Automate a Vaccine Appointment System with Serverless Twilio Studio

Automate a Vaccine Appointment System with Serverless Twilio Studio. Build a serverless vaccine appointment scheduler and reminder using step-by-step code with Twilio Functions and Twilio Studio.

Scheduling appointments for the COVID-19 vaccine is at the top of everyone’s mind, but setting up appointments at scale is a challenge. In this post, you will learn how to build a prototype of an interactive appointment management system using Twilio  Programmable Voice and  Programmable Messaging. Patients will be able to reply back to confirm, cancel, or reschedule their appointments and make outgoing calls to the number provided. With this in place, you also optimize the physician’s unused time slots due to 11th hour cancellations.

What about connecting with an EHR?

If you work in healthcare, you’re probably already familiar with the interoperability problem that exists when accessing and sending data to electronic health records ( EHR) systems.  HIMSS defines interoperability as “_the ability of different information systems, devices and applications (systems) to access, exchange, integrate and cooperatively use data in a coordinated manner, within and across organizational, regional and national boundaries._”

Since each health system has their own data format and data access mechanism, you need another layer of technology to make them talk to each other seamlessly. Whether you use an integration engine for middleware, such as  Redox Engine or  ELLKAY, or you’ve built a custom in-house solution, you can use the following tutorial to build out the logic for sending and receiving messages from patients.

For building this prototype, we will use  Airtable (a cloud spreadsheet-like database) to simulate the EHR. If you are using Salesforce as a CRM for patient data, you’ll want to check out this post on  how to send COVID-19 vaccine appointment reminders with Salesforce Flow and Twilio.

Use Cases for SMS

You will build three workflows when an appointment reminder is sent to a patient via SMS:

Patient responds back with “Yes” to confirm:

• Send back an SMS to the patient with a confirmation
• Update Airtable with the confirmation of this appointment

Patient responds back with “No” to cancel the appointment:

• Send a cancellation confirmation to the patient
• Update in the Airtable that the appointment is cancelled
• Find the patient that is on the waiting list for this physician and send SMS to see if they want to take this earlier appointment slot that just opened up

code tutorials and hacks serverless

Static code analysis is a method of debugging by examining source code before a program is run. It's done by analyzing a set of code against a set (or multiple sets) of coding rules. Static code analysis and static analysis are often used interchangeably, along with source code analysis.

There are more code smells. Let’s keep changing the aromas. We see several symptoms and situations that make us doubt the quality of our development. Let's look at some possible solutions.

Data Visualization in R with ggplot2: A Beginner Tutorial. Learn to visualize your data using R and ggplot2 in this beginner-friendly tutorial that walks you through building a chart for data analysis.

Get your R programming journey off on the right foot with this RStudio tutorial that walks through everything from installation to best practices.

Learn how to load a data set and clean it using R programming and tidyverse tools in this free beginner-level data analysis tutorial.