Near Field Communication Based Patient Appointment

Abstract

The current standard operating procedure in healthcare environment for patient registration and appointment scheduling are time consuming and somehow tiresome. Normally, we see patients coming to the hospital and filling out registration forms and waiting to be called or patient calls in for getting appointment and waits for the response for an agreed date. In some places appointment can be done online via web but still patient has to walk in with the appointment card to be swiped by the front desk personnel before being sent to the concerned doctor. In view of these problems, many techniques like online patient registration and scheduling appointment, etc., have been suggested to improve the work flow and thereby smoothen the waiting time. However, these systems still possess some drawbacks like facilities towards prioritization, security level of patient and also no reminder system present for these appointments. Considering these drawbacks, we here propose to develop an alternate patient appointment system using Near Field Communication (NFC) technique and Android enabled mobile application with a view to redefining the core of hospital waiting time towards appointment. The system here does not take into consideration towards implementing the prioritizing of appointment and early medicine collection for patients which would be part of another paper. The implementation be carried out in practice using appropriate NFC hardware, Php and MySQL database.