needs no clinical judgement at all is the larger one.
Decisions
A proposal is not yet an appointment
The practice offers a slot and holds it until a deadline. A freely bookable calendar would undercut treatment planning — which chair, how long, which assistant — and would be a promise nobody in the practice would back.
Documents never rest on the device
Every document is fetched afresh when it is opened. Without a screen lock the app will not open at all, and after fifteen idle minutes it signs out. A treatment plan sitting in device storage sits on a train, in a lost property office and, at worst, with somebody else.
On failure the app would rather show nothing
If the request fails, the list stays as it was and the document stays closed. With papers from a medical practice, half-loaded or out-of-date content is worse than an error message.
Deliberately left outNo findings, no diagnoses, no medication list — and no free-text box for symptoms. What an app never displays it cannot lose; and if something hurts, a phone call is the faster route and a form is the wrong one.
What is in it
- Screens
- 5
- Tabs
- 4
- Content blocks
- 15
- Languages
- 4
Navigation responds, including the route from the overview into the documents and back. The appointment reply, the prescription form and the message box are fully rendered and inert; the four states have a view of their own.
How it would go on
Connection to the practice management system
Appointments, requests and invoices live there. Two calendars side by side are worse than one — and this connection decides the cost and the feasibility of the whole undertaking.
Who is at the other end
The account has to belong to the patient and not to a handset. How it is issued, what applies for children and for people under guardianship, and how it is withdrawn again, belongs at the start.
Responsibility for the data
Record of processing activities, a processing agreement with the supplier, deletion periods — and the question of what the practice does when a patient loses her phone.
An app like this for your business?
Northgate Practice is invented — the fit is not. Apps come about exactly this way: from the routes that already exist in a business, only without the paper in between.
Sample app by Awelior. Invented business, invented data, nothing stored.