Design and Implementation of a Secure Web-Based Healthcare Appointment Booking System

Hospitals and patients benefit from accuracy and promptness in appointments, benefiting from both a measurable operational savings and a measurable patient savings. No shows are often as high as 20 to 30 per cent in outpatient facilities in India where scheduling is primarily done over the telephone, leading to wasted clinical time and patient not receiving care. This paper puts forward the design, implementation and empirical evaluation of MediGo an online secure healthcare appointment booking system for the use in medium sized clinics of India. The system has three user types: patient, physician and administrator, and provides all the necessary features for booking and/or managing appointments from end to end via a responsive PHP/MySQL web application. Regarding engineering aspect, some relevant features are: role based access control, automated SMS and e-mail reminder notify through cron scheduled jobs, secure storage of credential data in a bcrypt-hashed manner and parameterised SQL queries to nullify injection exploits. In a six-week controlled pilot in which 35 participants were held across two Greater Noida clinics, there was a 72% reduction in average “Booking Completion Time (from 11.7 minutes to 2.4 minutes), an 18 percentage drop in the number of bookings missed per week and a System Usability Scale (SUS) rating of 78.6 (grade: Good), with an additional 34% of all bookings made outside of regular clinic hours (which was not possible under the previous phone-only process). These findings validate the potential for significant scheduling gains using open-source Web technologies, without relying on health-IT proprietary solutions, in limited resource healthcare facilities. The work provides a blueprint for use of the reproducible implementation, an evaluation of the tool with market solutions, and options for the integration with Electronic Health Record (EHR) interoperability.

Keywords—healthcare appointment scheduling; physician-patient portal; web-based health system; no-show mitigation; patient-centred care; PHP/MySQL; system usability; hospital management.