Shifting to Social Scheduling

It wasn’t that long ago that a colleague and I opened Facebook for the first time, connected as friends, and asked the next logical question: now what?

The idea of caring about another person’s play-by-play status was completely foreign, but as she began posting pictures of her college years (and other friends began to do the same), the utility of social media began to form in my mind. Over the years, pictures turned into shared articles, interest groups, alerting services, and even community reporting. Facebook dramatically expanded how people, both friends and strangers, built communities, shared ideas, and debated topics.

As social media began to take off, hundreds of companies found thousands of uses for it, all of which were not even conceivable prior to the establishment of a social network. Social is also what differentiates SkedgeAlert from every other scheduling software out there. We’re consumer-driven. That means the patient or consumer connects with a service provider, just like a Facebook friend. The providers then share alerts for open appointments, much like Facebook friends share pictures or status messages. But in the SkedgeAlert world, consumers can act on those alerts and instantly book appointments.

Taking the notion of social-based scheduling one step further, imagine a Facebook feed of all open appointments at all your connected providers. Just like it was foreign to scroll through a series of 2-sentence updates across 500 friends just 15 years ago, it might feel strange to think about scheduling that way. However, with a social newsfeed of open appointments, one could scroll through every service provider he’s connected with (doctors, dentists, restaurants, golf courses, etc.) just to see what is open and available.

Service providers merely announce their openings and SkedgeAlert makes all the connections. And while our technology is currently focused on the alerting and booking capabilities, our data model is constructed such that an open appointment news feed, customized to the consumer, is not too far in our future.