Requirements

We're building an appointment booking system for a hospital. The system needs to manage doctors, patients, available time slots, and the appointments themselves. Each doctor has a specific specialization (e.g., Cardiology, Neurology), and patients can search for doctors based on specialization or name. The system should efficiently handle concurrent booking requests to prevent overbooking. We need to ensure that appointments are booked only if the time slot is available and that patient and doctor schedules are correctly updated. Consider the complexities of real-world appointment booking, such as cancellations and rescheduling, and design a system that is robust and extensible to handle future requirements like telemedicine integration or integration with a billing system. The core is to build a robust, scalable and thread-safe system for booking appointments. # Requirements ## Functional Requirements 1. **Doctor Management:** * Add a new doctor with details like name, specialization, and availability. * Update doctor information (e.g., contact details, specialization). * Remove a doctor from the system. * Retrieve a doctor's information by ID or name. * List all doctors, optionally filtered by specialization. * Doctors should be able to define their availability in terms of time slots. * Doctors can have multiple specializations. 2. **Patient Management:** * Register a new patient with details like name, contact information, and medical history. * Update patient information. * Retrieve a patient's information by ID. 3. **Appointment Booking:** * Search for available doctors based on specialization and/or date/time. * Book an appointment for a patient with a specific doctor at a specific time slot. * The system MUST prevent double-booking (thread-safe booking). * The system MUST ensure that the doctor is available at the requested time. * Appointments should be uniquely identifiable. * Provide confirmation messages after a successful booking. 4. **Appointment Management:** * View a patient's upcoming and past appointments. * View a doctor's schedule (all appointments for a given day/week). * Cancel an appointment (with appropriate cancellation policies – could be a future extension). * Reschedule an appointment (subject to availability). 5. **Availability Management:** * Doctors can define and update their availability (time slots) for specific days. * The system should consider doctor's availability when booking appointments. * Handle cases where a doctor is unavailable due to vacation or other reasons. 6. **Reporting** * Generate reports on the number of appointments booked for each doctor in a specified period. * Generate reports on appointments by specialization, patient demographics etc. ## Non-Functional Requirements 1. **Thread Safety:** The appointment booking process MUST be thread-safe to prevent race conditions and double-booking. 2. **Extensibility:** The system should be designed to easily accommodate new features, such as: * Integration with a billing system. * Telemedicine functionality. * SMS/Email notifications for appointment reminders. * Different appointment booking policies. 3. **Modularity:** The system should be divided into loosely coupled modules (e.g., Doctor Management, Patient Management, Appointment Booking) to improve maintainability and testability. 4. **Testability:** Each module should be easily testable with unit tests and integration tests. The design should facilitate mocking dependencies for isolated testing. 5. **Maintainability:** The code should be clean, well-documented, and adhere to SOLID principles to ensure long-term maintainability. 6. **Scalability:** The system should be designed to handle a large number of doctors, patients, and appointments efficiently. While we're not building a distributed system, the data structures and algorithms should be chosen with scalability in mind (e.g., avoid inefficient linear searches). 7. **Error Handling:** The system should handle errors gracefully and provide informative error messages to the user. Use exceptions appropriately to signal errors. 8. **Data Consistency:** The system must ensure data consistency, especially when handling concurrent requests. Consider using appropriate synchronization mechanisms to protect critical data. 9. **Performance:** Focus on algorithm and data structure choices to optimize performance within a single JVM. Minimize unnecessary object creation and locking. ## Core Entities 1. **Doctor:** Represents a doctor with attributes like ID, name, specialization (can be multiple), contact information, and availability. 2. **Patient:** Represents a patient with attributes like ID, name, contact information, and medical history. 3. **Appointment:** Represents a scheduled appointment with attributes like ID, doctor, patient, time slot, and status (e.g., Scheduled, Cancelled, Completed). 4. **TimeSlot:** Represents a specific time slot with start and end times. This could be a simple value object. The core of the thread safety issue will lie here. We need to ensure no double booking, so likely atomic operations, or locking strategies are necessary. 5. **Availability:** Represents a doctor's availability for a specific day and time slots. This links doctors to available TimeSlots. 6. **Specialization:** Represents a medical specialization (e.g., Cardiology, Neurology). Could be an enum or a class if more attributes are needed in the future.

Design and Architecture - Appointment booking for a hospital where each doctor can open slots independently of any time period.

Requirements

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