Reducing Hospital Queues With ABDM Integrated OPD Booking

Overview

OPD registration at government hospitals is slow: patients refill the same forms every visit and wait for hours. I designed an ABHA compliant booking flow to fix that.

My role

Solo UI/UX designer: research, visual design, prototyping, handoff

Team

With the CEO and 2 developers at N6T Technologies

Timeline

4 weeks, 2025

Impact overview

Hospital pilot

The first version won a ₹12K pilot at CWS Hospital.

Registrations

5K+ registrations so far.

Speed

From research to developer handoff in 4 weeks.

Summary

This case study shows how I turned a brand new government health standard into a booking flow patients can finish on their own phone.

Clinqo, built by N6T Technologies, is a hospital management system for tier 1 and tier 2 cities like Bhubaneswar and Rourkela.

I designed V1 of its patient appointment flow, which lets people book an OPD slot with or without an ABHA ID.

I had 4 weeks. The prototype helped Clinqo win its first pilot, a ₹12,000 contract with CWS Hospital.

About Clinqo and the features I designed

The Problem We Are Solving

OPD registration at government hospitals is slow and manual. Patients fill the same forms on every visit, stand in line at the counter, and then wait for hours without knowing when their turn will come.

Clinqo needed an ABDM integrated flow that speeds up registration and cuts the wait.

ABDM & ABHA in 30 Seconds

The biggest challenge was time. Clinqo wanted to pitch this feature to CWS Hospital within 4 weeks, and I first had to learn how the whole system works.

Quick context:

ABDM (Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission) is India's digital health mission. It connects patients, hospitals and doctors so records move securely.
ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account) is a 14 digit health ID. Think of it as a digital Aadhaar for your health records, shared only with your consent.

How I Researched in a Tight Window

I started with secondary research: the National Health Authority's ABDM guide, research papers, and articles on how hospital appointments work today.

This let me map the patient journey after ABHA rollout, for patients with and without a smartphone. It also showed exactly where my design fits: the moment a smartphone user scans a QR and books.

Journey of a patient with a smartphone — Patient with a smartphone

Journey of a patient without a smartphone — Patient without a smartphone

Then I ran semi structured interviews with 2 people who had visited hospitals the most in the last quarter, to check my assumptions against their own experiences instead of my own bias.

What the Research Told Me

Secondary research gave me 6 assumptions. The interviews confirmed most of them and surfaced 3 new ones.

Patients stand in several unorganized queues: tokens, consultation and medicine.
No one knows how long the wait is, so people arrive early and some leave untreated.
People with money or connections skip the line, which feels unfair.
Many patients have never used ABHA, so they miss the faster option.

The Pain Points I Chose to Solve

With 4 weeks, I focused on two buckets V1 could actually move: queue and process problems, and registration and form filling problems.

Who I Designed For (and Who I Didn't)

Two smartphone users made the cut: Ravi, a semi digital farmer near Rourkela, and Ananya, a working professional in Bhubaneswar.

Sita Devi, a 62 year old rural patient without a smartphone, became my anti persona. She needs assisted, local language support, which was out of scope for V1. Saying no early kept the prototype focused.

Turning Pain Points Into Goals

For every problem, I paired a user goal with a design goal and a business goal, so each screen had a clear reason to exist.

The five goals: cut uncertainty and wait time, make registration painless, build confidence for first time users, show live token status, and keep the queue fair.

User goals, design goals and business goals

Mapping the Flow

The system was new to me, and I got stuck on the user flows. The CEO suggested studying similar products, and that competitive analysis gave me a realistic direction.

After many iterations, the final flow has three paths that merge into one: booking without ABHA, logging in with ABHA, and creating a new ABHA on the spot.

From Paper to a Mini Design System

I sketched every screen on paper first, then moved straight to high fidelity in Figma and kept iterating on feedback.

Clinqo had no design system, so I built one from scratch.

A blue primary palette, as the company asked
Product Sans type scale
4 column mobile grid and an 8px spacing rule
Components with every state: default, hover, pressed, loading, disabled and error

Final Designs

A patient scans the QR at the hospital, verifies with an OTP, fills details once, picks a doctor and gets a live token number. No counter line, no repeated forms.

High fidelity booking flow without ABHA login

Try the interactive Figma prototype

Behind the scenes of the Figma file

Impact

V1 gave Clinqo a working flow to pitch, and it landed the first pilot at CWS Hospital.

₹12K Pilot contract from CWS Hospital

5K+ Registrations till now

₹5L Tide grant from Chitkara

What I Learned in 4 Weeks

Learning a new domain fast is part of the job. Primary sources like the NHA guide beat blog posts.
Asking for help early saves days. One tip from the CEO turned into the competitive analysis that unblocked the flow.
An anti persona is as useful as a persona. It tells you what not to build in V1.