Patients can check clinic crowd and queue online, and receive queue notifications via text messages, in the comforts of their home

(Editor’s note: Here is an article from our archives which we think is still relevant)

On a fine day, when his baby fell ill, Online Travel Agency (OTA) veteran Frederick Wong took him to a clinic to consult the doctor. Upon reaching the clinic after travelling more than 30 minutes, he found himself squeezed in the huge crowd. Wong had to wait for more than two hours before his turn came.

“There was no way for me to be informed on the queue status beforehand,” Wong tells me. “It was particularly baffling to me as to why this problem exists even today. So, I set out and committed to solving this problem once and for all.”

Wong started ClickClinic in Singapore in late 2017. ClickClinic is a web-based real-time online queue and notification platform for clinics. Patients can check clinic crowd and queue online and receive queue notifications via text messages. It tells you how many patients are waiting for the doctor, so you can make better planning.

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“You can get a queue online for yourself and your loved ones without having to be at the clinic. We will send you real-time queue status notifications so you can stroll nearby the clinic vicinity at ease,” adds Wong, who previously worked at companies like OctopusTravel, Travelocity, and Expedia.

ClickClinic launched its first pilot in October this year. Wong claims currently it has a total of five clinics on board and has over 2,000 registered users.

“We recently on-boarded Island Family Clinic, which operates five clinics in Singapore. Thousands of their patients can now check their clinic crowd, get an online queue in the comfort of their home, and receive queue notifications nearer to their turn,” explains Wong, who until recently led the APAC business of OTA company TrustYou.

According to Wong, there are quite a few online doctor booking platforms in Singapore to help patients bypass long queues in clinics, but the majority of them are appointment and app-based.

“ClickClinic, on the other hand, is solving the problems of clinics. For our small market, there are over 20 million queue based visits per year. This does not include the queue-based specialists such as paediatricians, traditional Chinese medicines, vets and other queue-based alternative care providers,” he says. “Also, we find that is is not necessary to build an app for our use case, as it creates more friction than a web-based solution.”

ClickClinic considers itself a QaaS (Queue-As-A-Service), and charges an annual subscription fee from its clinic partners. The web app is free for the end customers.

“We are currently focused on growing in Singapore. Having said that, we already have enquiries coming from clinics in our neighbouring country,” he claims.

Talking about the challenges in the industry, Wong says that onboarding customers and training them is an arduous task. “B2B services require onboarding and training that I have very limited capacity. We can only grow as fast as I can onboard and train.”

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Bootstrapped so far, the venture is now seeking funding to grow quickly and aggressively. “Our product is now proven and scaling is now the priority for us. Hopefully, we will be able to get a good investor partner soon,” he signs off.

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