Inspiration
Booking the dental check is a pain in the ass. You get first added to a queue and then afterwards they try to sort you out some appointment. And even then the appointment ends up being at some inappropriate time. Because of those reasons I didn't see the dentist for 6 years.
The same time my girlfriend, who is a dentist, keeps complaining about people who cancel a day before or even a couple hours before the appointment. She spends every week many hours doing nothing at the clinic.
Then I realized I can solve the problem for the both of us. I want the visit to the dentist be so easy that I just wake up to an alarm telling me "You will have an appointment in 2 hours." So combining the impatient patients and the cancelled appointments we can make everyone happy.
What it does
Whenever there is a cancellation, a message will be sent to the users who need a certain health check. The users can then choose to go if the time is suitable. It makes the regular health checks so effortless for the patients that they will actually have them. And it will also keep the efficiency of a clinic high - as the cancelled time slots can be filled up.
Example: Imagine you're at work and the app tells you "You haven't been to the dentist now for 3 years. There is a free appointment in 2 hours nearby, would you like to have it?" -> One click and you'll just drop by the clinic during your lunch hour. Hard to come up with excuses and you actually start getting your regular health checks done once again.
How I built it
It's written with React. The current Heroku hosted app doesn't have a backend and is just a prototype.
Challenges I ran into
The design still needs polishing. The concept is good but the app is a bit too complicated at its current form.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
It was built in less than 20 hours from a scratch. I made alone the design and programming - while my girlfriend helped with the concept and was a source of information.
What I learned
I'm surprised such systems haven't been developed yet. But as my girlfriend said, the doctor's time is too valuable for starting to randomly call around if anyone would be interested in a cancelled appointment. I also learned the importance of clean code - there were moments I was tempted on throwing my computer to the wall.
What's next for EasyClinic
EasyClinic will need real users - and a backend. It's likely it will be actually built because it received a lot of praises when explained to some friends at the Dentists' Expo that's now the same time as Junction. It really seems the cancelled dental checks are a big issue, especially at HUS. There are a lot of dentistry students who complain they don't get enough patients. I hope we can change that.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.