What’s new in Cliniko — August 2016

There have been a lot of developments within Cliniko since our last major update, so I thought I’d round up all the details for all the people using Cliniko right now! Here’s a quick summary of major changes made in Cliniko lately.

New Faces

Not only have we added a whole lot of features to Cliniko, we also added some new faces to our team! You may have already encountered Dara and Tim, who have joined our support team. Dara is the one with the Irish accent, currently based in New Zealand, while Tim jumps online from North Carolina in the US and he’ll be taking some time off in the near future to welcome his first little one into the world.

On the development side of things, we’ve had Colin and Hass joining us just last week. Colin hails from Minnesota and when he isn’t coding, he’ll most likely be gaming, while Hass is based out of Malaysia and watch out if you meet him as he’s a bit of a hugger!

This means that Cliniko now has a huge team of 22, with people working from New Zealand, Australia, and Malaysia, through to Poland, Portugal, and the UK, and all the way over to Canada, the US, and Brazil (plus a couple of itinerants who could be anywhere at any time!). If you’re curious about how we find the great people we find, check out our “How We Hire” post!

Upcoming Releases

We always like to share what we’ve been up to when people ask “What’s going on behind the scenes there?!”. So in that spirit, here’s some information on some of things we’re currently working on.

Group Appointments

Have we mentioned that you can now have Group Appointments within Cliniko? I feel like we have, but we’ll mention it again! Our support site covers the release of Group Appointments, while we also have a couple of help guides for setting up, adding to the calendar, and adding Patients to your appointments.

However, that’s not the end of our work on Group Appointments. We’re currently actively working on bringing repeats to the feature, just like we have with individual appointments. Since the base functionality is there, the technical component of this development is the easy part.

The difficulty with this lies in how we offer this in the interface. Getting the usability right on this one is super important, and super tricky. We’ve run through a huge number of iterations on how to present this in the most efficient and effective manner, and we’re certain that we’ll get something that works in the best possible way as soon as we can!

Diagrams in Treatment Notes

The big news here is that our drawing tool, which we had to build from scratch, is completed and works awesomely! Our entire team here has had a play around on various devices, using fingers, touch pads, and various other items to draw on our illustrations we will be pre-loading with the feature, and we’re so super excited!

That effort took the team over a year to develop, and now the tricky part is integrating that drawing tool with our Treatment Notes area. The guys handling this aspect are doing things that we’ve not done in Cliniko before, and while it’s exciting, it’s also difficult work. As we’re dealing with “graphical” data rather than text-based data, the saving and re-opening processes are quite a challenge! While it would be much easier to take a picture of the drawing you have created and attach it to the Note, we want you to be able to interact with that again, if need be.

We’re also currently implementing the same technology we are using on the appointment calendar for how these diagrams will appear on the webpage. This will ensure that selecting the right Template, then drawing, then saving will be as efficient as possible! While we have all this 100% planned, at the moment, programming always throws up new challenges, so we’ll continue to update everyone on this task as we move closer to it being launched!

Responsive Design

We’re almost there with a completely responsive Cliniko! As you will have noted, our visuals have undergone a huge transformation over the last 8 months, and for our clinics that have used Cliniko for a long time, a pretty unrecognisable Cliniko compared to when you started. All these changes are leading up to a Cliniko you can use comfortably on any device, as noted in our last major update, which will be a huge accessibility change.

As for right now, we’re finalising our design to the calendar as to how it will look on all devices, and also putting the finishing touches on the main navigation overlay (much like our blue sidebar on the desktop version) and the ‘wrapper’. These last two items will be what makes everything look fantastic on all devices, meaning that Cliniko won’t have the ‘zoomed out’ look that the desktop version currently has on a phone.

While this development will be coming very soon, I do have a sneak peek for you on how it will look. I’m hoping it will get you excited as to the capabilities and possibilities of how easy, efficient, and effective Cliniko will be on all devices. Here’s adding an appointment on an iPhone 5:

And here I’m changing the visible practitioners for the calendar, on an iPad:

We’re so very excited about this one, and we hope you’re ready for just how much of a positive impact this can have on the way your admin, practitioners, and the clinic as a whole can work with Cliniko!

And that’s it for this update! Also, you might have noticed that the blog looks a little different. I’m confident the new blog, and our ease of updating it, means you’ll hear a lot more from us now. Don’t forget you can subscribe to it too, by hitting the “Follow” button up the top of the page!