Doctoranytime is a European-based healthcare marketplace, allowing patients to find and book appointments with the best doctor for them. Already a market leader in Greece and Belgium, they also serve users in Latin American countries like Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia. We speak to Baptiste Lilles, the brains behind doctoranytime’s Marketing, Growth, and Product.

The problem:

Calendar bugs and double bookings getting in the way of a smooth patient experience

Doctoranytime's platform offers doctors a SaaS where they can manage their appointments and connect with new patients. With this came the challenge to offer their users instant availability, all while doctors were scattered across their own different calendar providers.

Initially, doctoranytime integrated with calendar providers themselves, but maintenance quickly became a drain on resources better spent elsewhere on their platform. “It was time consuming for our engineering team to maintain reliable service and squash bugs,” explains Baptiste.

We had many complaints from doctors saying calendars were not syncing properly, so multiple patients booked the same slot. This was the worst-case scenario for us. At this point, we were creating a lot of conflict for the doctor and for the patient who was unable to see real-time availability.

Struggling with complaints from disappointed doctors and patients over appointments not synchronizing properly and causing double bookings, the team decided something needed to change.

The solution:

The most reliable calendar API on the market that patients, practitioners, and developers can rely on

The philosophy behind doctoranytime prioritizes simplicity and transparency, and this dictated how they wanted to achieve their scheduling goals.

“It was important for the calendar connection to be seamless to enable easy onboarding for our doctors,” explains Baptiste. Real-time availability and calendar support were essential pieces to doctoranytime’s mission to connect patients with doctors for smoother telehealth experiences. “We’ve been working on our doctor-facing UI/UX for many years, and we have a big team of consultants that help doctors digitize their workflows. Many doctors looking to start out in telehealth still use paper calendars, and the switch to digital is saving them time and providing everyone with a better experience.”

While being essential to the functioning of doctoranytime’s platform, calendars are inherently disconnected, and their availability needs to be centralized.

We offer doctors our own calendar on doctoranytime, but we also wanted to offer them the capability to integrate with third party calendars for everyone to ensure everyone using the platform can see real-time availability.

The team was acutely aware that calendars are ever-evolving things that change minute-by-minute. “We knew it was our goal to offer real-time availability for our users, and to allow them to book, cancel, reschedule, and modify appointments within our own platform.” If they were to take users away from their own platform to book appointments, they risked user drop-off.

This is why Cronofy’s White Label API was the right solution for doctoranytime. Seamlessly integrated within their platform, it gave the engineering team the flexibility to create a scheduling interface that looked and felt native to their application, all while leaving Cronofy’s Sync Engine to do the hard work of establishing and maintaining connections between doctors’ calendars, and monitoring for any changes to availability.

How it works:

Doctors authorize Cronofy once as an intermediary, which then manages OAuth for all supported calendar services. This is a massive time-saver for developers, who no longer need to build and maintain separate integrations for each provider.

“Switching to Cronofy enabled us to reduce friction for patients looking to book appointments with accurate doctor availability. It was a non-negotiable for us to avoid double bookings and disappointed patients.”

Our engineering team integrates third-party vendors into our application, and it’s obvious that they always prefer vendors like Cronofy with clear API documentation and information on reliability.

Setting Cronofy API’s reliability apart from other vendors on the market is a 99.99% uptime service commitment, as part of the Cronofy API Service Level Agreement.

“The integration with Cronofy is very seamless. Our doctors can now connect their calendars in just a few clicks, and display their real-time availability, making this part of onboarding them onto our platform easy.”

The result:

Taking bold steps on the path to becoming a healthcare super-app by freeing up developer resources

“Pricing, documentation for developer teams, and reliability were very important for us when choosing our vendor,” explains Baptiste. “We are offering this availability feature free of charge for our doctors to improve the booking experience, so Cronofy having competitive pricing was a key consideration. We wanted a vendor that could scale with.” Pricing for Cronofy’s API comes in tiers suitable for various organization sizes, and a fair pricing model alongside discounts for startups makes the API a long-term solution to scheduling headaches.

We didn’t want doctors’ calendars to be our primary focus. Thanks to this integration, our engineering team is saving time and focusing on what really matters for us – the patient and user experience challenge. We’ve reduced user friction and increased the quality of our product.

Now, doctoranytime is focusing in on differentiating their offering to continue their trajectory of becoming a market leading telehealth provider. “Over the last few years, we’ve grown our so-called healthcare marketplace towards a more B2C-oriented solution, including an advanced review system to see and compare all reliable information about doctors,” reflects Baptiste. “We’ve been expanding, as well as creating a 24/7 medical chat, where as a patient, I can go and chat with both an internal and external network of doctors.”

With a goal to simplify healthcare management, they now aspire to become a super-app for patients. “The next step for us is to allow patients to see their medical history, files, and chats with doctors, as well as allowing them to access instant care from primary care practitioners to resolve everyday issues. We’re looking to build a seamless experience where users can switch from a chat interface to a video consultation if needed. They should also have the ability to renew their prescriptions, and to share them with their pharmacy.” Now, with freed-up time for their engineering team thanks to Cronofy’s API, doctoranytime’s journey to becoming a one-stop destination for everyday healthcare is well underway.