Patient-doctor online appointment system

Abstract

There is a great demand for online doctor appointment systems such as the patient-doctor appointment system. This is because many Ugandans are shifting from the brick and mortar system of making appointments physically. Existing patient-doctor appointment systems have many limitations that hinder real time chat, notifications and video sessions with the doctors. It is upon this background that we undertook this project with the objective of developing a web based Patient-Doctor Online Appointment System, which enables end-users to make appointments with specialist doctors from their places of convenience. During the system requirements extraction phase, qualitative and quantitative data was collected through studying documentation, interviewing and online questionnaires. Data analysis was done using Google Forms, and the findings showed that most of the respondents were willing to embrace the culture of online patient-doctor appointment systems. The system design (logical design and physical design) was done through process modeling which was achieved using context diagrams, Level 1 Data Flow Diagrams(DFD) and the Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD). The system was implemented using a number of tools and technologies such as MySQL, HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and Bootstrap. An early system prototype was uploaded online for user testing and validation. It is highly recommended that hospitals, doctors and patients embrace the system to make scheduling of appointments easier and better.