Medical Non-Profit

A Doodle User Experience Study

Doodle spoke with a medical non-profit focused on connecting research and innovation in cancer care with community physicians across the country, by offering continuing medical education sessions and events at all of its network sites. It’s important work - and none of it can happen without precise, effective scheduling.

We spoke to the non-profit’s external network liaison, Erik Frederick, about how Doodle Premium has simplified their scheduling.

Manage meetings across different calendars and software, smoothly.

Erik faces a typical challenge for non-profit organizations working with a range of external stakeholders: calendar access. Scheduling events means bringing doctors and educators from various institutions to network sites across six different states: there are typically a lot of calendars and incompatible software at play! Before Doodle, a lengthy back-and-forth over email was the only way to find a meeting time. Erik described it as, ‘...a juggling of calendars...batting schedules around.’ Doodle allows Erik to bypass the email back and forth. And, once a time has been confirmed, the meeting automatically syncs across all the participants’ calendars.

Doodle takes the pain out of medical scheduling.

As a liaison at a medical non-profit, Erik has another scheduling challenge to deal with - working with doctor’s notoriously tight calendars. Most doctors’ calendars are packed with clinic days; what’s more, it’s impossible to reschedule any clinic days within a three-month time frame. As a result, most meetings are organized with a very long lead time. Doodle polls have smoothed the process of planning meetings up to 9 months out; the Doodle dashboard provides an at-a-glance summary of all future meetings, not just the meetings scheduled in the next week or month.

"Because a lot of doctors, at least here, are not supposed to schedule anything within 3 months... That’s a big component of why I use this as well."

Integrate Doodle seamlessly into the lean methodology.

Doodle has proven entirely compatible with the non-profit’s internal commitment to lean methodology, a business methodology targeted at improving value for customers through continuously optimizing workplace processes. Before Doodle, says Erik, scheduling ‘...was one of the more painful things for the group to do, to kind of see this schedule, get these scheduled and execute on these education pieces, so this is right now one of the huge improvements removing a lot of waste and adding value to the process.

Use cases: team meeting, external stakeholders, one-on-ones, training sessions, appointment bookings