Context about the problem and reasons for choosing the problem statement

Busy doctors who treat multiple patients daily often struggle to keep track of upcoming appointments and pre-appointment action items such as lab results. Certain procedures depend on these results before the next step can begin. While some doctors rely on assistants, managing schedules, sending reminders, and following up with patients is still largely manual and easy to miss.

This was part of an assignment at the 10kdesigners cohort. I chose it because I’ve seen this challenge firsthand : my sister, a dentist, often spends her Sundays planning the week ahead, calling patients to confirm appointments and request reports. I wanted to explore how thoughtful design and AI could reduce this load and improve care coordination.

Through conversations with my sister (a practicing dentist) and her colleagues, I mapped out the typical flow of how treatment planning is handled in real-world clinics:

Initial Consultation
Doctors begin with a consultation and suggest 2–3 treatment options based on the patient’s condition.

Standardized Plans
Once a treatment is selected, a step-by-step plan is created—most patients with similar conditions follow the same structure.

Staggered Scheduling
Only 1–2 appointments are scheduled at a time, even if the full plan is known.

Frequent Changes
Appointment dates often change last minute based on patient progress or availability.

Tasks like sending appointment reminders, follow-up messages, and post-treatment caution notes take up valuable time. Doctors often manage these manually or through assistants, making it harder to stay organized, especially when handling many patients and frequent changes to schedules or treatment plans.

Communicating updates individually to each patient is time-consuming and prone to delays or missed information.

Doctors need to mentally keep track or manually check where each patient is in their treatment plan, which adds unnecessary load.

Pre-visit requirements like lab results can be forgotten if not tracked properly, leading to treatment delays.

Rescheduling a step or changing a treatment plan requires manual coordination with the patient, which adds effort and can cause confusion.

Before starting the design, I outlined the full range of features the app could support and categorized them into must-haves and should-haves. This helped me focus on the core workflows doctors need most - like scheduling, reminders, and messaging, without getting distracted by nice-to-have features early on

Ability to add and edit patient information like name, contact, age, procedure, treatment plan, and appointment details.

A task-manager-style view showing all upcoming appointments sorted by date.

Option to create reusable templates for common patient messages.

Sending reminders, caution notes, follow-ups, and medication messages directly to patients.

1. Chat Interface
A conversational flow to guide doctors through data entry and planning.

2. Treatment Plan Templates
Option to save common treatment structures as reusable templates. (Based on primary research: Many doctors follow similar steps for half their patients.)

For this project, I chose to focus only on the must-have features to keep the app lean, purposeful, and within the defined timeline.

I mapped out the key categories of information required to ensure the system runs smoothly and supports all critical workflows.

After the initial consultation, the doctor creates a treatment plan based on the patient’s condition. A treatment plan consists of multiple steps, each represented by a scheduled appointment with the doctor.

Each appointment can include the following details:

When the appointment is scheduled to take place.

A message sent before or after the appointment—this could be a reminder, follow-up, or caution note.

An internal reminder for the doctor, such as checking lab results before the appointment.

The specific name of the treatment step (e.g., “X-ray Review”).

The overall name of the treatment plan (e.g., “Root Canal”).

Additional context or instructions related to the appointment

Initially, I planned to collect scheduling details through a structured form divided into three sections:

Name, age, gender, ailment, and contact number.

Number of steps, reminders, appointment dates and times, and optional notes.

Messages to be sent before or after each step—appointment, follow-up, and caution messages

After receiving feedback, I realized that showing all fields at once could overwhelm users. To address this, I shifted to a chat-based input flow, where details are collected gradually, with contextual tables appearing for each category. For editing, the interface shows all filled-in information upfront, allowing for quick review and changes.

As outlined in the previous section on flows, this is the approach I believe can effectively address the problem statement. Below, I’ll go into more detail about specific screens and their purpose.

FutureClinic