Background: Veribook is an online scheduling service used by medical clinics to enable their patients to schedule online. 

Problem: Occasionally, we are asked why patients can view and manage their appointments scheduled by phone or in-person through our system? Can't our system show and allow management of all appointments, however scheduled?

Discussion: We balance multiple considerations in the design of our system, including privacy, security, and convenience.

We call an online account that has access to all of a patient’s appointments to be a “portal” approach. The online account is a “portal” into the clinic’s systems, and someone with access to the online account can see and manage everything. It’s a very black and white approach; either someone has access to nothing, or they have access to everything.

We designed and adopted a different approach because we see the world in shades of grey as there are many situations where a first person should have access to some information about a patient, but not everything. For example, we see all of these situations in the real-world happening:

• partners booking for each other

• parents booking for children

• children booking for parents

• colleagues booking for colleagues

• social workers booking for clients

• providers in a first facility (e.g. ER departments) booking appointments at another facility (e.g. family doctor’s office)

In all of these examples, we want to make it easy for the appointment to be scheduled, without the clinic needing to be directly involved.

At the same time, just because someone can book an appointment for someone else doesn’t mean they should have access to all appointments scheduled for this patient. For example, mature minors have a legal entitlement to see their family physician without their parents necessarily knowing. We address this privacy concern by allowing a particular online account to only have access to the information submitted through that particular online account.

Information submitted by any other means (e.g. phone, in person, another online account) is deliberately excluded.

We understand this can occasionally be inconvenient; for that we apologize but on balance, we're of the opinion this is the best approach.