Emerdency was founded by dental practitioners who identified two major problems in the provision of emergency dental care: 1) the many disconnected practices and disparate (and often opaque) pricing structures leave those in need of care at short notice with too great a task in determining the most appropriate and affordable route to treatment in their area; 2) dental practices, stuck on outdated and closed booking systems, struggle to fill booking vacancies at short notice, especially when imminent appointments are cancelled.
The founders at Emerdency, confident that the answer to both these problems lay in new technology, asked Cool Hand Studios to build a system that pools dentists’ availability information and steers those in need of emergency treatment (clients) towards reputable practices (providers) close by that can offer an appointment at short notice.
Providers who join the Emerdency platform begin by registering their details. Once registered, a provider simply posts their booking vacancies to the system, which then updates its availability database for reference in client searches. When making a search, clients need simply input their postcode, travel radius (miles), and an optional stipulation for wheelchair access and the system generates a list of nearby appointment openings, with details accessible following the payment of a small fee.
The platform notifies Emerdency when a client search is made in a region not covered by Emerdency-affiliated dentists, or where affiliated dentists in the area have no openings posted. In the former case, these notifications are a useful measure of unserved countrywide demand and a guide in marketing to providers in new regions; in the latter, the Emerdency staff can contact nearby affiliated providers to check for any unposted openings and alert the client when an appointment is found.