Queueless

Doctor appointments now made queue-less.

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Inspiration

hospital-image

The above image is a very common scene for anyone who visits government hospitals frequently. The long never ending queues for getting appointments in government hospitals across India are conspicuous. Long Queues, and a large crowd are some problems that you have to face once you enter there. Few days ago one of our teammates encountered this situation. He waited for hours just to get a receipt from reception so that he could wait for some more time before finally meeting the doctor. So, whether the department you need to visit barely has any patients but you need to go through this queue. You have to wait for your turn frustratingly to meet the doctor and in the worst case it might happen that before your turn comes, the doctor ends that day’s meeting and all your waiting goes into vain. So we thought of a way to automate this process and save people from unwanted rush and waiting time in queues. So we finally came up with "Queueless", an app which automates this task and comes along with some additional handy features.

What it does

Queueless is a single click appointment booking application for multiple hospitals across the country. It’s an easy to use application to look for hospitals, book an appointment and track the appointment. The latter feature makes the app special as it brings down the waiting time for the patient and avoids the heavy crowd in hospitals especially in the times we are facing currently. Queueless in it’s beginning stages will provide a certain percentage of slots to be booked online depending on the decision by hospital authorities and public convenience.

Queueless is an app which lets users book some fraction of appointments online just like IRCTC. So all those people who want an appointment can do it from here without struggling in the queue .

Queueless is not just limited to slot booking but it aims to give all the features an user looks for in a health app. As it's in early stage we are including a health related article section and covid dashboard (considering current scenario). But in future more such features will be included as well.

How we built it

The application is divided into three different modules based on the user types.

  1. The super user
    2. The super user can be a hospital or a clinic which can add the doctors, departments, schedules .
  2. Doctor
    3. The doctor can manage daily appointments, set availability .
  3. Normal User
    4. The user can book the appointments , make payments , track the appointment status ,check the estimated appointment time etc.

The user will be routed to a module based on the credential. A user can add a new account only as a normal user. The super user will be registered with the app separately and the doctor’s credentials can only be created by the super user. The login and signup procedure is done using OTP verification on the registered mobile number every time a user logins .The user will be prompted to fill required details the first time the user logs in. Doctors cannot create credentials directly; this will be handled by the super user. There will be separate views rendered based on user level.

Views based on user level :

  1. Super User :
    2. The super user will be provided the option to add, update and delete the departments, doctors and the schedules based on availability to provide better service to patients.
  2. Doctor :
    3. The doctor can see daily appointments ,can set the availability status as :
    1. Not available :
      2. In case Doctor will not be available throughout the day.
    2. Away :
      3. In case the doctor has encountered an emergency and has to leave for sometime.
    3. Active :
      4. The doctor is available.

    The doctor can also check the appointment history for reference.

  3. Normal User
    4. The user will be provided the option to select hospitals to book appointments, Read health related articles, Get corona stats and lookup the appointment history.
Although All the user level will have the option to edit their profiles.

Appointment Booking : The users will have the option to choose the hospital according to their convenience .Based on the selection of the specialities present in the hospital and after selecting speciality the corresponding doctor details and the available timing slots will be displayed. The timings will be provided automatically based on the First Come First Serve basis.

Payment : After selecting the desired doctor and appointment timings the user will be navigated to the payment screen . The payments can be made by any UPI application, Credit, Debit cards or net banking. The appointment will only be made after successful payment completion.

Frameworks and APIs Used : We have used flutter for application development as it is a powerful cross platform hybrid application framework and quite popular nowadays. We have used certain free APIs to get covid stats and hospital information.

Challenges we ran into

While brainstorming about the idea we faced certain challenges about the feasibility of the idea and about making it easy to use for all. The selection of UI which makes everything self explanatory was really challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It’s really great for us that we have completed the application within the stipulated time period. Making an application for the real world always comes with lots of challenges and hidden use cases where the solution fails. We are really proud that we have tried our best to consider almost all the cases after heated discussions. We are proud to design the system after obliviating certain classes which we were considering important at first thus making the system light and more efficient. We are proud that the UI which we were visualising in our minds is no longer needed to be visualised. We are proud that we are the ones who observed the problem everyone is facing and came up with a solution to make everyone’s life a bit easier .

What we learned

These 48 hours were just like a rollercoaster ride for us .The way we used to think was completely theoretical and things are totally different out there. The condition which we always consider ideal in theory is no more ideal and this opens the scope of whole new learning. Considering all the scenarios while implementing the code. We learnt how to take care of server errors, UI breakdown error, server error codes and much more in order to create a robust application. All of this made us better and now we have quite a gist of application development for real world scenarios.

What's next for Queueless

The project Queueless seems highly scalable and can be expanded across multiple dimensions of the health sector. Some of the future addons which we would love to introduce are :

  1. Book a live chat or on-call appointment with the doctor.
  2. Paperless prescription of drugs.
  3. The data collected can be used to analyse which disease is widespread in the society and then get to the reason behind the cause.
  4. Live counselling sessions from psychiatrists to the patients.
  5. Connecting the application with smart bands to provide a deep insight of heart rates, blood oxygen levels etc. which will definitely help the doctor to diagnose the disease in a better manner.
  6. Book the body scans and tests online as the doctor suggests.

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