Appointment Reminders.com Speeds App Development While Creating Superior Customer Experiences with Progress Telerik

AppointmentReminders.com was founded in 2012 and has continuously experienced fast growth since then, particularly in the healthcare field with its HIPAA-compliant scheduling solutions. Industry studies have shown that accurate, engaging, easy-to-use automated reminders can reduce patient no-show rates by up to 90%. With its user interface nearing the 10-year mark, AppointmentReminders.com recognized the need to modernize the experience and add more functionality.

“We hadn't really gone through a significant redesign of our product interface for about ten years, basically since we started the company,” said Jonah Langer, Founder and Lead Programmer. “Our interfaces were clunky and looked a bit old, since we designed a lot of the components ourselves due to the lack of great UI tools out there at that time.”

A modern interface had to provide a customized, highly-visual, engaging experience to motivate patients and customers to show up for scheduled appointments. When scheduling medical appointments for example, the information provided needs to be customized for each appointment type, while providing in-depth information like pre-appointment dietary and fasting information, to ensure patients properly prepare for their visit.

Building such a solution requires a broad, flexible set of customizable components to meet the demands of any UI scenario, along with superior data visualization and integration capabilities to make the solution as flexible and easy-to-use as possible.

To create the modern, highly-functional user experience required by AppointmentReminders.com, the team conducted a comprehensive search of UI vendors and found that Telerik not only offered the breadth and depth of components they were looking for, but also had the necessary integration capabilities and the greatest support, documentation and resources, critical for success in such an undertaking.

“At the onset, we found pricing to be super competitive, and as we dug deeper, we found that the supporting documentation was thorough and there were so many examples, visuals and videos that depicted exactly what we wanted to do,” Langer said. “But, of course it was the components and the features that specifically spoke to us, as well as native integrations with Visual Studio and other solutions that cemented our decision.”

And much to the delight of Langer and the development team, the project was completed in six months. “This was a huge redesign for us, and it took six months from start to finish to implement the entire project,” Langer said.

With large amounts of data that needed to be sorted in many configurations, Langer found the ASP.NET Core Grid control invaluable.

“Whether you are using it for something very simple or very complicated, it seemed to have the ability to integrate exactly what we needed,” he said. “We have these huge customer lists, for example, with names, phone numbers and emails, and you can easily edit, delete and manipulate them in any way you need to with the Grid component.

“Additionally,” Langer continued, “you can see all the appointment reminders for that person and you can add new, customized reminders right in the control.”

Langer also appreciated the real-time visibility offered by the Grid component.

“When appointment reminders are sent, you can immediately see what’s in the queue and who responded and who didn’t,” he said. “And using the Grid you can automatically configure a new customized reminder type depending on the previous response, whether it’s a call or text, and the exact time it should be sent.”

Integration with Visual Studio is another important feature for AppointmentReminders.com.

“Everything we need to work in Visual Studio is right there and already built to go,” he said. “The native integration is outstanding, nothing like a clunky third-party component.”

When it comes to both the developer experience with the ASP.NET Core Component Library—and the user experience—everyone is coming out ahead.

“From a customer standpoint regarding user friendliness, we are light years ahead of where we were,” Langer said. “And from a development standpoint, I can’t even say where we would be without the components, but it would have taken us at least twice as long to complete the project and likely with a fraction of the functionality.”