Sector(s)
It is a powerful community for doctors with the features of a social network, where doctors can communicate, create initiative groups, discuss issues, spread information about their clinics and much more. Another important site’s mission is to help doctors and patients find each other.
About the project
Goals
AttendingDR should be a light, handy network for doctors on one hand and a helpful site with doctors’ practical advice for patients on other hand.
Requirements
● quick site response
● social network features for doctors
● insures real doctors answer to patients
The features we created for this website:
Communication between doctors and patients
We integrated https://www.attendingdr.com with another, newly created site https://www.adrpatients.com/, which is a community for patients, allowing full-fledged communication between doctors and patients.
Doctors can receive requests from patients about visits and appointments. Patients can use calendars for that. Doctors can approve or disapprove the appointment time in the calendar.
Electronic signature for documents
A doctor can send a signed health certificate or a receipt for a patient via the website, and it will be considered valid. To get this kind of document, there is no longer a need to physically visit the doctor, nor does the doctor have to send it by regular mail.
Doctors can also redirect the certificates for other doctors to sign, if their signature is necessary as well. We created custom modules, as well as using the FPDF and FPDI libraries, for this functionality.
Community calendar and scheduling
All users can create events for the site. If events are public they are available in the common community calendar (schedule). For private events, users can create special private calendars and share them with selected users or networks.
Users invited to the calendar can add their own changes to it. Events can be imported from one calendar to another. The calendar functionality was developed using the Сalendar and Views modules. A custom module was created to import events from one calendar to another.
Company directory
Users can create comprehensive descriptions of their clinics and list them in the company directory for everyone to see.
Jobs
Talented doctors can be found according to their specialty, subspecialty, country and other criteria.
Verified doctors
Doctors claim their profiles by entering their official registration information. If this data matches with the official US doctor DB that is integrated into the site, the profile is claimed.
Performance orientation
Quick responses and load times matter for this kind of websites. The portal uses a system of outdated content deletion, run by Cron task, to keep the database size to an appropriate level, and prevent its constant growth.
Multistep registration for different user types
Each user type has its specific multistep registration form, which helps to confirm user’s status for the site.
Category search
Any content on the site can be searched by related categories.
User logout after 5 minutes of inactivity
If a user takes no action during 5 minutes, the site automatically logs them out to make sure that nobody else uses the site on their behalf. Before the logout, there is a warning message.
Invitations via Gmail, Yahoo and AOL
Users can invite each other via Gmail, Yahoo and AOL https://www.attendingdr.com/invite.
A very informative dashboard
Users can see new message indications, user statistics, connection recommendations and more.
Articles, blogs, news and forum
We created these 4 sections for the perfect skill-sharing and professional discussions.
Petitions
Users can create petitions, and other users can support them.
Sharing user status
Users can share their status, select who can see this status, send emails about this status to their contacts and add media files.
Content suggestion
“Content you may like” suggestion is picked by the system according to the user’s profile information.
User suggestion
We built the “Users you may like” functionality according to the same principle as stated above.
The "Listening to" and "Speaking to" features
These are similar to Twitter’s "following" and "followers." Users can “listen” to other users (see their updates on the dashboard), or “speak” to all user who have signed up for their updates.
The endorse functionality
This functionality is similar to “likes.” If users like somebody's profile or their activity, they can endorse them, and other users will see the number of endorsements.
Friend / subscription system
Users can add other users to their friends and subscribe to their updates.
The status wall displays all their friends’ news (friends added, likes, statuses etc.).
Internal messaging system
Users can send messages to each others. Message can be sent to one user, a couple of users, and networks (something like G+ circles).
https://www.attendingdr.com/messages
Pop-up notifications about new messages
If users are online, they can see real-time pop-up notifications about new messages.
Message notifications without a page reload
We implemented Ajax so users can see notifications about new messages without reloading the page.
Creating events and selling tickets
Users can create events which can be free or pre-paid. For pre-paid tickets, users can specify the number of tickets to be sold. Tickets are sold via the site. 95% goes to the ticket creator, and the other 5% goes to the site (we run this functionality using Paypal).
Personal link collection
Users can create personal collection of important external links. They can select icons for the links (icons from the site itself, default icons, or their own ones) and link names.
Video conferences
Scheduled online video conferences between users of the site are also possible. We created this functionality using the http://www.oovoo.com/home.aspx service.
User introduction cards
Users can send virtual visiting cards to other users by clicking just one button.
Network creation
Users can create networks and add each other to them. Then they can send multiple messages or share their status to entire networks at once.
File library
All documents added by a user to the site are saved in the library. These documents can be used again.
https://www.attendingdr.com/library
Encryption and secure transactions
We enabled HTTPS protocol to provide encryption and secure transactions to keep our users’ data more protected.
Authorize and PayPal integration
We implemented integration with Authorize and PayPal payment systems for convenient financial operations.
Why Drupal was chosen
We wanted to create really useful site both for users and for doctors. Patients should have a qualified doctor’s consultation, and doctors should have an opportunity not just to contact patients, but to communicate with other doctors inside the site.
So we needed a combination of a healthcare site and a doctors social network.
Drupal, with its numerous out-of-box modules and great flexibility, allows us to save time and money for routine functionality and expand its core with our custom modules to provide specific features for the project.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Views because of its incredible representation features
Drupal Commerce to implement commerce functionality on the site
Message Private to organize message system on the site
Flag, Flag Friend to implement social networking features
Сalendar to create the community calendar functionality
