Booking

How a patient gets an appointment, from the first three letters they type to the reminder the night before. Ordinary scheduling — written down because it is the part that has to be right every single day.

Status: Live at the Pinamar installation.

Finding the service

The patient types what they are looking for, and the search answers from three letters on, across the hospital and every health centre at once. It matches on word roots, so cardio finds cardiology and traumato finds traumatology, and it searches specialties, service names and the professionals themselves.

What it never does is invent an option. A service that is attended first-come-first-served is labelled as such and leads to its opening hours, not to a calendar. A service the installation does not offer says so and points at the ones it does.

Being offered a time

• The slots are real. They come from the professional’s own agenda, minus what is already taken, minus that day’s closures. Nothing is offered that the desk would then have to undo.
• Nearest first, grouped by day. The patient sees the first date that exists and can walk forward from it.
• A chosen slot is held for eight minutes while they finish. Two people cannot take the same time, and an abandoned booking releases the slot on its own.
• The first appointment shown is the first one, not the only one. Every band that promises a time leads to a flow that can actually give it.

Three doors, one appointment

A patient can book on the site, in the chat on the corner of the page, or on WhatsApp — the assistant asks the same questions and produces the same request. A conversation that starts on WhatsApp can be tied to the account already logged in on the site with a short code, so nobody dictates their ID number twice.

Whichever door it came through, identity comes from the session, never from what the message says. Somebody who writes “I am booking for my mother” has to be logged in as the person who is allowed to.

The account

Signing up takes a photo of the identity document, front and back. The details are read from it, and health coverage is looked up in the national registry instead of being asked for. What the registry cannot answer stays editable by hand — no field is ever locked because a lookup failed. Detail: Scan to register.

Before the visit

• A confirmation the moment it is booked, with the address of that particular centre, the date in words, and what to bring.
• Preparation instructions per service — fasting, previous studies, arriving earlier — written once against the service, so they are the same on the site, in the email and at the desk.
• A reminder the day before, by email and WhatsApp, that asks a yes-or-no question. Answering confirms it or cancels it; nothing else is required of the patient.

Cancelling, and the waitlist

A patient can cancel from the email, from the reminder, or from their own account. A freed slot does not sit there: the next person on the waitlist for that service is offered it automatically, and the offer expires so it moves on to the next person if nobody takes it.

Waitlists exist because the honest answer to “nothing until October” is not to send the patient away. They register once and get told when something opens.

When the answer is no

A refusal always carries the next concrete step, and the step is a link, not a homepage. An order that cannot be read gets the instruction to photograph it again with the parts that were missing named. A service with no availability gets the waitlist and the nearest centre that has one. A patient who already holds the maximum number of appointments gets shown the one they hold, with the option to move it.

Two rules worth knowing

Walk-in services never offer appointments. If a service is first-come-first-served, no surface anywhere in the product will promise a time for it — the single exception is a same-day opening, which is capped at one day ahead.

How many appointments a patient may hold at once is a number, resolved per doctor, then per service, then per installation. Kinesiology ships at ten because a course of treatment is ten sessions; most services ship at one. It applies to what the patient books themselves, never to what the front desk books for them.

Next: The desk and the panel