Design of Intelligent and Secure Hospital Appointment Scheduling System

As a roadmap to digitizing the healthcare delivery system in Nigeria to support effective decisions in healthcare management through harnessing and timely delivery of reliable data, we propose a design of an intelligent and secured appointment scheduling system. The main aim is to support healthcare administration in hospitals, while satisfying the global best practice in healthcare delivery. The system negotiates appointment schedules with medical teams in such a way that it is completely automatic, and optimally satisfies the patients’ demands for timely accessing medical service while efficiently utilizing healthcare personnel. With the system, patients have the option of seeking appointments in the comfort of their homes or through record officers in the hospitals. It can handle both daily basis walk-in patients and those seeking appointments with specialists. The system is also designed to be secured at the application layer through a fine-grained group-based access control on authenticated users. When implemented, the system would exist as a subcomponent of the Health Management System and be interoperable with the other components by communicating through standard data exchange formats such as JSON.