Now, I look outside and traffic appears to be back to pre-pandemic levels. Honestly, it probably got worse.

Though we know that some other countries are now raising warning flags again, I think we can say that we’re in the next phase. We’re now in a Post-Pandemic era of healthcare technology.

SeriousMD has always been a practice management app and EMR, ever since we started 7 years ago. SeriousMD can help you handle all your medical records across all your clinics, manage appointments, track billing with telemedicine features and more.

With the changing of the times again, you can truly utilize SeriousMD in a variety of ways to fit how you run your practice and adapt with your schedule. We’ve had great conversations (and first hand experiences) with doctors on how it’s being utilized all over the country.

We released the NowServing app months before the pandemic started (Jan 2020) with one of the goals being to help with follow-ups later in that year. We believe that the crazy traffic we (as patients) encountered to do a 5-minute follow-up consultation, was something technology can solve. All the while freeing up a valuable slot in your calendar for patients that urgently need to see you.

Right now, over 80% of doctors still utilize telemedicine, complimenting their in-clinic practice. Many utilize telemedicine for follow-ups already. We’re crying with tears of joy and ecstatic in seeing one of the goals come to fruition. I hope it has saved a lot of your time and your patients’ time.

I remember back then when I first heard feedback that Dr. <Confidential> could consistently finish clinic and make it back home to dinner with the family, which never happened before SeriousMD. That was definitely a core memory for me.

I’ve heard fun stories about using SeriousMD while doing rounds, which I shall not elaborate here.

Nowadays, I also hear how doctors are going on trips and still doing consultations or being able to charge patients halfway across the planet.

It’s definitely been a blast seeing the evolution of the medical practice and through your feedback, it gives us more insights on how we can continue to improve SeriousMD while helping your patients at the same time.

We’re excited to see what the future holds for healthcare in the Philippines. There’s so much more work to be done.

Anyway, that’s enough of story time, now let’s talk about some of the recent updates on SeriousMD.

There’s a bunch and here are some of the updates:

Custom Tag Pricing: You can now tag patients to have special pricing. For friends that you don’t want to charge full price or relatives that you don’t want to charge, it’s now possible. Give it a try!

Side by side view: Open a sidebar while inside SOAP on screens that are compatible. You can now pull up another profile or another note on the side to review while inside your current encounter.

Validation Code: If you send a document from SeriousMD thru your patient’s NowServing app, the generated file will have a validation code for extra security.

Named Watermark: Here’s a new watermark option that you can use. You can now enable this to show the patient’s name as the watermark adding another layer of security for your documents.

Medication Interactions: We’re currently testing a new tool to help you see drug interactions while you’re creating your prescription. Simply use the prescription as normal and click the Drug Interaction button.

MyFreeStyle Program: A new program was launched recently and can be found in the Programs area. Your patients can receive a free FreeStyle Libre sensor. Simply enroll to the program and issue a prescription with the FreeStyle Libre coupon attached. The patient will receive a message and the educational materials along with it.

Educational Materials: A strong doctor-patient relationship relies on effective communication, which involves various factors. Patients often express satisfaction and happiness with their doctor when they have a clear understanding of their condition and receive supplementary educational materials to further their knowledge after consultations.

These factors, combined with the proliferation of fake news out there, have prompted the development of the new Educational Materials module within SeriousMD. You can now save and easily share meaningful, relevant, and accurate content with your precious patients. Read more about it by clicking here.

All New Growth Charts: You can find it in Vitals under the Growth tab. The charts are based on the WHO Child Growth Standards Z-scores and percentile, so we can properly and accurately show age/sex specific growth charts for weight/height/BMI/head circumference as well as the newly added Weight for Length chart.

New Reports: To further enhance your tracking of your practice, you now have new reports added in your Reports area for keeping track of patients you’ve referred, keeping track of clinic visit demographics and so on.

There are a ton more but let’s end it there for now.

Healthcare and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

As a technology company, it was inevitable for us to finally get into this.

We’ve started experimenting with AI recently and it’s already live inside the NowServing app to help guide patients find the right specialty for their condition.

We know AI is a major “buzzword” nowadays and everyone is probably sick of hearing it by now but we do see the potential in it for healthcare.

Long term, it can be an invaluable assistant to you, from helping you do initial intake interviews, to handling other day-to-day activities, so you can maximize your efficiency and help more patients.

Side note: A separate team is exploring and working on this, so the features and enhancements for the platform is still business as usual. If you’d like to discuss your ideas, whether it’s training the AI for medical guidelines, to teaching it to suggest treatment options to shorten your data input and so on, just drop us a message. We’d love to discuss and throw ideas around about AI + Healthcare.

That’s it for now!

The SeriousMD and NowServing teams are working hard behind the scenes, around the clock on enhancements to existing features, all the while keeping services up and running.

As we all continue to adapt to this new normal, SeriousMD will continue to be your partner in your day-to-day medical practice.

Please keep supporting SeriousMD and please share SeriousMD to your fellow doctors!

If you have clarifications about using SeriousMD in the clinic or any of the features, feel free to schedule an online call or reply to this email or send us a message inside your SeriousMD account.

The post SeriousMD, NowServing and the Post-Pandemic World appeared first on SeriousMD Blog.

This update took longer for us as we had to recreate (again) the whole app to adapt to newer technologies available.

Pulling the curtains a little, internally, we call it the Post-Consultation Follow Up Workflow update, which is a mouthful, but essentially, this update would help you improve the process of how you schedule your patient’s next consultation with you.

One of our goals this year is to improve the continuity of care that your patient will receive. For this new update, we wanted to put a big focus on improving the follow up process and helping patients be reminded (and show up) for their consultation with you.

All New Follow-Up Process

We’ve added a new way to set follow up appointments, so patients are encouraged to confirm their appointments with you. You’ll also be able to receive payments as well for that follow up, if indicated.

On top of that, by being able to confirm their follow up, you’ll have a better idea of your schedule and you’ll be able to allot unconfirmed slots to patients that need your attention. Read more about it here.

SeriousMD started back then with a follow-up workflow that allowed you to just indicate the next follow up date. Times are again a-changin’.

Just as we adapted with you during the heights of the pandemic, SeriousMD is again adapting to the changing of the times and new behaviors.

Invite Patients to Book

Sometimes, you just need a way to send an invite to a potential patient to book an appointment with you. If the patient is not yet in your SeriousMD account, you can send them an invite directly from inside your SeriousMD account and they will receive an invite message to book an appointment with you.

Dashboard Update

This update to the dashboard is to better arrange/present information and have the flexibility to add relevant information in the future updates.

Minimum / Maximum Age Restriction

You can now set a minimum and/or maximum age for patients that book on your profile page. If you’re primarily seeing patients within a certain age group, you can now set it up in your account!

Patient Referral Enhancement

To further enhance the care the patient receives, we’ve added a new enhancement to the patient referral process. When referring a patient to another specialist, the patient now also receives the booking page link to invite them to book with the doctor.

We’ve also addressed some bugs and introduced a lot of other enhancements that are not going to be covered anymore on this blog post. More enhancements to this update are coming soon!

The start of 2023 has been a whirlwind for us to say the least. We’ve hit a lot of milestones but we know we also failed to hit one of our target updates from last year’s list. It’s taking some time to work through behind the scenes but we’ll be pushing out the next major update really soon!

Please keep supporting SeriousMD and please share SeriousMD to your fellow doctors!

The post Putting Focus on Continuity of Care appeared first on SeriousMD Blog.

In this next update, we are collaborating with the DOH’s efforts to improve anonymized epidemiological data from tele-medicine consultations.

The accuracy and reliability of the statistics will benefit with your aid in marking if your case is a diagnosed COVID-19 case after a tele-consultation. Rest assured that no personal information will be involved in this endeavor as we are only keeping track of counts.

Once this coming update is released, you will see a selection similar to the image above after a tele-consult session.

Simply select your answer and you’re done!

Once you save, it’s also automatically listed in your patient’s History tab, so you can refer back to it whenever you need to.

Another update that’s included in this release is to allow your to be able to send/attach files directly inside the messenger thread with your patient. Image thumbnails should also show a preview now.

The team is still deep in the trenches working on the Messenger overhaul/redesign, which is our next major update. It’s literally building a messenger app from the ground up.

The current messenger inside SeriousMD was built pre-COVID so the things it can do are pretty limited. That’s why we’re basically building a whole chat app inside SeriousMD. I hope to be able to provide some updates about it in the coming months.

That’s it for now! It’s almost the holidays and we’ll see if we can squeeze in 1 more surprise update before the year ends. Stay safe!

The post DOH + SeriousMD & NowServing appeared first on SeriousMD Blog.

This affects both Seriousmd.com and Nowserving.ph, so it will also affect bookings during those hours.

——-

When SeriousMD was released years ago, we focused on getting started with electronic medical records here in the Philippines with a dash of practice management.

For the following years, we’ve been working on improving multiple aspects of the app to make it a complete practice management platform.

There were still a lot of room for growth and we were preparing for version 2 and a patient app that would help with queueing… then the pandemic happened and we had to find ways to connect doctors using SeriousMD to their patients with practically no time.

With all those rushed things, a lot of things will fall in the cracks that are not considered in “ideal” workflows since they are not part of the original design, at all.

Our recent releases for the NowServing app were just the start of us finally having some breathing room to start working on improving and solidifying the workflows.

Today, we’re releasing the new clinic management update for SeriousMD Doctors.

This might look elementary and will look like just simple clinic settings, but this fundamentally changes a huge structural side of SeriousMD. This not only affects clinic settings, but it also affects the queue & calendar, which have been there ever since the beginning, as well as the more recent booking and online features linked to it, like billing and calls.

Previously, we had to make use of our clinics section and turn them into make shift “online” clinics where you had to use “Visit Types” in the app, which worked but was a bit confusing to set up.

Today, we’re removing that and really nailing it down to something that makes sense when setting up. You’ll also have some more control with how long you’d be able to guarantee responses to appointment requests, specific fees when when using the Paywall and more.

Here are just some of the things included in this update:

When you load your clinics section, you’ll see a new button for Clinic settings and you’ll be able to do the things below.

Automatically close online bookings for the day

Previously, you had to manually close your schedule so that bookings outside your clinic hours won’t go through.

Now, you can automatically set this and let the system handle it for you.

Add multiple paywall rates

You now have more control with fees for your paywall.

Dedicated online clinic feature

For solo practice accounts, you now have a dedicated online clinic setup. Those that still want to continue their current setup, can still use the current queue for those existing clinics and assign patients there.

Control your reply time guarantee for bookings

You currently have a 24 hour booking response time. With this update, you can now adjust it and set it to 48 hours if you prefer. It’s always best if your patients can get a response about their booking request earlier, though! We’ll probably add more options in the future.

Easily control which HMO’s you will accept for certain face to face consults and your online consultations

Those are just some of the enhancements included and there are more for you discover.

This is of course a major/required update for iOS.

It’s been a while since we released a required update as we try to minimize these types of updates as your sync won’t be able to work without updating first.

There are some more enhancements already lined up for this update. We just have to get this out and in your hands so we can start with adding the supplementary updates.

We’ve also started working on our next surprise major update and we can’t wait until we can share the news with all of you.

HINT: Messenger + _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The post Clinic Management Update appeared first on SeriousMD Blog.

If you’ve been using the NowServing app the past months, you might have noticed that it blinks and shows a white screen when you load the app initially. That means there’s another new update.

Yes, much like with SeriousMD, we have been pushing out improvements and new features to the NS app consistently.

Fast forward to today, we’re now releasing another major update to the NowServing app. Please update it from the App Store/Play Store first if you don’t have auto-update for apps turned on.

Due to all the new additions and enhancements, the previous design of the app is not as intuitive enough anymore. Finding information and performing transactions intuitively and efficiently felt like a struggle.

Also, we have other features coming up to make your life even easier, so we have to factor those in the app’s design as well.

The new Services section houses all the current (and future!) services that we can offer to your patients to aid in accommodating all their healthcare needs. That said, whenever you send Prescriptions or Lab Requests to your patients, they will be able to have an easier time to order medicines or generate a Hi-Precision discount coupon for their tests.

There are a lot more coming up, including a way to make it easier for doctors to communicate with patients and adding options to messaging.

That “feature” for your forms that you’ve been asking for? That’s also finally coming because of this release and yes, a big update to the NowServing directory is coming up as well.

We’ve worked hard to bring you this app and we’re continuing to work day in and day out on updates to better improve the app even through all the challenges of this pandemic.

Like we always say, NowServing is still a work in progress but you can rest assured, it’ll continue to keep improving.

We thank everyone for the constructive feedback, both from patients and doctors. Though we are oftentimes silent and working in the background, we do listen & learn from your feedback and will continue to improve our products and services.

We look forward to being able to help you, your patients and their families even more in the coming months.

Thank you for supporting us and be sure to let your friends know to join in and start making their clinic and virtual lives easier.

The best doctors in the country are already inside SeriousMD and NowServing.

Keep safe!

The post The NowServing App – Reimagined appeared first on SeriousMD Blog.

SeriousMD Doctors can now receive results from Hi-Precision directly inside their SeriousMD accounts.

Of course, we’d like to thank Hi-Precision for taking time to work with us and continuing to work with us to improve the integration further.

It is still a work in progress as there are still some real-world barriers that need to be overcome but so far, the reception has been great from both the doctors and their patients.

For a limited time, your patients will also be able to get 5% off their bill (imaging and blood tests) as long as they received the lab request inside the NowServing app. Simply complete and submit the booking form inside NowServing to Hi-Precision.

How does it work? Just send a lab request like usual to your patient via the NowServing app.

Here’s a step by step: Frequently Asked Questions and what your patient sees.

Hi-Precision Branches currently integrated.

The post Hi-Precision Integration Inside SeriousMD and NowServing appeared first on SeriousMD Blog.

We’ve already invested and we’re continuing to invest a lot of time / energy and resources in making the NowServing platform awesome and driving tons of new patients to it to find doctors using SeriousMD. We are doubling down to increase that even further moving forward.

There are some caveats though so we have to set some rules for the listings that are on the NowServing Doctors Directory.

Though a majority of patients are happy, we get avoidable support messages, reviews and complaints from patients.

This, in turn, will affect the doctors that are already benefiting from the NowServing directory because it affects growth, word of mouth, net promoter scores and basically the overall patient experience.

We care about you, our users and your patients, so moving forward, the following will have an effect on the ranking algorithm handling how profiles are shown and discovered on the NowServing directory for virtual consultations:

1. An emphasis on % response to appointment requests, % acceptance rate, response time, calls & billing

Basically the usage of the built-in features of SeriousMD, while giving patients a better overall experience when they send in an appointment request all the way to the end of their consultation.

Profiles that are not engaging with booking requests or have a lower score will be given a lower ranking and eventually, delisted from NowServing if completely non-responsive.

2. Complaints and messages about missed appointments will be reviewed accordingly

Here’s a sample that we just got:
“I have a scheduled virtual consultation with Dr. _______ today at 4pm. I was wondering why Doctor still hasn’t called me. It is past 4 already.” – Sent by patient at 7:30pm

Sometimes, this can be a misunderstanding. Sometimes, the doctor completely forgot. We’ll be investigating this accordingly to further optimize the experience, perhaps to even build other features to help. On the flip side, this is also applicable to patients so we are also building ways to protect you and ban specific patients.

3. Doctors that signed up only to get patient leads to direct to a competing platform

For those that signed up for SeriousMD to solely funnel patients to a competing or separate platform, SeriousMD/NowServing is not for you.

Once detected by the system, the profile will be delisted from the NowServing directory. Not only will they benefit from our efforts, their support issues only ends up with us, all the while, taking away opportunities from the actual doctors using SeriousMD.  

The NowServing platform is still a work in progress. 

We have a lot more planned to help bring in even more patients and improve visibility for everybody. A design overhaul is in the works and patient traffic from partnerships with other healthcare companies are also in the works.

We look forward to growing NowServing further to be at the forefront of Philippine healthcare, so we can continue to help patients connect with you and get the healthcare that they deserve.

Let’s continue to revolutionize how healthcare is provided in the country.  ✌

The post NowServing Directory Listings appeared first on SeriousMD Blog.

So, here’s a quick recap on some notable things in March. The rest are in the What’s New area and in the Email Newsletter

NowServing Patient Portal

Your patients are now able to access their records online via the NS Patient Portal. Just login or use the link they receive from you.

They can then do the calls while on the browser, check the prescriptions you’ve sent, book schedules and more.

Schedule Blocking

We released this initial update to let you block off selected dates. If your day is full, you can just click the toggle and it will block off the date for bookings.

There will be more improvements and enhancements for this feature moving forward to help you further optimize your scheduling process.

MediCard Verification Has Started

We’re starting with the next phase of our partnership with MediCard. Doctor verification has started and if you haven’t yet, please check here to see how to get started.

Once this stage is complete, we’ll be able to help you verify LOA’s that are submitted, for both Face to Face and Virtual consults.

A Focus on More Visibility

As there are more and more limits nowadays with the traditional ways of getting found by patients, we’ve started rolling out more ways to give more accurate information and send more, potential patients to your booking pages. We’ve started different strategies on different channels to get patients to discover your profiles as well. On a side note, those that want a basic website for added visibility, we’re starting a beta test for it as well at the moment.

As we are investing more on sending traffic your way, we’ll also have to optimize as to who are seen.

An algorithm is in place, so that historically unresponsive users will of course, not benefit from these efforts as it will just confuse patients and hurt the trust of the platform if they book and they don’t get a response.

That’s it for this recap, the rest will be in the monthly newsletter. Stay safe everyone! More to come!

The post March Updates – A Recap appeared first on SeriousMD Blog.

We’re very thankful for the thousands of people that sent us messages about how Now Serving has helped them and their families during the whole quarantine phase.

And of course, we’ve heard all the issues and complaints as well, which we dissected to conclusively identify what the real causes were.

Now Serving was primarily created back in January 2020 to aid with queueing.

This is to help patients know that it’s almost time for their appointment and they can head back to the clinic. Remember those days when we can freely queue in the clinic?

We were still improving the process in February and planning out releases for the whole year.

Fast forward 1 month later in March 2020, ECQ happened and we had to adapt Now Serving to be able to help aid doctors and their patients.

We practically had to slap on what we can to be able to make online appointments, messaging, notes, electronic prescription, billing and online calls work in a pre-existing app design to be able to release and help as soon as possible.

This is why a design overhaul was needed as soon as we had a bit of breathing room.

Now with all the experience and feedback we’ve gathered the past months, we’ve worked hard to bring you a new experience and we tested and worked with over a hundred patients directly trying to improve the design and experience.

Our first priority going into the redesign process was to be able to secure the patient’s account and stop patients from entering the wrong numbers when booking, which prevents the doctor from making the call while we end up being blamed.

We also needed to improve the calls as there are those with slower internet speeds that just cannot cope with video calls. We wanted to optimized and push call connectivity to it’s limits.

Another is to be able to handle multiple doctors and multiple patient profiles as seamlessly as possible.

Our work with the integrations (medicine delivery, labs etc), updates for filling up and signing forms are all factored in the design as well so it would be possible for us to start releasing these updates once the initial release is stable.

We’re excited to get the new version of Now Serving to all of you.

We know there’s always “birthing pains” with all new major versions but we are confident that it will be minimal. Once the patient is on the new app version with a verified profile, it should be smooth sailing from there.

We have so much planned for the coming year. We look forward to bringing you even bigger and better things in 2021.

Happy holidays everyone and stay safe!

The post Now Serving App Update appeared first on SeriousMD Blog.

I announced V2 well over a year ago.

We started completely working on it around mid 2019 and today, we’re finally able to release it.

We had to recreate the whole app from scratch, which was already a monster with over 5 years of consistent work already put inside it.

Then put on top of that, one stumbling block after another. From new Apple requirements, emergency implementations on the V1 of the SeriousMD app to cope with the pandemic and others.

We’re just glad we’re at this point now, it’s out in the wild, we’re ready to tweak it with the actual doctors and find low hanging bugs that we might have missed. We can also finally move forward and bring out a lot of our other ideas that we previously could not now that V2 is officially out for iOS and the web app.

What’s new?

If you’ve been using the web app since the pandemic began, you might have noticed that the SeriousMD app doesn’t look the same.

Now, they are very similar. Aside from the obvious design overhaul, you can now also accept your online bookings right from the app as well as send e-prescriptions and other documents to your patient’s Now Serving app directly.

There are a lot more changes behind the scenes to improve the experience, minor changes on the other pages that would make your life easier and more that we’ll let you discover on your own.

So what’s next?

I’ll tell you about that in the Newsletter so check out your email this long weekend.

We have the rest of the year planned out and I hope I can share a special announcement with your before the year ends.

For now, please enjoy SeriousMD Version 2 on your iOS devices and goodbye old friend. 

The post SeriousMD iOS Version 2 Is Out appeared first on SeriousMD Blog.