At Dialogue, we always want to provide our patients with the best care when they need it. To do that, we provide our Medical Team with the tools and information they need. One piece of information that we’ve been getting manually is a patient’s location when they contact our medical team. This is important since regulation around which doctor can provide care is based on the patient’s current location, regardless of where they live.

If a patient lives in Ontario and visits Montreal (in Quebec) for a week, then a doctor licensed in Quebec would be the one providing care. The rules are a little more complicated and apply to all licensed healthcare professionals, but allow us to operate in more provinces with the same Medical Team.

What we need is a quick and easy way to locate a patient and inform the Medical Team so they can direct the patient to the correct professional. Since the patient’s location is needed every time they interact with our team, we’re using the geolocation from the patient’s device. This requires asking the user for permission to access their location:

We chose to do this during sign up since the first thing we encourage our patients to do is chat with our Medical Team, who will need the patient’s location.

On both iOS and Android devices, we need to ask the user’s explicit permission to access their location. The flow is the same on both platforms.

If a patient declines or skips this step, we would ask them for their location later on as they start chatting with the Medical Team.

If a patient declines to give us permission, on iOS we would need to send the user to the Settings app to turn on the setting. On Android, there are different behaviours depending on the type of phone the user has. Some act the same way as iOS, while others use the default Android system’s permission structure and allow the permission to be asked multiple times.