With ~1,000,000 active physicians available to treat ~330,000,000 Americans, patients can find it difficult to find healthcare that suits their specific needs. When a patient is finally referred to a specialist by their primary care physician, there may still be obstacles that could delay care (eg, specialist not taking new patients, not accepting medicare/medicaid).
This full-stack application provides patients with an active database containing information on physicians in the US. Patients can search for physicians by city/name and view physicians in specific specialties (eg, cardiology, neurology, psychiatry, etc). Each card has a link that dynamically renders that physician's profile, which contains their biography, practice address, and city/state of operation. All pages, except for login/register, are locked to unauthenticated users (Feel free to login using the information below!).
USERNAME: test_member
PASSWORD: Django2024!
For security, only users with specific permissions can add/delete/edit physicians to the database. Front-end utilizes Bootstrap5/Bootswatch themes. Back-end utilizes Django and PostgreSQL database provided by Heroku.
NOTE: All names, addresses, phone numbers were collected using ChatGPT and fake address generators. Any resemblance to actual locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
- Bootstrap
- CSS3
- Django
- Django-Crispy-Forms
- Heroku
- HTML5
- PyCharm
- Python
Originally, I wanted to add a "bookmark" feature so users can find their physicians of interest. From my research, it seems this would require knowledge of jQuery, which I have yet to learn. Deployment to Heroku was challenging to say the least. Migrating from SQLite to PostgreSQL produced errors due to mismatching of variable types. After some research on StackOverflow, I decided to delete the original SQLite database and migrate all models to the new PostgreSQL database and repopulate it via the front-end model forms and admin panel.
I enjoyed developing this feature-rich application and I really believe there's potential to add more features (eg, bookmarks, reviews, etc) and scale this further. If this were to use real, active physicians, I would consider a verification step via email and include their profile picture and NPI number in their profile page. Although the complexity of Django seems daunting initially, it becomes much easier after the steep learning curve.
