Sam Strasser

I just spent a few minutes adding 6 weeks of appointments with a physical therapist (I hurt my shouder…again).  I have done this now a few times in a few cities, and I basically know the routine.

This is the way it is now.  After my first appointment, having already filled out many forms, I go to the front office and schedule about 4-6 weeks of appointments.  The front-office person uses some scheduling software, which is generally easy to use and has a key feature: print.  So the receptionist person prints me a list of my upcoming appointments.  I take the list home and add it to my calendar.

This is the way it will be.  After the front office person and I schedule my appointments, she will send me the appointments electronically, so I don’t need to deal with entering them.  Before that can happen, a lot of things need to happen, and I think they will happen in this order: regular people (e.g. my mom) will become comfortable enough to add an .ics feed into their calendar application of choice (in the case of my mom, it is a paper calendar, which I suppose we’d have to address first.  Then, the software developer of the sceduling software needs to an a feature, which we will call “Email These Appointments.”

And that’s all.  As usual, the technology is there, and has been there, for years.  Yet people don’t know how to use it, so developers can’t sell the “Email These Appointments” feature, which means it won’t make it into real software, and no one will know the technology exists.

Many software companies solve the larger problem by providing the end-to-end solution themselves.  In this example, it would require the scheduling software to be the same as my personal calendar, which is not feasible.  In the not-so-distant future, though, people will be comfortable enough that they will be able to make two separate solutions (scheduling software and personal calendar) interact with each other.