Anirudh Menon

City Care: Zero-Latency Clinic Queue Manager

Clinic waiting rooms are frustrating black boxes. Patients suffer from anxiety due to unknown wait times, while receptionists struggle with slow, click-heavy software that causes bottlenecks. Traditional systems require patients to download clunky apps or type complex passwords just to check their status. Furthermore, managing multiple doctors simultaneously often leads to empty rooms and wasted time. The goal was to build a zero-latency, frictionless load balancer that automates patient routing and provides real-time transparency without adding any administrative overhead. Process I started by designing an architecture to handle real-time concurrency: a decoupled Node.js backend and Next.js frontend, linked by WebSockets (Socket.io). I designed three portals: a keyboard-optimized Receptionist UI, a Public TV board, and a mobile Patient Tracker. To prevent race conditions from concurrent data entry, I structured the MongoDB schema with atomic compound unique indexes. Instead of hardcoding wait times, I wrote a backend algorithm to calculate a rolling average of recent completions, ensuring real-world accuracy. Finally, to eliminate onboarding friction, I engineered a "Magic Link" and QR code system using cryptographically secure hex codes, bypassing the need for patient accounts while maintaining absolute data privacy. Results The final product is a highly efficient, enterprise-grade queue manager. The receptionist workflow was optimized to sub-3 seconds using just "Enter" and "Spacebar". The multi-room algorithm successfully load-balances patients across available doctors instantly. The Public TV and Patient Trackers update with zero latency. Wait times dynamically adjust based on real clinic data. Most importantly, patient onboarding friction was reduced to zero through secure, 1-click magic links, proving that complex healthcare tech can be both highly secure and deeply accessible. Reflection If I had more time, I would introduce a "Doctor Terminal" (a simple tablet UI in the room) so doctors can trigger the "Finished" state themselves, entirely removing the receptionist bottleneck. To scale the system for a massive hospital network, I would integrate Redis to handle WebSocket broadcasting across multiple distributed Node.js instances. Finally, while the QR code and Magic Link simulator work perfectly for this MVP, I would fully integrate the Twilio API to automatically blast these secure URLs directly to patients via SMS the second they check in.