Booking patient transport without picking up the phone

Accon booking platform

Accon Köln Krankentransporte drives patients between hospitals, practices and their homes. For years those rides were ordered over the phone.

Together with one of Cologne's largest hospital operators that turned into a booking system in which the clinics enter their rides themselves. It was built on ApptiveGrid, our own platform.

Before: the telephone

Booking by phone becomes expensive once many people depend on it. The manual process produced delays, transcription errors, and vehicles that stood in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Each of those failure points fed straight through to patient care — which made the process a medical question rather than an administrative one.

Two systems, one booking

The platform fits into the hospital's existing infrastructure and connects to the transport company's dispatch software. A ride is entered once and is then present on both sides — nobody types it in a second time.

The real requirement was that the interface had to work in a clinical day without training. Adoption is what decides whether any of this helps.

The result

• error rates from manual entry and phone bookings clearly down
• shorter waiting times for medical staff and for patients
• traceability and billing through the digital documentation

Done in a short time, without a drawn-out IT project and without expensive specialist software. The solution has since become a template other patient-transport companies can use directly.