Aryajeet Jha

QueueCure — Live Queue Manager for Neighbourhood Clinics

76% of India's 1.5 million neighbourhood clinics run on paper token slips and verbal announcements. Patients wait 2–3 hours with zero visibility into when they'll be called. Receptionists juggle everything from memory — no dashboard, no estimates, no system. The result is anxiety for patients and chaos for staff. The problem isn't the paper. It's the information asymmetry: the receptionist knows everything, the patient knows nothing. Process I started by reframing the brief — the real problem isn't digitising a token, it's making queue state a shared, live resource visible to everyone simultaneously. I chose Socket.io over polling because 50 patients refreshing every 5 seconds is 600 wasted requests per minute; a push model means updates hit every screen in milliseconds with zero redundant load. I designed a single queue:state broadcast instead of granular events so clients can never fall out of sync — every mutation re-fetches from DB and pushes the full state. Wait time is computed as position × avgConsultTime, dynamic and recalculated the moment the receptionist changes the average. I used a MongoDB transaction for "Call Next" to prevent race conditions if two receptionists click simultaneously. Results A receptionist can add a patient and assign a token in under 10 seconds — name field auto-focuses on load, Enter submits, focus returns automatically. The patient-facing screen updates in under 1 second of "Call Next" being clicked, with no refresh. Wait time is computed live from real position data and adjustable average consultation time — not a hardcoded estimate. The system handles queue reset, reconnection recovery, and empty queue states gracefully. Built and deployed end-to-end in one hackathon cycle. Reflection I would add authentication with role-based access so only authorized staff can access the receptionist view. I'd integrate SMS or WhatsApp notifications so patients don't have to watch the screen. I would build doctor-specific queues to support multi-department clinics, add a priority lane for emergency patients, and implement pause/resume so the queue can be frozen during breaks. I'd also build an analytics dashboard to track peak hours and average wait times, maintain patient visit history, add audio announcements when tokens are called, and provide daily exports as CSV or PDF for record kee