NFC enabled intelligent hospital appointment and medication scheduling

Patient Appointment and medication Scheduling is necessary to manage and keep efficient tracking of day to day functionalities in health sector. It may be mentioned that a well-designed appointment Scheduling System can help to deliver timely and convenient access to medical services and enhance patient satisfaction and physician efficiency. Normally, we see patients coming to the hospitals and health centers and filling out registration forms and wait for the response for an agreed date. Some research has been done in the past towards developing online and mobile enabled appointment system. Some of these include prioritization also towards scheduling appointment. But still there exists the area of waiting time and also delay in patient being served to be explored. So with that as basis a Near Field Communication (NFC) based appointment system was developed which allows patient towards tapping NFC appointment card at appointment kiosk in hospital/clinic for making appointment. The system does possess prioritized scheduling for appointments and the medicine collection made by NFC card which was purely dependent on nurse rather being automated by software. The NFC based system puts a lot burden towards scheduling of patients based on priority by the nurse who obviously put lot of room for the waiting time and the consequent delay for patient as in the previous system. To obviate these problems we now have developed an intelligent NFC based appointment system towards prioritized appointment scheduling based on age and profile of the patient. In addition the system also enables automatic calling of patient based on priority for being served by the concerned nurse. Lastly system possesses timing constraints towards making/canceling appointments. The implementation has been carried out using Php and Mysql.