Seven kinds of fifteen minutes

A practice with more than 15,000 patients has the same problem as a popular restaurant, except all day long: everyone calls at once. The front desk at Huisartsen ’t Zuid is open from 8 to 12 and from 2 to 6, the line closes over lunch, and in between 50 to 100 appointments a day have to find a place in the diary.

The practice goes back to December 1966, when Dr Jacques Coupez started out on the edge of the Muinkpark in Ghent. In 1973 it moved to a new building in the Hertstraat, in 2014 to the Zebrastraat. Every move was a move to more room. In 2019 came the next one: room in the diary, without the phone.

Booking online starts with knowing who is booking. A new patient fills in first name, surname and date of birth, their email address twice and a password twice. Forget the password and a new one lands in your inbox. “My account” is where you change your details and that password later on.

There is no puzzle with traffic lights to prove you are human, just one field you cannot see. If something fills it in, it was not a patient. Beyond that, nothing on the page is measuring you: no trackers, no cookie banner, one cookie that keeps you logged in. That, too, counts as looking after people.

Once inside you make two choices. Your doctor first — or “any doctor”, because people who feel awful rarely care about the name on the door. Then the reason for your visit, and every reason carries its own length. A standard consultation takes fifteen minutes, and those fifteen minutes are exactly what the diary sets aside. The practice puts it more bluntly itself: fifteen minutes, two complaints maximum.

Those two choices decide what you get to see. Pick one doctor and you look at one diary. Pick “any doctor” and the grid looks across all of them at once, which is usually the fastest route to a slot this week.

That grid holds seven days side by side, Sunday to Saturday, each one a column of quarter hours. You page through with “previous week” and “next week”, jump straight back to today, or type a date if you already know when you can make it. Today is marked, so nobody books themselves into last Tuesday.

On a phone it becomes one day at a time, with arrows either side. Seven columns of quarter hours on a three-inch screen has never made anyone feel better.

Clicking a free quarter opens a panel with everything you picked: doctor, reason, date, time. Confirm, and it appears in the practice diary at the same moment as in yours. No phone, no hold music, no “let me just check that for you”.

What the system does not do, the practice does. They would rather you cancel at least two hours ahead, and not turning up costs you money. That is not a technical limit, that is politeness with a price tag.

On the practice side a quarter of an hour is never an empty box. It can be open for booking, it can be a walk-in consultation, it can be held back for the front desk, closed, holiday, fully booked or doubled up. Seven statuses, each with its own colour, so that one look at the screen tells you how the day is going.

Which is necessary, because the timetable is anything but a grid. One doctor works 8 to 12 and 3 to 7, another 9 to 1, and it differs per day of the week. The diary simply has to follow that, without someone rebuilding it every Monday morning.

That day view puts all the doctors next to each other, quarter by quarter. Anyone who would rather follow a single diary switches to the week view of one doctor. Top right sits a refresh button, because in a practice something changes during a single phone call. The front desk looks a patient up, drops an appointment in or takes it back out — exactly what it would do at the counter, minus the sticky notes.

When it comes to appointments, this does everything a classic, off-the-shelf booking platform does. That is not a selling point, that is the floor. The difference sits somewhere else.

A standard platform lets you choose from what it already does. The practice shifts towards the product: you translate the way you work into whatever fields happen to exist, and whatever is missing you keep on paper. We work the other way round. What we build is allowed to be different for every client, because no two practices run the same way. That is rarely stubbornness; it is how they are organised.

Which is why the quarter hours here are counted the way this practice counts them, the statuses are called what the front desk calls them, and something can be added when something needs adding. Not because it was on a vendor’s roadmap, but because somebody asked.

The practice website is WordPress. The appointment module is a separate application in Kirby, in its own folder, with its own login and its own session. We host both. The last change to the stylesheet is dated February 2025, which says enough: this is not a museum piece, it is a tool.

We build this kind of thing more often — software somebody sits in every day: time sheets for an agency, registrations for a golf day. Rarely spectacular, always in use. And at the bottom of huisartsgent.be it still says “Launched by Major Tom”. Seven years on, we are fine with leaving that there.