04 Mar Innovation and Customer Impact: How Online Airfare Booking Can Help Inform Radiology Appointment Scheduling

Consumers expect smooth online scheduling, communication, and payment processes from every business they interact with, regardless of the industry. We have been booking airline tickets online for three decades, and there are valuable insights to be gained from consumers’ embrace of digital airline innovations that can be applied to industries that have been slower to adapt, such as online healthcare appointment scheduling.

We recently came across CNN’s fascinating look at the history of the airline paper boarding pass. The airline industry’s online revolution began in 1994 when the first electronic ticket was issued; however, full adoption took over a decade.

In the United States, Southwest Airlines was an early pioneer of online ticketing. In 1994, Southwest’s largest competitors Delta, United, and Continental attempted to force Southwest out of the computer reservation systems that travel agents used for booking and printing airline tickets. In response, Southwest developed its own reservation system, providing it directly to travel agents. This system still required paper ticket printing, so Southwest continued to work on creating an online e-ticket system for travel agents, which was launched in 1995. In 1996, Southwest unveiled its own website, which allowed customers to purchase e-tickets directly through an online portal.

The other airlines followed suit. Finally, by 2008 the International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced that all airline ticketing was electronic.

The late ’90s and early ’00s saw an online travel revolution. In 1999, the site FareChase launched in the United States, which was the first travel search engine to aggregate fares from different booking sites. This spawned an industry (metasearch engines) and also provided consumers with a new level of transparency, flexibility, and autonomy.

Change often brings challenges, though. Increased transparency in flight prices led to more competition among airlines, prompting many to experiment with low-cost, base fare pricing models. Due to the airline industry’s lower profit margins, it was likely challenging for many airlines to make substantial investments in technology. However, the digital transformation of ticketing laid the groundwork for other improvements in operational efficiency, such as a smoother check-in and bag-drop process at the airport.

Now, thirty years after the first airline e-ticket, the airline industry is facing a new wave of transformation and digital innovation spurred by the artificial intelligence revolution.

Shifting our focus to the healthcare industry, there are learnings and insights that we can apply to the digital transformation of radiology scheduling and patient engagement workflows. While customers have been booking airline tickets online for nearly three decades, the healthcare industry has been slow to adopt online patient portals and appointment-scheduling tools. According to an article published in the National Library of Medicine, patient portals did not gain widespread use until 2006.

Despite being behind other industries’ digital transformations, healthcare systems must consider the following:

In our society, seamless, online booking experiences are “table stakes” for consumers. Patients demand the same real-time access from healthcare that they receive from Amazon, Expedia, Uber and every other industry.

Online appointment scheduling and patient engagement tools provide many of the same benefits to consumers as online airline booking systems, including on-demand access, flexibility, and transparency.

While digital transformations do come at a cost and can introduce “growing pains” that healthcare systems need to work through, they present long-term opportunities to reduce costs through increased operational efficiency and patient retention.

Let’s consider the complexity of radiology appointment scheduling, which can involve scheduling across providers, locations, and procedure types. While there are clear benefits for patients in using an online radiology scheduling system like openDoctor, there are also significant operational efficiencies to be gained by healthcare systems of all sizes.

In May 2023, Emirates Airlines announced that it would start requiring most passengers to use a mobile boarding pass, signaling the beginning of the end for the paper ticket-three decades after the start of the online booking revolution. Digital transformations can be disruptive and take time to fully develop, but once implemented, they establish a new gold standard for customer experience. The era of digital transformation in healthcare is here, and we’re excited to see what the future holds for both healthcare systems and the patients they serve.

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As an early innovator in radiology patient experience, openDoctor is dedicated to bringing passion and expertise to an industry undergoing rapid change. For years, openDoctor has delivered innovative online appointment scheduling and patient engagement solutions to healthcare systems and practices of all sizes and levels of complexity. Our comprehensive set of tools is highly adaptable and capable of addressing even the most intricate scheduling and workflow challenges.

Let our experience guide you. For more information on how radiology patient scheduling software can enhance your healthcare system’s patient experience, please get in touch with us.