Hospital Appointments Scheduling and Monitoring App (Oasis)
Often times, people in different parts of Uganda need access to specialised treatment and consultancy in hospitals, which often times are found in urban centres. In order to meet a specialist, one needs to book an appointment in order to be attended to. However, often times people are inconvenienced by long queues, wrong days for such an appointment and the lack of knowledge of whether they can be attended to or not. This may hence result into people missing an appointment on a given day, and they have to wait for another on a different day or week. Some people may not even know which exact health centres or hospitals they have to visit for such services. This results into one facility being over flocked, yet the traffic could be shared amongst other hospitals. In extreme cases, one may have to drive to the hospital 2 to 3 times before securing a viable appointment slot with the specialist.
We are proposing a Hospital Appointments Scheduling and Monitoring App (Oasis), that shall help to mitigate this problem. The App shall handle creation of a patient profile, where the patient shall be assigned a unique Patient Identification Number. The user shall be able to specify a date and time they’d like to meet the specialist. The app shall then provide a list of hospitals that have the required service, based on the proximity of the patient and availability of an appointment slot on such a day and time. The user shall select the slot that works for them, and the appointment shall be either confirmed or denied by the hospital. Upon confirmation, the user shall be notified of such an appointment, and the app shall do routine reminders for the patient. When the hospital visits the hospital, they present their patient identification number. A search through the App’s database id made and the appointment is confirmed. After the service, the user can then rate the quality of service received.