Queue Cure '26 — Real-time Clinic Queue Management

Millions of clinics in India still use paper token slips and manual calling. Patients wait 2-3 hours with zero visibility into their position. Receptionists manage everything from memory — no dashboard, no estimated wait time, no system. Process Started by identifying the core problem: not long queues, but information asymmetry. Patients have no data; receptionists have all of it. Chose WebSockets over polling immediately — the live sync requirement needed push-based updates, not repeated fetching. Built frontend first with mock data, then replaced every state mutation with socket events. Deployed frontend on Vercel, backend on Render as a persistent Node.js server. What didn't work: tried deploying both on Vercel — WebSockets require a persistent server, which Vercel doesn't support. Switched backend to Render. Results Both screens update in under 100ms when "Call Next" is clicked — no refresh, no polling. Wait time calculates dynamically from real queue data. Concurrency lock prevents duplicate advances on rapid clicks. Patient reconnecting mid-session immediately sees correct state via REST hydration + on-connect socket emit. Reflection Add Redis for state persistence so a server restart doesn't reset the queue. Add PIN-based auth on the receptionist screen. Replace manual token entry with SMS delivery so patients don't need their paper slip to track their wait.