Online Appointment Setting for Doctors and Patients

SetMyAppointment.com is a hassle-free service that does not require any physicians to own their own website or pay hosting costs. Set My Appointment is a centralized service that allows physicians to take part of the advantages of hosting their own scheduling service online and allows all patients to visit one website for all of their appointment needs.

The mission is to provide a simple online service that can assist thousands of patients in setting up appointments with their physicians easily. Set My Appointment understand it is not easy for patients to take time out of their busy days to call their doctor's office and get put on hold, often only to be unsuccessful in obtaining a time slot they are comfortable with. Set My Appointment allows patients to sign up for free, select their doctor, and schedule an appointment at a time that won't have them dropping everything to seek a little help for their medical concerns.

I know there are few sites who are doing similar, however SetMyAppointment.com only works for physicians and patients, and what else, its free for all patients and currently free for all physicians. So why not use this service for your next doctor's appointment?

Another website which seems to be doing similar, but once you dig in you will find out the appointment setting is not in real time as for SetMyAppointment.com. WebMD do offer visitors to find a physician just like SetMyAppointment.com does, (https://www.setmyappointment.com/physician/find.aspx ) and then shows “appointment booking” link for each doctor into their database. From that point it seems they have everything figured out, however later I learned that WebMD takes visitor’s information and automatically fax the information and appointment request form to each physician’s office. So in that case, WebMD appointment setter is not real-time because the requester has to wait for physician’s office to confirm.

Whereas, SetMyAppointment.com uses physician’s appointment book and only offers open time slots, so there is not confusion.

SetMyAppointment.com is developed using Visual Studio.Net 2005 and the programming language it uses is C#. Right from the home page we can see the link for ‘Physician Finder’ this is a very useful tool / form for visitors to quickly lookup if their physicians are part of this website. https://www.setmyappointment.com/physician/find.aspx

The ‘Physician Finder’ page uses ASP.Net DropDowns for Country, State and Cities. Following are some cool features it adds, but most of the visitors might not be aware of it.

- It hides ‘Cities’ dropdown until you select a state from the ‘State’ dropdown.

- You might notice your page does not refresh, this is due to the fact this website is using ASP.Net AJAX. (http://www.asp.net/ajax/default.aspx?wwwaspnetrdirset=1 )

• Create next-generation interfaces with reusable AJAX components.
• Enhance existing pages using powerful AJAX controls with support for all modern browsers.
• Access remote services and data from the browser without tons of complicated script.
• Take advantage of the improved efficiency and ease of use in Visual Studio 2008, with its built-in support for ASP.NET AJAX, improved JavaScript support, and a new Web page designer interface.

- When a user clicks on the button ‘Click to start the search’ the code figures out if you have selected a state, or selected a specialty or typed in a keyword. Then based on which option is selected, the search can begin.

Since this form is using AJAX to help visitors know the search is in process, this form shows a yellow bar right above the ‘Search options’ heading. You might or might not see depending on how long this page takes to finish searching. Please see the screen shot for ‘Search Bar’.