STOWE, VT, March 18 - As widespread testing for COVID-19 becomes increasingly critical for the health of our communities, Inntopia has released TestLink, a free scheduling platform that allows patients to search for testing locations and times across individual or multiple locations. The system, built on Inntopia’s activity booking platform, is typically used for scheduling ski lessons or tee-times. However, as the challenges of testing escalated in Vermont, where Inntopia is headquartered, its CEO, Trevor Crist, saw an opportunity to help.
“We have always been involved in our community, but we really felt helpless. Saturday, as we watched coverage of testing issues, the lightbulb went on. Within 48 hours over a weekend our team came together to adapt our activity booking system to an appointment booking system in anticipation of challenges in scheduling patients that we believe will occur as testing kits become widely available Our system solves the unique challenges of searching for available testing across multiple locations, and is built to handle the high volumes of inquiries that have traditionally been common in travel bookings, but are not typical in scheduling medical appointments,” said Crist.
Inntopia’s technology is traditionally used to bridge multiple activity providers or hotels, so a guest can search for many different products from a single location. In this case, someone qualifying for testing could search for appointment times across multiple clinics or hospitals to find an available slot rather than have to call or search multiple clinics individually.
TestLink can be used by individual clinics, hospitals, or other agencies to either schedule testing appointments at their own locations, or by agencies and community organizations wanting to have a single resource for searching for available times across multiple locations.
Inntopia is also making their call center application available so clinics, government agencies, and other organizations handling or coordinating testing can take reservations over the phone and have those feed into the same system and availability calendar. TestLink can be customized with unique screening questions based on testing requirements in various states and regions. It can easily be deployed to at-home and remote workers, who can typically be trained on its use in less than a day.
“We are making this available free of charge initially, and our goal is to keep this free for clinics for as long as we can feasibly support it. At some point we may need to consider how we take on new users, but right now we’re simply trying to get it into as many hands as possible to ease the burden on the healthcare professionals who are on the front line of this.” said Crist. “We hope that having a scheduling system available will reduce the need for people to gather in lines to await testing.”
Inntopia has set up a small website with details about the project and a form that interested clinics can use to request more information: corp.inntopia.com/testlink