Clinic Booking and Live Queue

Every branch booked appointments by phone, and only during opening hours. At peak times calls queued and went unanswered, and reception spent most mornings on the phone while patients waited at the desk.

In 2020, crowded waiting rooms became a real risk, just as patients most needed to keep their distance. Regular patients asked to see their own doctor without travelling, and India’s new telemedicine guidelines made that possible, but the clinics had no way to offer it. Missed appointments left gaps in the calendar that nobody could fill in time.

We spent mornings at the front desks of two branches before designing anything. Four things stood out.

• Reception was doing three jobs at once: answering phones, checking in walk-ins and taking payments, all at the same counter.
• Paper tokens hid the real wait. When a doctor ran late, nobody waiting knew, and the questions at the desk kept coming.
• Schedules lived in different places. Doctors who worked at more than one branch were sometimes booked at two branches at once.
• No-shows were invisible until the slot was already lost. Nobody had confirmed in advance, so nobody could offer the slot to someone else.

We gave the whole group one clinic appointment booking system: a booking website, a patient app for Android and iPhone, and one shared calendar for every doctor at every branch.

Each doctor’s calendar holds their hours at each branch and their video consultation times. Slot rules follow how the clinic actually works:

• new consultations, follow-ups and procedures each have their own length;
• some slots are kept for walk-ins and emergencies;
• a doctor’s leave or late start updates every affected booking at once.

Patients choose a branch, a speciality, a doctor and a time, in the clinic or by video. One account can book for the whole family, and every family member keeps their own history. Reception uses a console that shows the whole day across branches and books walk-ins into the same calendar.

The live queue replaced paper tokens. Every patient gets a token when they book or check in, and the system tracks how fast each doctor is actually seeing patients that day.

Patients see their place in the queue and their expected waiting time on their phone, with a notification when they are a few patients away. They arrive when the doctor is ready instead of waiting in a crowded room. If a doctor is running late, every waiting patient is told at once, without a single phone call from reception. A screen at each branch shows the queue for each doctor.

Video consultations run inside the patient app and the browser, under India’s Telemedicine Practice Guidelines of 2020. Before the call, the patient gives consent and their identity is confirmed. During the call, the doctor sees the patient’s history beside the video.

After the call, the doctor issues an e-prescription that carries the doctor’s name, qualifications and registration number, as the guidelines require. It reaches the patient in the app and as a PDF, and video follow-ups can be booked straight from the prescription.

Reminders go out by SMS and WhatsApp the day before each appointment and on the morning of it. Each reminder carries a link to confirm, move or cancel.

When a patient cancels or moves, the slot returns to the calendar straight away and can be offered to patients waiting for an earlier appointment. Reception sees who has confirmed and who hasn’t, and calls only the few who haven’t replied.

Video consultations are paid online when booking. In-clinic visits can be prepaid or paid at the desk, and every payment produces a receipt in the app.

Each patient’s visit history, prescriptions and uploaded reports stay together, so the doctor sees the full picture at the next visit, whether in the clinic or on video.

The patient app is built in React Native for Android and iPhone, and the booking website and staff consoles in React. A NestJS API on Node.js sits on PostgreSQL, with Redis and Socket.IO keeping the live queue current on every screen.

Video calls run on Agora, and SMS and WhatsApp messages go out through Twilio and the WhatsApp Business API. Everything is hosted on AWS in India. Patient data is encrypted in transit and at rest, every staff role sees only what it needs, and every access to a patient record is logged.

One branch went first. For two weeks, reception ran the new system alongside the phones while we fixed what they found. Each branch then switched in turn, with its reception team trained on the console beforehand and posters at the desk inviting patients to book online next time.

Patients now book, move and cancel at any hour without calling, and arrive when their doctor is ready. Waiting rooms stay calm, doctors see their regular patients by video when travel isn’t needed, and every branch shares one calendar that can’t double-book. Reception spends its mornings with the patients in front of it instead of on the phone.