DocPlanner:

DocPlanner is the world’s biggest healthcare platform (and the market leader in 13 countries), serving 90M patients and 280M healthcare professionals and processing over 22M appointments booked via the DocPlanner app monthly.

Their app combines the logic of a healthcare marketplace with EHR (Electronic Health Records) functionalities, allowing patients to schedule appointments and medical facilities to manage the visits easily.

DocPlanner had a very well-defined business vision: to increase the number of people using their app (both patients and medical professionals) and become the booking system of first choice in the markets they operate. 

The main challenge they face is that many medical clinics still utilize outdated, legacy Electronic Health Records systems and are reluctant to change. Although Docplanner can easily be integrated with many of these tools via API, there are EHRs on the market that are particularly hard to integrate. 

Even when clinics use the DocPlanner solution, they often keep their existing EHR in place, manually moving the data between systems, which requires a lot of manual labor and is prone to mistakes. Sometimes, they are forced to keep the old system due to the lack of certain local functionalities within the DocPlanner app.

These were their main scalability bottlenecks.

During the solution research, DocPlanner reached out to UiPath, a leading Robotic Process Automation platform. UiPath created a simple PoC of one automation and recommended Flobotics as a development partner.

From day one, we recognized the huge potential of bringing automation to DocPlanner, going beyond the assumptions made initially and DocPlanner and the UiPath team. The automation should be built as universally as possible (when it comes to the clinic networks, various EHRs, and multiple markets), allowing product scalability.

The goal was to fully integrate various types of EHRs/EMRs within the DocPlanner app, automatically moving and processing data.

The PoC designed by UiPath integrated only one Electronic Health Records system within one facility. We decided to keep the logic but rewrite the automation from scratch.

The RPA bot would now automatically extract data and tasks (such as scheduling new appointments) from the EHR and pass them to the DocPlanner app, performing various automated tasks along the way.

What data is being automatically migrated? Whatever is needed!:

• detailed patient data (personal info, Social Security Number, etc.)
• Patient’s insurance details
• Healthcare provider's data (clinics, clinicians, etc)
• detailed appointment info (location, service codes)
• Actions and tasks (scheduling, canceling, rescheduling, etc.)

After three weeks of development, we were ready to deploy the MVP in the first clinic network. Here is a sneak peek of how the automation works:

After the immediate success of the first automation, we began to scale it. We built an automation system that can be easily extended to:

• new/legacy EHR software used by the clinics,
• new facilities using the already integrated software,
• different geographic markets.

We have also been successfully adding new features to the system, such as:

• Automated patient data migration within all the apps connected to the system
• Supporting rescheduled and canceled visits
• One, universal dispatcher bot for many performer bots
• Support of new markets and language versions
• adding support for ad-hoc migration of data
• an exception system to notify clinic employees about various edge cases of patients/appointments that require their manual action 
• Automated or manual launch of the bots
• reporting and messaging in the native languages of supported markets (ES, PL, IT, PT-BR)
• RPA Supervisor Tool for bot monitoring and data visualization (Business Intelligence Dashboards)
• Automated system deployment for every new facility added to the system, so there is no need to engage the developer 

As of today, our RPA system provides interoperability between +10 different EHR systems (such as iClinic, mMedica, or Arzamed) in four different markets: Spain, Italy, Brazil, and Poland.

Clinicians and back-office workers need way less time to move patients’ data between systems, as they only handle the edge cases—more than 98% are processed automatically, with no mistakes.

From DocPlanner's business perspective, implementing RPA drove more users to the app, which meant more business and strengthening their position in the market.

As new clinics, software integrations, and markets are continuously being added to the network, the reach and capabilities of the Doclpanner app increase.

Thank you, DocPlanner, for your (ongoing) trust!