Patiello, an innovative application for patient reception in a medical center

At first, the question is simple: in a small medical centre with no reception staff, how do you know that a particular patient has arrived and is waiting in the waiting room? By going down several floors, several times a day, to check in person!

The central idea: an interactive kiosk

The kiosk displays a welcome message, its appearance is inspired by the visual identity of the medical centre and, most importantly, it displays as many buttons as there are healthcare professionals present in the centre at that time. The patient simply presses the appropriate button and a notification is sent to the healthcare professional’s smartphone.

The interactive kiosk application is developed as a hybrid .NET MAUI application for Android. The application is described as « hybrid » because its main screen is designed in exactly the same way as a website. This makes it possible to customise its appearance using CSS, with settings that can be configured by the purchaser of the system.

A configuration portal for the kiosk

The kiosk is located in a public area. This is not the right place to modify its settings. Its administration is therefore performed online through a dedicated portal. From there, it is possible to define the welcome message, the general appearance of the kiosk and the list of healthcare professionals registered in the system.

This part of the project is developed using ASP.NET Core Blazor. It makes it possible to build a website that behaves like an application. The interface is fluid, with no page reloads (postbacks). The data is stored in a SQL Server database. The entire system runs on an Ubuntu server hosted in the cloud.

This portal is complemented by a few pages forming a showcase website for the commercial presentation of the system.

A mobile application for each healthcare professional

To receive a notification when a patient arrives, the healthcare professional needs an application on their smartphone. It is developed with MAUI for Android and iOS. The application is freely available on Google Play and the App Store.

The application also allows healthcare professionals to indicate their « present » or « absent » status to the kiosk. The application generates a QR code. When arriving at the medical centre, the healthcare professional presents this QR code to the scanner integrated into the kiosk. Their status is then updated automatically. The same operation is performed when leaving the premises. The application can also send short text or voice messages to the kiosk. 

And to make everything communicate: a REST API server

Both the interactive kiosk and the healthcare professionals’ application need to communicate with a server layer that provides access to the data. Since the system already has a web application, ASP.NET Core makes it possible to integrate the REST API functionality directly into that web application. A few MVC controllers therefore handle the exchange of the necessary information with the interactive kiosk and the mobile application, as well as sending notifications to smartphones. This keeps private keys, such as those used to send notifications, secure and ensures that access to the database is never exposed directly. A SignalR-based service makes it possible to send instructions to the kiosk in real time: playing a voice message sent from the mobile application, requesting a refresh, …

This project started with a very simple business need and yet, to provide a complete solution, it required a large part of the technologies that make up my development stack today.

That is what makes this project particularly interesting to me. Stepping outside the ERP world while finding the same fundamentals again: understanding a concrete need, designing a simple solution for the user and making different but coherent technologies communicate with each other so that, from the user’s point of view, everything simply works naturally.