Booking care without the phone queue

The problem

Halden Health’s 40 clinics opened their phone lines at 8:00, and by 8:05 the queue was full. An online booking form existed, but only 18% of patients used it: it asked for a reason in medical terms, showed times in a dense table and timed out after ten minutes.

The patients who most needed appointments, many of them over 70, were the ones the website served worst.

Research

I spent two weeks at the front desks of three clinics, listening in on calls and watching patients try the existing form. The biggest barriers were not technical. People didn’t know which kind of appointment to ask for, and they were afraid of booking the wrong thing.

• Patients described problems in their own words, so the flow now starts with “What do you need help with?” in plain language.
• Many shared a device with a partner or carer, so booking for someone else became a first-class path.
• Nobody trusted a booking until they saw a confirmation they could keep, so every booking ends with a summary, a calendar file and an optional text message.

Design

The new flow has three steps, and each one fits on a single screen, even at 200% text size. Times are large, tappable buttons grouped by morning and afternoon. Nothing times out, and a patient who leaves halfway can pick up where they stopped.

I tested every iteration with patients aged 68 to 91, on their own phones and with their own glasses, and with clinic staff who used to answer the phones.

Outcome

Within four months, 62% of appointments were booked online, up from 18%. Booking online took a third of the time of a phone call, and the flow passed an external accessibility audit at WCAG 2.2 AA on the first attempt.