A DAY IN THE HOSPITAL

Introduction

This is a small project I did for the CS50 introduction to programming with Python. Since I study biomedical engineering, I decided to create a program related to the healthcare field. The program, after validating your supposed hospital "working credential", takes the information of two csv files previously created and outputs another csv file with a list of the patient and the doctor that should be assigned to the patient according to his or her medical condition.

Validate working credential

Imagine you are a hospital worker and want to access the database to check which new patient needs to be assigned to which doctor. For security reasons, there must be a way to prove that you are indeed a hospital employee to have the right to access that information. I decided to check the worker credential first using Python regular expressions, which are really useful to check if a string contains the specified search pattern. The search pattern I decided to implement was name_surnameXXY, XX being two numbers and Y being a capital letter. Only if the string that the user introduces matches the pattern (meaning that indeed the user is a hospital employee properly indentified) the output csv file will be created.

patients_file.csv and doctors_file.csv

Patients_file.csv is a csv file I created with Python through the code patients.py that contains information of the incoming patients (name, age and medical condition). Doctors_file.csv, on the other hand, is a csv file I created with Python through the code doctors.py that contains information of doctors that are in that hospital (name, credential and specialization).

project.py

After validating the working credential through regular expressions as it was previously mentioned, the program opens and reads both csv files and creates a new csv file called matches.csv with a first row named 'Patient', 'Doctor associated'. Then, through a for loop it iterates through the csv files and with a conditional it compares the medical condition of each patient with a list of different contitions. If the condition of the patient is in the list and the name of the list matches with the specialization of the doctor in doctors_file.csv, then the program appends a new row in matches.csv with the name of that patient and the doctor.

Conclusion

This program provides a file with the name of the patient and the name of the doctor that has to take care of the patient. The case has been simplified (it has a small quantity of patients and doctors and the list of medical conditions is also short) but it exemplifies a situation that could happen nowadays. This program could be helpful to reduce the time that the employees spend searching for available doctors to assign to a patient.

A possible improvement could be to extract the information from an API with real-time patients and also to erase the doctor from the list of available doctors once it has been assigned to several patients.