Appointment scheduling enabled through the Communications platform as a service (CPaaS) allows healthcare organizations to ensure patients receive consultation booking reminders in advance, receive multiple reminders before the booking, and minimize no-shows. 

Many healthcare businesses turn to CPaaS technology when appointments play a key role in medical assistance, customer satisfaction, and service delivery. Enabled by CPaaS, a service-related appointment system integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) and SMS capabilities can be the key to boosting customer experience. 

Communication service providers are helping organizations realize their full potential by delivering valuable appointment scheduling capabilities with Vox CPaaS API. With the help of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and NLP (Natural Language Processing), a virtual assistant can chat with customers in rich human-like conversation to: 

1. Schedule new appointments 

2. Modify existing ones 

3. Provide appointment reminders 

4. Confirm upcoming appointments 

Automated Scheduling: 

The enterprise CPaaS enables intelligent end-to-end journeys and offers a central platform for building and configuring communication-enabled applications. The platform acts as a connecting link between organizations’ back-end systems and communication channels, providing a single platform that lays a foundation for delivering a holistic user experience. 

Here are three capabilities that enable enterprises to design intelligent automated scheduling systems using CPaaS: 

1. Integrations: CPaaS enables enterprises to connect customer interactions with different business and partner systems. Inbound integrations enable business systems to trigger communications while outbound integrations permit data lookups, updates, automating scheduling appointments. 

2. Bi-directional communication: The platform supports bi-directional communications, enabling two-way interactions between doctor and patient using APIs, webhooks, and other integration technologies. 

3. Visual flow builder: The centrepiece of the CPaaS platform is its low-code flow builder that can be deployed by anyone with no developer experience. The low-code builder helps enterprises to automate and intelligently send appointment reminders. A large variety of pre-built functionality and logic appear as visual building blocks that developers can quickly drag and drop into their systems. These include AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) capabilities, channels, communication rules, customer preferences, and more. 

API security for authenticating patients: 

With the rise of many cloud communications, API security has become a general concern for enterprises, especially in the healthcare industry where data has to be protected. 

CPaaS and APIs offer benefits including improved productivity, third-party integrations, and protecting endpoints from any potential security risks. 

CPaaS allows native integration of communication capability with simple API interactions so that developers can deploy capabilities quickly and customize them as per business needs, without sending customers to other applications. 

As developers write code to interact with CPaaS API, it becomes necessary for organizations to ensure that the specifications follow API security best practices, such as requiring authentication, and the API actually matches the specification. 

CPaaS APIs powered with security come with strong authentication as well as TLS (Transport layer security) and a good Content Data Network (CDN) to provide the best web application firewall services (WFS) keeping cloud API and CPaaS implementations secure. 

An Interactive voice response (IVR) layered over the top of the SMS can allow customers to dial a phone call and get access to all the features provided via text SMS. 

Vox CPaaS SMS APIs can “read between the lines”, and identify the user needs that they might not know to express directly. On the other side, Vox CPaaS APIs give experienced developers the control to create custom robust omnichannel applications at ease.