This is a continuation in our series of MD Tech Tips — Technology tips to help physicians improve their craft and work more efficiently.
Whether you work in private practice or in an academic setting, it can be difficult to get a group of physicians together for conference calls or meetings. Physicians hours vary greatly by clinical duties, academic commitments, and conferences. Often times a secretary is required to help schedule meeting times with a flurry of emails that clog already stuff inboxes.
My solution to this has been using Doodle.com exclusively to schedule meetings. Doodle a free online calendar that is ridiculously easy to use. The easiest way to describe Doodle is it’s an online vote for when a meeting should be scheduled.
You don’t need to register to use Doodle and other participants don’t need to register either — making it different than other types of online tools that preceded it.
You can schedule a meeting with physician partners and colleagues in less than 3 minutes with the following steps:
Step 1: Go to Doodle.com and hit “schedule an event”. You’ll get the following screen asking you to enter in event details.
Step 2: Enter in the various dates that you are available for a meeting.
Step 3: Enter in the time frames that work for those dates.
Step 4: Doodle has premium features you can utilize and they present some of those on this screen. However, I haven’t found the need to ever utilize them and just click “next” to continue with scheduling the meeting.
Step 5: For the next step invite participants. One of my favorite features of Doodle is no registration is required. You put in the participants email addresses and they get a link asking them to fill out which proposed meeting times work.
Step 6: The following is the screen that participants are taken to when they click the email from Doodle. They can enter their name and they mark the times they can meet.
Once everyone has filled in their availability, the organizer can then look at which time works for everyone. No more back and forth emails or a secretary required to help coordinate a time.
