Queue Cure 🏥

Hospital waiting rooms are broken. Patients sit anxiously with no idea how long they'll wait, constantly approaching reception to ask "how many more?" disrupting staff workflow. Receptionists juggle paper token slips, manual calling, and verbal updates across a crowded room. There's no system: tokens get skipped, patients miss their turn, and average wait times balloon due to miscommunication. Process I mapped two user types — receptionist and waiting patient — and identified their core needs separately. Receptionist: issue token, call next, done. Patient: where am I, how long, am I next? Chose React + Firebase Realtime Database because the problem was fundamentally about live sync — both screens updating the moment "Call Next" is clicked. Split into two dedicated routes after realizing a single screen couldn't serve both users well. Tried CSS polling for sync first — it broke under rapid clicks. Switched to Firebase's onValue listener, which solved it cleanly. Final decision: viewport-relative units throughout so the waiting room display works on both a TV and a phone without a separate layout. Results Delivered a fully live-synced queue system where both screens update in under 1 second of clicking "Call Next." Receptionist can register a patient and call the next token in 3 taps. Waiting room displays accurate position and estimated wait time to every patient in real time. If I were to do this differently, I'd add a patient self-check-in flow from day one — several test users immediately asked if they could get their token from their phone without approaching reception. Reflection I underestimated how much patients wanted independence. I built the system assuming reception would always issue tokens — but the first time someone used it, they immediately asked "can I just get my token from my phone?" I'd start with a patient self-check-in screen on day one, not as an afterthought. I'd also add an offline fallback. Firebase drops on poor clinic Wi-Fi and right now the whole system freezes — a local queue cache with sync-on-reconnect would make it production-ready.