Life had been busy for Dr. Vikram, an Oncologist. He was moving to a new city soon and wanted to establish a personal clinic there. Here, in Mumbai he was working for one of the Tata Cancer Care Hospitals and life had been good. But he wanted to move back to Kolkata, where his parents lived. His wife and he had decidedto move back as both their children were studying abroad and this would not affect their daily lives much. And his parents were quite old and needed a helping hand nearby.
He had started to setup his private clinic in Kolkata but didn’t know how he would cater to all his regular patients from Mumbai as well. While traveling back and forth between both the cities to oversee the clinic setup for his practice and the house setup for his family, he thought that maybe he can visit Mumbai once a month and consult all of hisfollow up cases. He would consider seeing new cases also depending on the feasibility of the same.
Some of his patients had been under his care for over 4 years and some had been consulting with him for a couple of years. He knew his patients would not want to move to another doctor after being under his care for this long. The newer patients were also quite happy with him, which is why he didn’t want them to stop consulting with him. Also, he did not know yet about how much time the new clinic in Kolkata would take to pick up and bring him patients.
He was meeting his friends this weekend and decided to ask for their help regarding the same. Maybe someone had some idea that could serve better and not require him to travel to Mumbai every month. When discussing itwith his friends, Shailey, a neurologist suggested using the Docty app. She said she uses it to conduct any follow-up consultations with all her patients. Vikram and a few other friends had never heard of an app called Docty. But it seemed two of the others knew about it and another friend was already using it.
Vikram went home and immediately looked the app up and set up his account. The app asked him to wait for verification from their end. He had put in his clinic address for Kolkata and hoped this would not pose any problems.The next day, he saw that the app had sent in a verification email and his account was up and running.
Over the next two weeks, he told all his patients in Mumbai to book appointments for the next consultation through the app.
Soon the moving day was upon him. He choose a weekend to move so that he could help his wife set up the house a little. Otherwise, he would have had to run into the new clinic and would not have been able to lend a hand. He planned to go to the clinic from Monday onwards and had the new staff working the weekend to put everything in order at the clinic.
On Monday, when he came into the clinic, his new receptionist said she had booked a few appointments for him already. It seemed his reputation preceded him and patients were keen on consulting with him. Due to the slightly busy schedule, he had to miss one of his online appointments on Docty. He sent a message to his patient, Shekhar, asking if they could reschedule. This was all new to him, but he knew well enough that everything had a learning curve.
He had to make sure Docty would work for him as it was the best way for him to consult his patients and still not have to go to Mumbai every month. He still planned to visit Mumbai quarterly to consider if any of the existing cases needed extra attention. But in the meanwhile, it had been two months since he moved to Kolkata and he was able to consult with new patients in Kolkata at the clinic and do their follow up as well as the Mumbai patients follow-ups through the app.