offline-first hospital reception & OPD system · Healthcare / Hospital administration

Hospital Reception System

An offline-first reception system in a government hospital — Electron + PouchDB, four OPD desks, government slips and day-end cash reconciliation.

on-premise (government hospital) — private / on-premise (not publicly hosted)

Problem

The hospital ran reception on paper. Four OPD desks — General, Specialist, Laboratory and Emergency — each registered patients, took a different fee and issued a different government-formatted slip, and none of it reconciled against the cash drawer at day end. Any replacement had to keep working when the network didn't, because a reception desk that stops taking patients is not an option in a district hospital.

Solution

Two Electron apps. A server app runs on the hospital's main PC, hosting an in-process Express API plus local PouchDB databases — the only machine that holds data. The reception desks run the same React interface with no database, pointed at the server's LAN address. Every read and write hits PouchDB locally, so there is no runtime dependency on the internet; CouchDB replication is an optional, off-by-default concern for multi-site backup. Searches and the accountant's date-range reports run on indexed views with pagination, so the app stays responsive into hundreds of thousands of visits, and fees are config-driven so a price change is a settings edit, not a redeploy. Slips render as full A4 government documents with the AJK Health Department header.

Key features

• Offline-first by default — reception keeps working through network outages
• Four OPD registration flows (General, Specialist, Laboratory, Emergency)
• Government-formatted A4 slips with serial, CRP, receipt no., CNIC and visit details
• Config-driven fees (hospital type, per-specialty fees, per-test lab prices)
• Role derived from the credential — no role selector; colour-coded server vs reception stations
• Accountant day-end closing with per-desk cash reconciliation and mandatory shortfall reasons
• Indexed search by patient ID, name or phone; optional CouchDB replication for backup

Technology

Results

• Paper reception replaced with a resilient local-first system on low-end hospital PCs
• Cash reconciles desk-by-desk at day end instead of not at all
• The government slip is treated as a hard interface spec — precise output, near-zero input friction