An appointment can also be scheduled online to avoid queues.

After more than a month in quarantine and strict isolation measures, planned children’s consultations, mandatory immunizations, women’s consultations, and scheduled admissions to healthcare facilities were resumed on April 21 by order of the Minister of Health. However, all these activities will still be carried out with strict adherence to anti-epidemic measures and only by appointment, in order to prevent crowding in front of doctor’s offices.

“Pre-scheduled appointments are mandatory for both women’s consultations and for medical check-ups and consultations in diagnostic-consultative centers and medical centers,” said Minister Ananiev.

Following the resumption of outpatient care, the risk of crowds in front of doctor’s offices and failure to maintain social distancing between appointments remains. For this reason, it is critical to properly and strictly manage appointment scheduling to minimize the risk of people gathering in one place, and to allow medical professionals time to disinfect the office and surrounding areas.

To assist with this process, the Bulgarian Cluster for Digital Solutions and Innovations in Healthcare (http://dhicluster.bg/) provides two working solutions for making medical appointments online: Consento and Superdoc. Both companies are part of the cluster, which actively supports the government and anti-epidemic measures by providing various technologies to manage the crisis.

The platform Consento.bg offers doctor schedules, calendars, and pre-scheduled appointment booking for both individual doctor practices and medical centers, through a browser, mobile app, or by calling a dedicated call center that operates 24/7. The online appointment module can easily be integrated into the official website of the doctor or healthcare facility, thus shortening the patient’s path and providing access to important additional information.

Patients can schedule appointments with 300 doctors, including 80 general practitioners and 220 specialists. The platform serves 10 medical centers in 3 cities – Sofia, Pleven, and Pernik. Over 200,000 patients are registered on Consento, with nearly 20,000 using the mobile apps of the platform.

Superdoc.bg is another solution for online appointment booking. Currently, over 500 family doctors and pediatricians, and over 300 obstetric-gynecological offices are already using the platform for online doctor appointment reservations. The total number of doctors nationwide using online appointment booking is 2,000, and more than 300,000 registered users have made appointments in this way. Superdoc handles over 80,000 online reservations each month. Using the platform saves time for both doctors and patients and facilitates access to healthcare by offering an effective and established solution for properly managing the time of doctors and patients without crowding, overlapping, or duplicate appointments.

The platform is very easy and convenient to use, and bookings can be made from any device, at any time, including outside of office hours. Superdoc notifies patients with confirmed appointments about any delays in the doctor’s schedule, helping to avoid further crowding in front of the doctor’s office.

In support of the digital solutions, Dr. Ivan Madzharov, Chairman of the Bulgarian Medical Association, also emphasized their critical importance for maintaining physical distance and complementing the Ministry of Health’s measures more effectively.

The Bulgarian Medical Association is an official partner of the Bulgarian Cluster for Digital Solutions and Innovations in Healthcare and, over the past two years, has actively supported the optimization of medical professionals’ work through the technological solutions developed by the digital health ecosystem in Bulgaria.