Boucherville, April 15, 2019 - Access to healthcare in Ontario is taking an important step today as Bonjour-santé® introduces its new online appointment request service, which allows all patients throughout the province to request their medical appointments online.
With this new Universal, Free and Open service offered by Bonjour-santé®, an established SME dedicated to improving healthcare access, patients will no longer have to spend precious time lining up outside medical clinics to get an emergency walk-in appointment, sitting in a waiting room hoping for an opening, or on the phone trying to get through to book an appointment with their family doctors.
In a time where technology is an intricate part of our everyday activities and where many services are provided remotely, it is not surprising to know that according to the Canada Health Infoway, 90% of Canadians say they want to be able to request their medical appointments online. As a large portion of medical clinics do not have their own website, an all encompassing directory will provide patients with a quick access to all clinics.
The innovative service offers great advantages for both patients and clinics. Patients can easily request their appointments online 24/7 from the comfort of their own home. In just a few clicks, they can find the clinic of their choice in Bonjour-santé®’s directory and either request a walk-in appointment in a walk-in clinic, for instance, or an appointment with their family doctor at their regular clinic. They have to complete a simple form that includes their preferred availabilities. The clinic will have up to 23 hours to process requests, at which point patients will receive a confirmation by text message and email. Should the clinic decline a request, the patient will be notified accordingly.
With a free and intuitive interface, clinics can quickly and easily receive and process all requests online. All they have to do is either accept or refuse appointments and Bonjour-santé® will take care of notifying patients and adding appointments to the clinics’ schedule. This online process of appointment requests is 84% faster than assignin appointments by phone, which means that clinic staff will enjoy more free time to complete all their other tasks.
“It has long been Bonjour-santé®’s goal to help improve the well-being of all Canadians. We are lucky to live in a country where healthcare is free; however, we will consider ourselves even luckier when we can easily, quickly and conveniently access this free medical care”, explains Bonjour-santé's president Benoit Brunel.
To request an appointment online, patients simply have to go to Bonjour-santé.ca and request their appointments.
Our cutting-edge technological solutions have been supporting 2.5 million users every year. A deeply committed corporate citizen, Bonjour-santé® has been offer its platform to clinics and hospitals free of charge thanks to a few optional paid services. Bonjour-santé® is a trademark developed by Tootelo Innovation inc., a company founded in 1994 and hiring 165 employees.
Boucherville, November 13, 2017 – By using artificial intelligence for the benefit of patients, Bonjour-santé plans on reducing to 20 minutes the average wait time in medical clinics. This ambitious project will be carried out with the support of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), which is world-renowned in the area of deep learning. To achieve this goal, Bonjour-santé will tap into its immense data warehouse comprising unidentifiable information accumulated from millions of medical appointments over the last few years. The data gathered is very diverse, including reason for consultation, type of professional consulted, number of professionals per clinic, arranged and actual date and time of consultation, weather conditions, geographic location, etc. The aim of working with MILA is to more accurately predict clinic wait times.
Benoit Brunel, President of Bonjour-santé, is drawing on artificial intelligence to enhance the performance of the current Bonjour-santé algorithm, which has already reduced the average clinic wait time in its network from 246 minutes to 45. “Our mission is to take advantage of the available technologies to make it easier for patients to access health care. I believe that Quebec has the expertise required to make its public health care system one of the most efficient in the world in terms of clinic wait times,” said Brunel.
In addition to improving the patient experience, a reduction in clinic wait times brings with it many other significant spin-off benefits, the most important of which are fewer nosocomial infections (those contracted during health care) and optimization of clinic resources. (Source: MSSS, 2017)
Benoit Brunel believes that the public health care system can serve patients better. “It’s unthinkable that only 3% of patients – those who turn to the private system (not covered by RAMQ) – can receive care without waiting. These same patients have to spend hundreds of dollars for services that should be covered by the public system. Innovations cannot be limited to the private system; they should benefit everyone,” said Brunel. (Source: RAMQ, 2017)
Bonjour-santé wishes to implement its new wait time prediction service during the winter of 2018. Among the 327 medical clinics currently using Bonjour-santé services for managing appointments and waiting rooms, 70 are eligible for a rapid deployment of the improvements which will eventually be brought to the system, following the work being conducted by MILA.
“We are seeing a revolution in artificial intelligence,” said Étienne de Villers, Project Director at Bonjour-santé. “I’m convinced that artificial intelligence skills, particularly in deep learning, are the key competencies for tomorrow. In this context, we are particularly excited about leveraging our data via a practical deep learning application, which will improve the lives of all the members of our communities.” (Source: Radio-Canada, 2017)
Bonjour-santé is an intraprise of Tootelo Innovation Inc., a SME based in Boucherville since 1994 and employing 140 people. In collaboration with over 2,000 doctors, Bonjour-santé offers services in 327 medical clinics in Quebec. Its objective is to facilitate access to health care while offering clinics free innovative solutions for managing their appointments and improving the patient experience.
The Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), headed by Professor Yoshua Bengio, brings together researchers in the field of deep learning. MILA is world renowned for its valuable contributions, both practical and theoretical, to the field of deep learning. The Institute has significantly contributed to language modeling, machine translation and generative modeling.
Sources (French only):
MINISTÈRE DE LA SANTÉ ET DES SERVICES SOCIAUX (2017). “Le Québec et les infections nosocomiales,” Santé et Services sociaux Québec, http://www.msss.gouv.qc.ca/sujets/prob_sante/nosocomiales/index.php?situation (page consulted on November 7, 2017).
RÉGIE DE L’ASSURANCE MALADIE DU QUÉBEC (2017). “Liste des professionnels de la santé non participants ou désengagés au régime de l’assurance maladie du Québec avec adresse de pratique au Québec,” Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec, http://www.ramq.gouv.qc.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/professionnels/facturation/desengages.pdf (page consulted on November 7, 2017).
BERNARD, André (2017). “La révolution de l’intelligence artificielle,” Radio-Canada Info, http://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/special/2017/02/intelligence-artificielle/voir-vision-apprentissage-profond-reseau-neurone.html (page consulted on November 7, 2017).
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Information:
Benoit Brunel
President | Bonjour-santé®
benoit.brunel@bonjour-sante.com
514.373.1000
