ClinicQ — Real-Time Digital Queue Management for Clinics
Eliminated waiting-room uncertainty for Indian clinics — patients get a live token, real-time ETA, and <500ms queue updates with zero account needed.
Goswami Meetpuri<500ms
Queue update latency
<10 sec
Patient registration time
0
No Account Needed — Device UUID only
Overview
Indian neighbourhood clinics see 30–150 walk-in patients daily with zero digital infrastructure. Patients take a paper token, sit in a crowded waiting room, and have no idea when they'll be called — could be 10 minutes or 2 hours. Receptionists manage everything via handwritten registers and shouting token numbers. The gap: existing solutions (hospital HMIS, WhatsApp groups, physical token machines) are either too expensive, manual, or hardware-dependent. No tool exists that's free to deploy, opens in any browser, and gives patients live visibility without creating an account. Process Benchmarked 4 existing solutions (HMIS, WhatsApp, token machines, SaaS) and documented why each fails a 1-doctor walk-in clinic before writing code. Key decisions: TanStack Start over Next.js for edge-native type safety; Supabase CDC over polling after measuring a 3–5s lag that made "live" feel dishonest. Scrapped patient auth entirely — a UUID in localStorage removes the biggest drop-off for elderly, low-tech users. Rewrote ETA mid-build: the admin slider was inaccurate. Replaced it with real average computed from the last 50 seen_at timestamps, filtering gaps above 45 minutes to exclude lunch breaks. Results Shipped a full product in one sprint — patient flow, receptionist dashboard, billing, reports, and settings. The Patient Waiting Room gets updated in real time with no refresh needed again and again, it auto updates. The Avg. Consultation and Wait Time are not hardcoded, they are calculated from last 50 entries. Key metrics: <500ms queue sync, <50ms cold start on Cloudflare edge, 0 REST endpoints, client-side PDF with no server cost, patient registration under 20 seconds with no account required. Open/close toggle broadcasts to all patient screens instantly via CDC. Reflection Dynamic Wait Times: Calculated wait times using real consultation intervals, filtering out long gaps like lunch breaks. TanStack Loaders: Used server-side loaders to prefetch queue status for instant page loads. Atomic State Updates: Structured database updates to atomically move patients from active consultation to done and promote the next waiting patient. Cookie Auth: Fixed cookie-based authentication middleware to prevent session drops during routing.