This week we went live with a medical office application (built in Rails) that I’ve been working on for a few months. It is focused on patient communications (not records) and is designed to replace lots of phone-message interactions that leave patients and staff frustrated.

The site handles requests for appointments, referrals, prescription refills, and records transfers, as well as payments. We are providing this as a hosted solution, initially for medical practices but quickly expanding to address other service businesses.

The live site is www.doyleparkfamilymedicine.com. Feel free to browse, but don’t fill in a request form unless you’re a patient there!

There’s a sizable admin site that is not, of course, publicly visible. This is where the staff processes the requests that patients submit on the site. It tracks the history of each request and sorts them into queues for the appropriate staff person.

If you know a service business that is interested in having a site like this, with a much smaller up-front cost than has previously been possible, please send them my way.