Project Idea - Appointment Restful service.
I see lots of requests at various times for projects that do appointment reminders and the like.
I think that one feature that many vets would love to see implemented is the ability to send a reminder to clients prior to an appointment or even a confirmation email.
The difficulty is automation so I wondered if we should consider implementing a endpoint to allow limited api access via RESTservice that via POST could update various internal functions.
I am mainly thinking about Appointment confirmation emails. Embedding in those emails a post request that confirms the appointment when clicked.
This would of course depend on the HTML email project being funded and developed.
We could open the service on a different port and point it at a different path. It could be implemented within the current application accessed on a different port. pointing to a different endpoint or in a entirely seperate war I think.
Once you have such a service it does open a bit of a pandora's box but I know that other packages are heading down this road and advertising the feature heavily.
Thoughts?
Re: Project Idea - Appointment Restful service.
Ben - having just been developing the macro to generate the text for an SMS appointment reminder, I can see various problems in automating appointment reminders such as:
At the moment I am of the view that any automatic system would be complicated and it it best to stay with a manual system - you select the appointment and press the SMS or Email buttons and enter the appropriate macro - smsae for the english speakers, smsac for the cantonese.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Project Idea - Appointment Restful service.
Let me break that down
1. We already make the decision regarding sms/email/or post with reminders by flagging a contact - no reason this cant be done with appointments
2. When to send - this one is easy there are literally thousands of marketing articles based around this - if you have ever done an email marketting campaign then you can actually see when people read mail via callbacks - but this can be configured practice by practice to get the best response rate. Lets be honest even doing it manually you are already doing this.
Smart phone usage is on the rise massively really only a small subset of the baby boomer generation are resisting its inevitable saturation.
3. Regarding language that is a very locale based problem. and to be honest it should be easily configurable by creating a custom customer field.
4. Having a staff member sit and press a button or 5 40-50 times each day is ludicrous. You might as well employ a chimp rather than a vet nurse. They are better off answering the phone and taking new appointments rather than confirming existing ones - if I had to pay someone to do it manually I would take the missed appointments rather than doing it that way.
The system I am talking about is not just about appointments tho - it could be utilized in so many ways
1 . Email reminders for vaccinations could contain restful links to let a client immediately request an appointment. Additionally utilizing shema.org links to create content rich emails
2. You can create email comfirmation links for everything. When a staff member enters a new clients email address - sure we can internally validate it but that doesnt confirm the client gave you the right address - validation might mean hundreds of dollars in business are not missed because clients dont get timely information.
3. Endpoints like this can also serve as much more advanced endpoints for external applications
I mean sending a url hit to
http://myinstance.com:port/appointment/confirm?id=123&value=yes
is relatively simply but there are more advance applications.
Two way sms systems are already being used "manually" do reminder people and take confirmations...but they are inheritantly expensive compared to email. not that they are not better or worse.
Ben
Re: Project Idea - Appointment Restful service.
Ben - you are correct - I am an early baby boomer (1947) and smart phones are beyond me - if it does not have a 17" screen and a full keyboard, then forget it ;-)
It would be sexy to have a system that would automatically send out an sms or email to customers who have asked for appointment reminders - and to have a confirmation URL.
As well as the RESTful interface, I think one needs the following bits:
Regards, Tim G
Re: Project Idea - Appointment Restful service.
There's currently an appointment reminders project that deals with SMS here: SMS Appointment Reminders (Automatic).
I don't think its generated any interest to date, so it may be worth re-specifying to include:
This would enable SMS and email appointment reminders to include URLs. With some extension function support you could generate an encoded URL containing the appointment id.
The Prefilled emails from document templates project would extend this support to statement and reminder emails.
You would then be free to implement whatever service you like to act on users clicking on those URLS.