What’s new in Cliniko — December 2015

Since our last update, there’s been a lot of work completed behind the scenes, with a number of changes that you may not be aware of! Here’s the rundown:

• Changed our hosting provider. This allows us more control over our set up, so that we can continue to make improvements to speed and reliability.
• Visual improvements to the calendar, dashboard, reports, and many other areas of Cliniko to help in the quest to make Cliniko responsive to all screen sizes (for more on that, see below!).
• Kick started our referrals scheme so that you can earn credits to your account by referring friends and colleagues to Cliniko.
• Various securitymaintenance and improvements.
• Various performance improvements surrounding the calendar and Cliniko in general.
• Changed from Apple-styled emojis to the traditional-styled emojis. Surprisingly important, considering the heavy load that supporting emojis has on performance!
• And lots more that you can find out about on our Updates and Changes page on our support site!

Work in progress

We’ve got a few of large features that we’re actively working on bringing to Cliniko. Here’s an update of what we’ve accomplished so far:

Group Bookings

We’re desperate to bring Group Bookings to Cliniko: it’s literally our #1 priority and it’s a task that John, Bira, and Bruno (amongst others) have been working on for over a year now! However, restructuring Cliniko to accommodate such a fundamental change to appointments has proven to be a huge task. Let’s get into the details of what we’ve done so far.

First and foremost, we have had to change the appointments to be structured from one-to-one to one-to-many. This meant creating a new field within our application called ‘attendees’, and these attendees had to replace ‘patients’ in every part of the application that appointments touched. Not only for the future, but also we had to fit it retroactively, which meant converting the 30 million appointments made in Cliniko from patient to attendee without breaking anything.

Once we had done that, then we’ve also had to do the same for the 10 million treatment notes, 15 million invoices, and the 25 million communications records. This is the arduous part of the project, and we’re almost through it.

The other side of things is relatively easy in contrast (now!): that is, what it looks like, and how it works within Cliniko. We’ve done a lot of the base work on this already, including the Appointments page re-design (from around 15–18 months ago), changing from the top bar to the side bar for navigation, and also some underlying framework improvements to speed up the appointments page and other areas. A lot of seemingly unrelated changes to Cliniko have been driven by what we need for Group Bookings.

Diagrams in Notes

We’re also past the most difficult part of creating diagrams, with Bartosz and Kelly creating a whole new drawing tool from the ground up!

When we came around to developing diagrammatic treatment notes for Cliniko, we researched a lot of “open source” libraries for drawing tools that we could implement into Cliniko. We were very disheartened by the selection out there, as they did not have the reliability and functionality that we want to provide you. Therefore, we chose to build a drawing tool from scratch ourselves. This means that our diagrams feature will have been built specifically for Cliniko and our needs and we designed it to work perfectly for all devices and all drawing options: from using your fingers on your mobile phones, through to drawing with a pen on a tablet, and drawing with your mouse or touchpad on a laptop or desktop computer. Here’s a early screenshot from that drawing tool creation process (extra illustrations by Joel):

Now that we have the grasp on the drawing tool, we have the easier part to go! Currently, we’re working on how the tool will work within the current treatment note set up, how to access the stock images that come with the tool, and how it will work with the printing and exporting options that we have for treatment notes. We’re nearing the finish line with this one, and we’re super excited to see how this will work within Cliniko!

Support for mobile devices

Our designers, Josh and Kelly, are currently working on making all of Cliniko work great on mobile devices (phones and tablets). They’ve started with the Dashboard and Settings area. At the same time, they’re improving usability and building components to be reused throughout Cliniko for better consistency. Here’s a sneak peek of the Settings page, if you haven’t seen that one already:

Whilst this does give you some improvements right away, most exciting is that we’re a step closer to Cliniko being fully available on all screen sizes, including tablets and phones. Why is that exciting? You’ll be able to write treatment notes comfortably on your phone, invoice on a tablet remotely, or even check out your reports from the luxury of your couch!

You can find more updates and changes posts right here on our blog, or sign up for a free trial to get access to our Newsletter with all these details and more!