Jeevan Ram P B I

Clinic-Queue Manager

In neighbourhood clinics, patients crowd the reception desk asking "how long?" — while the receptionist manually tracks tokens on paper or memory. There's no way for patients waiting outside or on their phone to see their position or estimated wait time. This causes repeated interruptions, confusion when tokens are skipped, and a poor experience for both staff and patients. We built a live digital queue so reception controls everything from one screen and patients follow along on their phone and thus, no app download needed. Process We started by mapping the clinic flow: patient arrives → gets token → waits → called in → consultation. The receptionist needs speed (add patient in under 10 seconds); patients need visibility without refreshing. We chose Django for a fast backend and Server-Sent Events for live sync. On deploy, SSE broke across multiple Gunicorn workers — we fixed it with instant API response updates plus 2-second polling as a fallback. Wait time uses real data: patients ahead × average minutes. After 2+ completed visits today, it switches from the receptionist's configured average to today's measured consultation duration — not a hardcoded guess. We built 4 screens: reception desk, waiting room display, patient get-token (self-service), and per-token tracking. Deployed free on Render for online Results Reception can add a patient and assign a token in under 10 seconds (name + Enter). Patient screens update live within 2 seconds when "Call next" is clicked — no page refresh. Wait estimates use patients ahead × effective average; after 2+ visits, measured today's pace replaces the configured default. Live demo: https://clinic-queue-manager-9me2.onrender.com/ GitHub: https://github.com/jeevanrampbi/Clinic-Queue-Manager Next time: SMS/WhatsApp token alerts, multi-doctor queues, and Postgres for persistent data on free hosting. Reflection I'd use Redis or polling from day one (SSE failed across Gunicorn workers on deploy), switch to Postgres for persistent data, and add SMS/WhatsApp alerts so patients don't need to keep the page open. I'd also add reception login and multi-doctor queue support for a real clinic rollout.