Q.Now

#1: Get Started
#2: Create an Account
#3: Select a Clinic
#4: Swipe to Queue
#5: Booking Confirmed
#6: Upcoming Appointments

Inspiration

In view of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Singapore healthcare service system has been brought out under the spotlight on several occasions. The simple procedure of visiting your nearest clinic has become the trending topic for conversations. Fears of contracting or spreading the infectious virus while queuing at the clinic has led patients to seek advanced booking and electronic queuing solutions in order to minimise their waiting time at the clinic. Observing this new phenomena, we saw an underlying concern that wait times at clinics all over Singapore was something that could be and should be avoided. In the context of the pandemic, such an issue leads to congregations of high risk individuals which increases the risk of transmission. Outside of that, it results in time wasted and patients having to endure their ailments outside the comfort of their homes. Having personally witnessed and experienced the excruciatingly long queues at clinics, we sought out a way for patients to have a smooth and delay-free process of obtaining medical attention.

What it does

Q.Now allows patients to make informed decisions based on the provided comparative analysis of waiting times and costs of nearby clinics. Our application allows patients to make advanced bookings in order to save precious personal time, as well as offering succinct summaries of various clinics in terms of relative cost and wait time, enabling patients to make informed decisions prioritising their needs.

Q.Now integrates the waiting time and rates of all clinics and the ability to make advance bookings all into one application. Thus, centralising all of that information into one platform

How we built it

We split into two teams: one focused on visualising and prototyping the product and the other focused on developing the business pitch slide deck, delegating manpower with prior experience to their respective tasks.

The technical team produced a Figma prototype to visualise how the user journey would look to succinctly illustrate the simple and hassle-free process of using the Q.Now app.

The business team conducted investigative surveys to gain a deeper understanding of the market gap. Subsequently, the team also performed a thorough analysis of our target market in order to evaluate the profitability of our product and identify our product differentiation factors. Lastly, we also used a predictive analysis model for financial projections based on existing companies that operated on a similar business model.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was how to develop a product that could benefit both patients and healthcare providers alike. Initially, we envisioned a product which, by providing real time data of the waiting time, would be able to improve the patient’s experience even with multiple pre-existing advanced booking and/or electronic queuing apps. However, such a solution does nothing to bring value to the clinics. After much brainstorming, we were able to synthesize these solutions to come up with a product that brings value to both parties in the transaction: patients get to enjoy a shorter, more efficient trip to the doctor’s while clinics can benefit from reduced administrative loads and improve their product by improving customer satisfaction.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

During our brainstorming efforts, we considered the possible challenges and opportunities that implementing Q.Now could bring to the table from a variety of viewpoints and used our takeaways from that to refurbish our product conceptualisation and business projections. One such revelation was that while our targeted users were the patients, our paying clients would actually be the various clinics. Therefore, it was crucial that our product have some sort of value proposition for these healthcare providers as well if we were to entice them to come onboard with the idea of our product. Furthermore, we also intentionally priced our commission-based pricing model at a much lower margin as we foresaw the possibility of governmental intervention due to the nature of healthcare as a necessary good in the economy.

What we learned

Despite the immense ratio of private GP clinics to public polyclinics (~1,800 to 23), polyclinics still remain oversubscribed. While its competitive prices and various government subsidies do play a role in drawing in clinic-goers seeking medical attention, there is a large group of neighbourhood clinics out there that offer affordable consultation fees which are underutilised. With Q.Now we hope to be able to bring more limelight to these neighbourhood clinics, alleviating the strain on the Singapore public healthcare system, especially in these trying times of the Covid-19 pandemic. Working on Q.Now has also allowed us to gain a deeper understanding about the field of healthcare and the tools available to us when we would require medical attention.

What's next for Q.Now

Integration of Cost Data so that patients can have an additional metric to evaluate their options with
Integration of other related services such as teleconsults, medicine delivery and e-commerce marketplace for wellness-related goods and services
Application of similar concept to other retail-based establishments (e.g. carparks, hawkers etc)