Zappointments.com announces secure chat

Zappointments.com, Canada's online appointment scheduling service, announces a new secure chat feature to complement its secure messaging service.

May 19, 2004 -- Zappointments.com http://www.zappointments.com announces their new secure chat application. This service will allow secure chat sessions for health care service providers to converse with patients using a secure system.

Dr. Zal Saper, President of parent company psycorps.com Inc, thinks this feature will prove popular. "There are other sevices that provide only secure chat applications, or secure messaging, while we are providing secure appointment booking, secure messaging, a free web page for health care providers, and the new secure chat system. We think this new feature is a winner." Saper stated. "Our emphasis has always been on reliability, security, and privacy. We also keep our appointment booking pages accessible by hand-held devices, so that people on the move can use them to book appointments. We are offering the new secure chat service free with a subscription to zappointments.com, which is still at a special low price of $30.00 per year."

The secure chat system is designed to require a secure connection between the server and the browsers of the users, strictly enforce anonymity of clients to each other while permitting health care professionals to be visible, encrypt data (using AES) on the server, and automatically delete chat records after a few minutes. Saper noted "This system is not designed to have all the bells and whistles, because all of those things introduce risk to the end users. For example, we didn't build in the ability to have group sessions, because we wanted to keep the risk to privacy to a minimum. This system is designed to do one thing well, and that is to protect the privacy of patients."

When asked what types of clients or patients might use this service, Saper answered, "This is a system that might be used by individuals who are in remote locations, who need to have their weekly psychotherapy session but who are out of town, or who are wanting to discuss things with a health care provider and are already on the Internet pretty well 24 hours per day."

Zappointments.com was one of the first appointment scheduling services and the only one to use a patent-pending method for secure appointment scheduling. Zappointments.com is a division of psycorps.com Inc., a Vancouver-based IT and ecommerce company, which also runs a variety of other Internet sites. The company can be reached at 604-681-6902 or on the net at http://www.zappointments.com .