Our commitment to delivering exceptional post-consultation experience to patients
The year may be coming to a close, but the healthcare concerns that came up in 2020 are far from over. As people continue to take precautions to avoid infections and seek medical help to protect and improve their health, being able to consult a doctor anytime, anywhere on Practo has been a real boon.
What makes these consultations even more effective is the continuity of care they afford by offering a free follow-up appointment after the primary consultation.
Post-consultation experience on Practo
We were earlier offering one follow-up appointment along with 50 messages – for free – to patients, which they could avail within three days of their consultation. This meant that patients could essentially have a detailed follow-up session over chat with the doctor within three days of their first consultation at no extra cost.
We found that this practice ensured that patients get a second chance to reach out to the doctor for a quick follow-up, leading to a better understanding of the primary diagnosis and ensuring improved results.
But we want to do even better – not just to enhance your patients’ experience, but also yours on Practo.
Taking into account the scope for further improvement in making continuity of care more effective and in response to frequent inputs from our doctor community, we decided to reduce the free messages to 30; and while doing so, change the duration of the follow-up window to seven days.
Why we modified our post-consultation plan
We have often found that users who have a laboratory test prescribed in their consultation are unable to complete their follow-up within the three-day period. This is because laboratories can take up to five days to report the final results on various parameters due to logistical reasons.
Furthermore, we identified one week of follow-up to be the standard practice for follow-up consultations at most healthcare establishments because of delayed lab reports as well as extended period of certain courses of medication.
Thus, in order for patients to obtain meaningful follow-up care, it became important that the period to avail the free consultation be modified from its previous limit. Moreover, it will also ensure that only genuine queries come to doctors during the follow-up period.
Enabling doctors to deliver better post-consultation experience
Although this modification has created a larger window of time for patients to book their follow-up appointment, it will also help doctors deliver an exceptional post-consultation experience to them.
Rest assured, we will continue to offer our support to doctors by notifying them about any outstanding follow-up messages so they are not missed out. Additionally, the chat interface will be further revamped to factor in these modifications whereby doctors can easily identify the follow-up messages and quickly respond to them.