CUSTOMER STORY

Protecting The Community Against COVID-19 with HotDoc

Dr Sabrina Saldanha and her team at Lane Cove Family Medical Practice have helped protect their community against COVID-19 with a quick response to the vaccination rollout.

Lane Cove Family Medical Practice have been serving their community for over 20 years with the highest quality care. When Dr Sabrina Saldanha, Practice Principal, and her team saw the opportunity to help their community get vaccinated, they jumped on board and got straight to work.

The rollout has been a huge undertaking for the practice, with six tents set up in the backyard and over 80% of their COVID-19 vaccination patients being new to the practice. This setup has helped them keep the staff and existing patients safe, reducing the need for vaccination patients to come into the practice at all.

“I just look at the numbers of patients and think if I had to check consent forms and take all these phone calls, my staff would’ve resigned a long time ago.”

When Dr Saldanha and her team first started their vaccine rollout, they were doing all the bookings manually. It was no small task, with phone conversations taking at least five minutes for each patient. “We were actually manually ringing patients, manually putting them into a clinic, manually checking their consent forms. I actually had to hire somebody extra because we had to do everything by phone call.”

A more manageable process

The HotDoc team knew that clinics like Lane Cove Family Medical Practice had to move quickly so as soon as a COVID-19 vaccine solution was close to ready, it was rolled out to help. “We’ve been learning while HotDoc has been learning,” says Dr Saldanha.

The HotDoc COVID-19 vaccination feature allows patients to book online any time of day and complete their new patient details and consent forms before they come in for their appointment. The practice can track stock against bookings and limit appointment availability to specific times or days. They also have use of the mobile check-in feature, which helps the practice reduce close contact between patients and practice staff.

Dr Saldanha says,

“On many different levels, there is absolutely no way we could’ve done this rollout without HotDoc. It’s helped us enormously.”

HotDoc’s support team has also played an important role in helping practices like Dr Saldanha’s stay on top of changing regulations. “Every time I call, everybody has been amazing. They take the time, they’re patient. I’ve got no IT skills and they’ve always solved it for me.”

Helping the whole community

With these easier booking systems in place, the practice was able to open up their services to more patients. “We opened our books up not just to our patients but to the whole community,” and it really paid off for the team and their local population. They’ve administered 6,000 vaccines so far, with another 4,000 already booked in. And they’ve had some important recognition for their hard work: “We’ve got such a huge rollout that we were actually even mentioned in Parliament for our contribution.”

6,000

COVID-19 vaccinations administered

80%

of COVAX bookings from new patients

4,000

future vaccinations booked

It’s a contribution that might not have been possible without online bookings helping them reach potential patients. “HotDoc has really helped us market that to the bigger community.” That wide reach is helping Lane Cove Family Medical Practice make a huge impact on the health and safety of their local community.

“When I actually sat down and figured out the numbers, I thought, ‘imagine if we’d had to have 6,000 phone calls in the last two months.’ That statistic blew me away, and I thought ‘most of those have been booked in via HotDoc—thank God for that.’”