It has been a long time since online shopping had started engulfing the conventional offline shopping market. More and more people are now preferring the online medium of shopping to the old one, not just because people have become lazy or anything but online shopping has lots of advantages, for instance you can explore as many variants of an item as you may want without even trying the shopkeeper’s patience
New thing is that online market has now started encroaching upon such areas also which were traditionally required appearance in person. What we are talking about here is online health consultation. People no longer want to sit and wait sometimes for hours for a doctor in a clinic, when except for surgery and emergency medical aids, every sort of medical advice and consultation they can get online right at their homes. Online doctors’ advice is an emerging, new generation Healthcare service.
Recently there has been a surge of such online portals (like practo, lybrate, aslapollo etc.) which are run by qualified and competent doctors and provide online medical and health consultation services.
Can websites like practo and lybrate be built with WordPress? And the answer is: ‘Sure, Go ahead’. For some time, I have been researching the possibilities and finally I have concluded that, yes, it’s possible with the help of WordPress plugins. By simply customizing some plugins, you can build a basic website of this type without having to worry about coding. Though, an advanced website will, for sure, require some modification in the code and extension. .
I thought my readers should know about this and the present article is just an introductory article on this concept and possibility and it is not a thorough tutorial.
The present post, as I just said, is an opening post on this topic and introduces the general idea of making a website with WordPress and its plugins, a website where different doctors can sell their services like medical advice online with your share too in their earning.
So what we need to setup an online multidoctor consultation place
- Doctors could register and add their qualification and experience
- Site owner set registration cost for doctors
- They could add their services and set their consultation prices
- We should have manual process to verify doctors qualification and other information
- Site owner could set commission per appointment
- An automatic confirmation email to patient on registering appointment with invoice and additional detail
- An automatic email to the doctor when a paid appointment is done
- A pre-consultation form on doctor’s appointment page so that doctor has basic medical information of patient like age, sex, patient history (other doctors prescriptions, already done medical reports, already declared medical problems etc..). This will facilitate and accelerate consultation and treatment. On submitting this form, patients information is sent to the doctors email ID.
- A support ticket system so that doctor and patients could chat after appointment is done
- Deciding consultation period. i.e how many days appointment will be valid until
Lets try achieving it with WordPress
- Get a quality web hosting. We recommend A2 Hosting. Skip this step if your already have one
- First install WordPress and then install following plugin
- Woocommerce – Free
- WooCommerce Dokan (Business License) – Converts Woocommerce into a multi-seller marketplace where other people can create accounts and sell their services
- Formidable Forms Single Site + Registration addon – Creates highly advanced forms
>>>> First of all setup registration process so that Doctors could apply for a consultant on your site. We will utilize Formidable Forms and its registration addon for this.
>>>>Create a registration form with all fields to gather all required data from doctors such as name, address, email, phone number, Facebook ID, current working hospital address or private clinic, scanned copy of their medical qualification certificates, identity proof and address proof provided by government and all other data that you think necessary. It is very easy to build advanced forms with Formidable Forms.
Read more about Formidable Forms
Some Screenshots of example registration forms
>>>>> after creating registration form customize user registration settings such as after registration user email, admin email
>>>>> In registration settings keep user role pending until you verify registration details manually and confirm that applicant is a real doctor. after successful verification change his/her role to vendor and send him an email with his/her seller(doctor) dashboard link and any required detail. You can use free WP Email users plugin to send email to any user.
Some settings example of Formidable Registration
>>>>> Enable Dokan Subscription module so that doctors could create service products with service duration in days. This way doctors can add consultation service and limit it to certain days. For example if a gynecologist adds her/his consultation service she/he can decide until how many days patient can consult on booking consultation. And after that period patient will need to book the consultation again.
>>>>> Also enable Dokan store support module
>>>> Store Support module adds service based support ticket system. Any of your patient can create support ticket with his order ID and you can reply to his ticket. This way doctors can communicate with their patients and also give their phone number to assist on phone call. Doctors can receive patients images and videos if required via this support system.
>>>>> Also create a pre-consultation form with detailed questionnaire and this form to the Doctors’ service page. When someone books an appointment an email will be sent to the patients email asking them to fill out the pre-consultation form on booking page. When patient submit this form, this form detail will be sent to the doctor’s email ID.
How to send pre-consultation form data to the doctor’s email (see the screenshots below)
In your pre-consultation form add a hidden field with default value [post_author_email]
In form settings create a new email action and in “To” field add [post_author_email] as shown in the image below
You can use any payment gateway like PayPal, Stripe etc. to receive payments from patients while they book consultation on your site. You need to configure what is site owner (yours) commission per appointment based on percentage or flat rate. Commission settings can be found in Dokan settings.
I earnestly think that if you go ahead with this idea, you can easily build a multi-doctor consultation website. At the same time, if you want an advanced website, it’s also not very difficult. Just make a little more effort, get the hang of some plugins given in this article and your website, equipped with all the advanced features, is at the ready. If you’re still not satisfied and want a more advanced website, you can add the advanced features to your website by hiring a developer to take care of it.
If you have any suggestions to make this guide better and more useful, please write them in the comment section. All suggestions are welcome.
