UBERGP: Doctor Home Consultancy App

1. Introduction

In the engaged life and increasing rate of diseases, there is an overwhelming response of patients. For avoiding unnecessary wait and giving priority to patients the online appointment for a phone to phone and home-based consultancy is introduced. The medical science is a vast field and now with advanced technological gadgets and mobile applications, it becomes easier for the user. The technologist every day comes with new ideas to assist the affected people. In a modern healthcare management system, an online appointment scheduling system has become more popular. It facilitates and minimizes waiting time for patients (Yin, Zhang, Ye, & Xie, 2019). The online appointment scheduling system is a system through which a user can access the doctor's website through the internet, and the patient can easily make their appointments. Furthermore, the patient can also provide more detail of their illness to the doctor. The doctor aware of the patient's situation and prepares himself for patient consultancy. In this way, an online appointment management system can help the doctor, the office staff, and the patients. There are several online appointment scheduling software in the market, some of which are rich functionalities, easy to set up and cheap. For doctors, online appointment scheduling brings a lot of value to add services and benefits, like engaging the patient, making the patient feel appreciated, and being able to store patients data securely for future reference. But the big and useful advantage is that online appointment scheduling has a low cost (Nazia & Ekta, 2014).

The research on appointment scheduling has a long history, starting with the work of (Bailey, 1952). Their most famous result is the so-called Bailey-Welch appointment schedule, which states that some patients should be scheduled for an appointment in the morning time and some in the evening time in a day. The patient should have evenly spaced throughout the day, to offset the bad effects of no-shows and patient lateness. They also stated that an appointment system is a trade-off between doctors’ and patients’ waiting times. Although outpatient clinic’s average internal waiting times are long, doctors frequently have idle time. Patients who do not show up or who are late for their appointments cause idle time for doctors, leading to temporary underutilization of the outpatient clinic’s capacity. Gaps in the appointment schedules also cause the underutilization of the doctor’s time.

What makes the appointment booking problems. The booking preferences are different for each patient, and they change over time for the same patient. For example, some patients are willing to see any available doctor if they can have an appointment sooner whereas others prefer to wait until a slot becomes available. Some patients are able to visit the clinic only within a short time because of job-related constraints or personal schedules. Finally, changes in work schedules, marital status, and family size can alter a patient's booking pattern.

In our proposed system the initial step toward the consultancy and for booking the appointment patient will pay the initial service fee which is mandatory. By booking the appointment patient will select the category either phone to phone or face to face home-based consultancy. The doctor will receive the notification of appointment and patient detail of disease and can check also the previous history in the database. After that, at the specified time the doctor ready to go or ready to call the patient and the doctor can see the location to track one another. When the doctor reached the patient receives the notification is ready for a checkup. The invoice will be made upon the time consumption and paid online from the account. The doctor can also generate a certificate and refer the pharmacy for the medicine.

What does the popularity of online consultancy mean for the future of healthcare? This change has positive and negative effects. Many of these changes are positive for patients, allowing them to engage with physicians better, interact with health care providers, meet individual needs and reduce costs. Make it better. However, not every health problem can be solved by a virtual doctor. They cannot perform surgeries, cannot sew, test or accept specialized equipment that requires video chat or messaging services. In any case, online medical care can never completely replace personal treatment. In addition, every online doctor and medical service has its own strengths and weaknesses.