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Healthcare facilities always need streamlined procedures and systems to manage their regular appointments and consultations. A robust and effective system, such as a Medical Appointment Scheduling and Reminder System, can manage appointments for multiple doctors, send automated reminders, and even handle cancellations and re-scheduling. Let’s understand how you can build such a system using SQL.
Database Structure
Firstly, we need to design the database. We will need:
1. A Patients table to store patient information
2. A Doctors table to store doctor information
3. An Appointments table to link patients and doctors and to store appointment details
Patient Table
Let’s create our Patients table with necessary fields:
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CREATE TABLE Patients ( PatientID INT PRIMARY KEY, FirstName VARCHAR(100), LastName VARCHAR(100), Email VARCHAR(100), Phone VARCHAR(15), DOB DATE ); |
Doctor Table
Next, let’s create the Doctors table:
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CREATE TABLE Doctors ( DoctorID INT PRIMARY KEY, FirstName VARCHAR(100), LastName VARCHAR(100), Specialization VARCHAR(100) ); |
Appointments Table
Now, let’s create the Appointments table. An important point to note here is the use of foreign keys to connect our tables. PatientID and DoctorID will link to the respective tables:
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CREATE TABLE Appointments ( AppointmentID INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, PatientID INT, DoctorID INT, AppointmentTime DATETIME, RemindTime DATETIME, FOREIGN KEY (PatientID) REFERENCES Patients(PatientID), FOREIGN KEY (DoctorID) REFERENCES Doctors(DoctorID) ); |
Scheduling an Appointment
When a patient wants to schedule an appointment, you can insert a new record into the Appointments table.
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INSERT INTO Appointments(PatientID, DoctorID, AppointmentTime) VALUES(1, 1, '2022-08-08 10:00:00'); |
Sending Reminders
Use the RemindTime field to keep track of when to send reminders. You can use a timed job or cron job to regularly query the appointments table for any upcoming reminders:
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SELECT Patients.FirstName, Patients.Email, Appointments.RemindTime FROM Appointments JOIN Patients ON Appointments.PatientID = Patients.PatientID WHERE Appointments.RemindTime <= NOW(); |
Keep improving your SQL skills and happy coding!