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Design and Implementation of Hospital Reservation System on Android

Article in International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, · July 2021

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 International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),
Vol. 17, No. 10, October 2019

Design and Implementation of Hospital Reservation

System on Android
Tenagyei Edwin Kwadwo , Kwadwo Kusi , Patamia Agbeshi Rutherford
Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Chengdu - P.R.C
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

Abstract—Day-in and day-out, the healthcare sector faces the The manual nature of booking hospital appointments has
challenge in curbing the rate at which patients time are wasted proven to be ineffective and as such needs to be changed. In
when they visit hospitals. They are either left frustrated or this manual process, patients walk into the hospital with his
tend to pay sums of monies to jump queues to receive medical
care from doctors. Furthermore, this challenge is known to hospital card to see receptionists to book appointments with a
be caused by the manual nature of booking appointments at doctors. The patient pays for an appointment booking fee and
hospitals. In order to solve this situation, Hospital Reservation goes to the Out Patient Department (OPD) to join a queue
System (HRS) is a mobile application designed to help improve and wait until his/her time is up to see a doctor for further
patient and doctor appointment bookings at hospitals. It aims diagnosis. This process entails much paper work and as such
to reduce and eradicate the manual process associated with
hospital appointment bookings and also balance the load between the update of patient records are often not done. Errors in this
a doctor and its patients. HRS provides the platform for patients type of appointment booking are also not inevitable. Phone
to book appointments with doctors in a specific department of the calls are often set as reminders for this type of appointment
hospital according to the doctor’s available date and time slots. booking, which is a very tedious task. If unfortunately for
To enhance the effectiveness of appointment booking between the patient, the number of patients at the hospital at the
patients and doctors, an interaction feature is also introduced in
our application. present day is very large, then his opportunity of booking an
Index Terms—appointment, booking, application, interaction. appointment with a doctor is hindered. Recently, people prefer
to use their mobile phones to render or receive services than
other smart technologies available such the web. According to
I. I NTRODUCTION
[4], the number of smartphone users is expected to the pass
Appointment process is known to be one of the cumber- 5 billion mark in 2019. Android operating system has also
some tasks to handle in many organizations and institutions, received a massive boost in its usage due to its portability
especially in the health sector. It is a task which requires and availability [5]. With the massive increase in the use of
significant time and staff resource to properly manage. If mobile phones and its technologies, significant changes can be
appointment tasks are not managed well in organizations, it made to appointment bookings between doctors and patients
could lead to the loss of customers or clients, but if managed at hospitals.
properly, it leads to the satisfaction of customers and clients Several works have also been done with regards to the
and increase productivity in that specific organization [1].It use of mobile devices for appointment booking at hospitals,
is often alarming and disturbing to see patients who intend in [6] smart technologies for mobile technologies have been
to visit hospitals for medical care are asked to join long developed which consists of the use of Near Field Commu-
queues before they are able to see a doctor for healthcare. nication Technology (NFC) and Android mobile application.
Sometimes a patient might be having less threatening health Here patients tap their NFC cards into NFC readers at the main
issue which does not consume much time, but instead he/she is entrance gate of the hospital to check for information match.
constrained at the hospital. Furthermore, in order for patients Once there is a match, other scheduling procedures can follow.
to jump these hospital queues, they resort to paying sums of Furthermore, Kyambille and Kialegee [7] developed a mobile
monies to receptionist to help them skip these queues to visit application for hospital appointment booking that displays list
doctors [2].All these unfortunate events cause patients to be of specialties and available slots. The systems notifies patients
dissatisfied when they visit hospitals. A report in the USA of cancelled application and postponed slots, but lacks one to
states a patient has an average waiting time of 24 minutes one interaction feature for the doctor and patient.Shafaq Malik
The report shows how satisfaction declines as the waiting time et al [8] also proposed a hospital appointment booking system
increases, with 93.1% of satisfied patients when waiting time on mobile which specifies the amount of time allocated to
is under five minutes, dropping to 84.9% when waiting time each patient, but lacks appointment reminders.N.V. Chaudhari
is over ten minutes[3]. et al [9] also proposed an android application that provides a

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 International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),
Vol. 17, No. 10, October 2019

portal for doctors and patients to manage their appointments

accordingly. It focuses on saving precise time of patients and
increase the reachability between patients and doctors.
Our proposed system is a designed Android application
which has so many features and can be useful to both
doctors and patients. The application helps patients to book an
appointment with a doctor in spite of their location, according
to doctor’s available time and time-slots .It aims to reduce time
wasted by patients at hospitals and also help balance the load
between a doctor and patients during appointment scheduling.
The application consists of both doctor and patient panels.
Patient and Doctors can both register for the application, but an
id is assigned to each doctor of the hospital to be included in
the signup process. After a successfully login by users, doctors
Fig. 1. Number of Android Sales Compared to other mobile operating
and patients will have their respective dashboards displayed to systems
help them access other functionalities of the application. When
the patient is ready to book an appointment he/she selects
reason for booking appointment, then selects a department to touch screen mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets.
display specific doctors in that specific department, then selects Android is compatible with multiple hardware and supports
a doctor to view doctor’s available date and time slot to book various features .Android was the most preferred choice for
an appointment. After the doctor confirms patient’s booked our application due to its large number of users, popularity
appointment, he/she will then get a confirmation message, among other operating systems and also lot of online learning
serving as reminder for him/her. available for zero cost.
The rest of our paper is organized as follows: Section
II explains the design of our proposed system. Section III B. Requirement Analysis
shows the implementation of our proposed system and its sub- Requirements describes the set of features and function-
modules on Android. Finally, Section IV gives the conclusion alities for a target system. They play a role in the success
of our paper and also suggests future improvement for our and failure of systems. Gathered requirements can be either
application. functional or non-functional. Requirements are documented
for further validation and verification of the developed sys-
II. PROPOSED SYSTEM
tem.Fig.1 shows our specified requirements for our system to
The patient dashboards consists of the following sections: be developed. The diagram shows the actors of the system,
1) Profile Section: For displaying of patients profile which is patients and doctors, with the task they are to perform
2) Book Appointment Section: For appointment booking. when using the application. Both doctors and patients will
3) View and Delete Appointment Section: For viewing share common tasks such as Registration, Login and Logout,
patient’s appointments. Here patients can also delete View Dashboard and Send Message. During the registration,
unconfirmed appointments. patients and doctors can enter their details to register for the
4) Messaging section: For interactions with doctors application. There are also specific tasks associated with the
5) Logout section: For logging out of the application patient, such as Book Appointment, View Appointments and
The doctor’s dashboard also consists of the following sec- Make Payments. The doctor’s main task is to View Patient
tions: Appointments, which he/she also have the ability to confirm
1) Profile Section: For displaying of doctors profile the patient’s appointment. In addition to the Book Appoint-
2) View and Confirm Appointment Section: For viewing ment task, patient can select reason for booking appointment,
patient’s booked appointments. Here doctors can also select department of hospital and also select doctor’s schedule.
confirm patient’s appointment. Patients can also delete unconfirmed appointments and also
3) Messaging section: For interactions with patients view their appointment status. They can all also reset their
4) Logout section: For logging out of the application passwords in case they forget.

A. Why Android C. System Design and Architecture

Android is a mobile operating system developed by Google. 1) Architecture: Fig.3 describes our system architecture
It was developed based on the Linux Kernel .It is one of the and explains how data flows between doctors and patients.
world’s most popular mobile platform, due to the increase in In the HRS application, communication is done through a
its usage on mobile phone devices around the world. It has webserver and the android system. The webserver stores
grown to be the most preferred operating system for mobile patient’s and doctor’s entries in a database hosted on the
phone/smartphone devices surpassing all other mobile phone webserver, which can be retrieved when requested by the
operating systems as shown in Fig 1.It is specifically used by user. HRS retrieves information from a webserver’s database

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 International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),
Vol. 17, No. 10, October 2019

by entering their details into the application. After registration,

they can now log in into the application with their username
and password used in the registering for the application. The
username and password must be known by only the user,
unless he/she wishes to share with any other person. If patient’s
username and password is correct, he/she can proceed to view
the patient’s dashboard where they are other functionalities
he/she can access. In the other way round, if a patient’s
username or password is wrong, he/she can reset it to get a
new password. After logging in to the application is successful,
patients can then view the patient’s dashboard which enables
him/her to access some functionalities such view his profile,
book appointment, view and delete appointment and also send
message. During the usage of any other these functionalities,
Fig. 2. Use Case Diagram for HRS Application patient gets responses which is displayed to them. When
responses are displayed, patients can choose to continue to
use the application or quit using it.If he/she opts to quit using
the application, he/she can click log out option to log out of
the application. Furthermore, in the doctor’s activity diagram
according to Fig.6, there are similar processes and operations
just like that of the patients. The difference between these
two activity diagrams takes place at the doctor’s dashboard
after the doctor has logged in successfully. In the doctor’s
dashboard, the doctor can access some functionalities such as
view profile, view and confirm patient’s appointment and also
send message to patient. Responses after accessing all these
tasks/functionalities are displayed to the doctor. The doctor can
choose to continue using the application or opt to log out of
the application by clicking logout to log out of the application.
III. IMPLEMENTATION
In this section, our system and its subsystems are imple-
mented on Android. Fig.6 (a) and (b) shows the splash screen
and homepage for our application respectively. The splash
Fig. 3. System Architecture screen welcomes users to the application. The application
homepage consists of the patient and doctor panels.
Patients and doctors register for the application to be able
through PHP code files which are also hosted on the webserver. to access patients and doctor’s dashboard .Fig 7 (a) and (b)
The PHP files contains MySQL queries that connects to the shows the patient account signup and doctor account signup
database to retrieve the required information through a JSON page respectively. There are similar fields for both users, but
object.JSON objects are readable by the HRS application .The Unique ID and Department field for the doctor account signup
JSON objects are then extracted in java classes and displayed makes the difference between the doctor and the patient. Each
to the user. Each PHP file contains queries for a specific task. doctor of a hospital has a unique id which must be entered
HRS app calls the location of the PHP file and then executes for a successful registration. A doctor must also belong to a
it to open connection to the database. After the execution of department in the hospital. After a successful registration, both
the query, it then closes the connection. patients and doctors get an alert message saying Registration
2) System Modules/Subsystems: The application consists Successful or else Registration Failed. Notifications are also
of the main system and two main modules as shown in given after a successful registration.
Fig.4.These modules are the patient subsystem and the doctor The login pages for both patients and doctors are similar.
subsystem. There are also several minor subsystems which are Patients and doctors enter their username and password to
derived from the patient and doctor subsystem. All these minor get authenticated, before they can use the application. After a
subsystems helps users to access the full functionalities of the successful login, both users get a message which reads Login
application. Successful or else Login Failed. Fig.8 shows the account login
3) Activity Diagrams: Fig.5 (a) and (b) shows elaborates page for a patient.
the flow of activities to be performed by patients and doctors Patient and Doctor Dashboard enables users to access other
using the application respectively. Patients registers/signs up functionalities such as viewing profile , booking appointment,

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 International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),
Vol. 17, No. 10, October 2019

Fig. 4. System Modules

Fig. 5. Activity diagram for patients and doctors

confirming appointments, making payments, messaging a doc- doctors available in a department and also a click on a doctor’s
tors and patients and logging out of the application . Here there name selects his/her available time slots and date. The patient
is a navigation drawer, which displays the dashboard when then clicks on the button labelled “Submit Appointment “to
the user clicks it. Fig.9 (a) and (b) shows patient and doctor book the appointment. If the appointment booking is success-
dashboard respectively. ful, the patient gets Appointment Booking Successful message.
There is a profile page for our application. Patients and The patient also gets a notification through SMS message
doctors can view their application details .After a successful which serves as reminder for his/her booked appointment.
login, the profile section is automatically the first page of the Patients can also view and delete their booked appoint-
both patients and doctors dashboard. During the usage of the ments. Patients view their booked appointments in a table
application, a click on the profile option of the navigation form which is horizontally scrollable. The table consists of
drawer opens users account details. Fig.10 (a) and (b) shows booking id, doctor name, department, date, time, reason, sta-
profile page of patients and doctors respectively. tus, amount and a delete button. A patient can only delete
When a patient is ready to book an appointment he/she his/her appointment if and only if the appointment status
selects reason for appointment booking, department, name of shows “pending”. When deletion is successful, a Deleting of
doctor in that specific department, available date and time slots Appointment Successful message is shown or else Deleting
from spinners available in the appointment form as shown in of Appointment Failed message is shown. Fig.12 (a) and (b)
Fig.11 (a) and (b). A click on a specific department shows shows a patient’s view and delete appointment page with an

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ISSN 1947-5500
 International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),
Vol. 17, No. 10, October 2019

Fig. 6. Splash Screen and Homepage

Fig. 8. Patient Login Page

Fig. 7. Patient and Doctor SignUp Pages

unconfirmed appointment.
Doctors are required to confirm patients booked appoint-
ments, so show their consent to the booked appointment. Fig. 9. Patient and Doctor Dashboard
Firstly, doctors can view the patient’s appointment in a table
form which is also horizontally scrollable. The table consists
of booking id, patient name, patient phone, date, time, rea-
son, status and a confirm button ,which is also horizontally a message through the application by clicking the “Send”
scrollable. A click on the confirm button sets patient’s ap- button and the other user can receive it directly on his/her
pointment status to Confirmed .The doctor then gets a You phone. If the message sent is successfully, a Message Sent
Have Successfully Confirmed The Appointment message to message is shown to the user or else Message Failed is
show that the process has been successful. Fig.13 (a) shows shown. Notifications are also attached to messages received.
a doctor view and confirm appointment page, whiles Fig.13 For example, a patient can send a message to a doctor through
(b) shows a doctor confirming patient’s appointment.After the app which describes his symptoms .The doctor receives
patient’s appointment are confirmed, an appointment cannot the message and responds immediately. Fig.15 (a) and (b)
be deleted. Patient’s appointment status changes to Confirmed shows an interaction between a patient and doctor through the
after his/her appointment is confirmed by the doctor as shown application. The screenshot in Fig.16 shows when a doctor
in Fig.14 replies a patient’s message through the application.
The app also provides an inbuilt SMS messaging feature
which enables both patients and doctors to communicate with
each other. It is available for both users. A user can send

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 International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),
Vol. 17, No. 10, October 2019

Fig. 12. Patient View and Delete Appointment Pages

Fig. 10. Patient and Doctor Profile Pages

Fig. 13. Doctor View and Confirm Appointment Pages

Fig. 11. Appointment Pages

IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the main aim and objective is to create an an-
droid application that will help patients to book appointments
with doctors of their choice at a hospital and also balance
the load between patients and doctors. A patient can delete
their unwanted appointments before confirmation. Doctors can
also confirm the patient’s appointments and also respond to
messages sent by patients through the application. This will
give patients much satisfaction when visiting hospitals, since
there will be eradication of long queues at hospitals. HRS ap-
plication will also help to remove the bottlenecks, the manual
nature of assigning patients to doctors and the bureaucracy of
allocating patients to doctors. Future improvements for this Fig. 14. Patients Confirmed Appointment
application is possible. In the future, the creation of an IOS
version of this application can be very help since IOS is also
another competitor of mobile operating system.Furthermore, a

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 International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),
Vol. 17, No. 10, October 2019

[6] Mey, Y.S. and S. Sankaranarayanan. Near field communication based

patient appointment. in Cloud Ubiquitous Computing Emerging Tech-
nologies (CUBE), 2013 International Conference on. 2013. IEEE.
[7] G. Godphrey Kyambille and Khamisi Kalegele“Enhancing Patient Ap-
pointments Scheduling that Uses Mobile Technology,” International
Journal of Computer Science and Information Security(IJCSIS),vol.13,
No.11, November 2015.
[8] Shafaq Malik, Nargis Bibi, Sehrish Khan, Razia Sultana and Sadaf
Abdul Rauf “Mr.Doc:A Doctor Appointment Application System”,
International Journal of Engineering Science and Innovative Technol-
ogy(IJESIT).
[9] N.V. Chaudhari, Akshay Phadnis, Prajakta Dhomane, Jayshree Nimje
and Akansha Sharma “Android Application for Healthcare Appointment
Booking System”, Imperial Journal Interdisciplinary Research (IJIR),Vol
3, Issue 3 2017.

Fig. 15. Interaction between patients and doctors through messaging

Fig. 16. When doctor replies a patient message through the application

feature which helps the sharing of medical reports of patients

to doctors can be added in the feature. Communication is
proven to help in the effectiveness of appointment bookings
and as such voice calls and video call features can also
be added to the application to enhance interactions between
patients and doctors.

R EFERENCES
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