Building a MERN Stack Application for My Portfolio Project - Medikall: Lessons and Wins

*Say Hello To Medikall! *

My project, Medikall, is an MVP for a Hospital Appointment Booking System which is hosted online to help ease appointment booking by patients as well as offer a means to collect information about the patient's complaints ahead of time before their schedule day to see a doctor - this collection is collected by an AI chat bot. Users also have the option to use the AI chat feature on the platform to make inquiries about health and lifestyle advice to help them stay fit.

Building this project was A requirement for passing the Foundation stage of my training as a Full Stack Software Engineer under the training of the prestigious ALX Software Engineering Program under scholarship of MasterCard Foundation.

Using my problem solving skills and knowledge gained from my training, I was able to research, plan and design the solution I intended to make for the identified problem - streamlining appointment booking by providing a web interface for potential patients to book for consultation. For this, I chose to use the MERN Stack (with Typescript). It was an exciting experience working and learning about best practices as I worked on the Front-end and Back-end Logic as well as Database design using MongoDB.

The motivation behind this was borne out of my experience having been around some General Practice Clinics in the past. It was a common sight to see sick people struggling to get booked for an appointment for non-emergency cases, but they experience great inconvenience due to the analogue process of registration and assignment to a medical professional, which often leaves the patient fatigued and burned out long before their turn to see the doctor. So, I thought to build something that can be a viable solution that offers scalability for facilities that adopt it as, well as convenience for patients who patronize such facilities.

Learning Points

I must say, the most exciting part of building this project, apart from the UI and integrating the AI, was learning how to use Typescript to enjoy writing Javascript that has achieved gnosis haha. Learning about types, interfaces, union types, enums, type safety, easy code completion.

I have made a fan-boy promise to only write JavaScript this way going forward.

While this was just an MVP, there are still many potentials for expansion and much more learning opportunties to made the project solve all the problems it is aimed at. I hope to work on it on the side, while I continue my learning in the Backend Specialization Stage of my training.

Cheers!