Queue & token management

Hospital Queues That Follow the Patient

A hospital rarely has one queue. It has a queue at every reception desk, a queue outside every consulting room, a queue at the laboratory, another at the pharmacy and another at billing — and traditionally each is kept separately.

When those lists are separate, a patient can be simultaneously first in one and forgotten in another. auraCare keeps one queue per service point, all reading from the same visit, so a patient only ever holds one place.

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The problem

Why hospital queues fragment.

Queue problems are rarely caused by the queue itself. They are caused by the number of places a patient can be waiting at once, and by the fact that no single list knows about the others.

A patient sent from consultation to the laboratory leaves the doctor’s queue and joins another — but nothing connects the two, so the time they have already waited is lost.
A second reception desk issues its own numbers, so two patients hold the same token and neither is wrong.
A patient who steps outside is called, does not answer, and is either skipped permanently or holds the room up while somebody looks for them.
Staff know the real order and hold it in their heads, which works until the shift changes.
Nobody can say how long the longest wait actually is, because the answer is spread across several lists.

One visit, one token, wherever it was issued.

The token is not a number printed on paper. It is the handle on the visit, and every department uses the same one.

01

The kiosk asks for a number

A self-service kiosk at the entrance issues the token by asking auraCare for it, rather than working one out locally. Two kiosks at two doors therefore cannot collide, and a kiosk that loses its network cannot invent a number that already belongs to somebody.

02

Identity can wait

A walk-in patient does not have to be identified before they hold a place. The token is issued first and identity is attached at reception, so registration never costs the patient their position.

03

One token per visit

A patient who has already been issued a token that day is recognised as an existing visit rather than given a second one — even if they arrive at a different entrance. Everything already recorded against it carries over.

04

The token moves with them

When the patient is sent from reception to a department, or from a department to diagnostics, the same token follows. Departments see arrivals, not strangers.

The controls a real desk needs.

A queue that can only move forwards does not survive a working day. These are the operations reception and clinical staff actually use.

Call nextTakes the next patient for a service point and room, and updates every screen looking at that queue.

RecallCalls a patient again when they did not respond the first time, without losing their place.

No responseRecords that a patient was called and did not come, so the room can move on and the patient can be picked up again later.

Hold and releaseParks a patient who is not ready — still waiting for a relative, still eating before a test — and puts them back without starting again.

Priority overrideMoves a patient up the queue deliberately and on the record, rather than by a verbal instruction nobody can audit later.

Cancel and reprintVoids a token issued in error, or reprints a slip a patient has lost, against the same visit.

The screen on the wall

Keep patients informed without exposing them.

The waiting-area display runs off the same queue as the desk. There is no separate list to configure and no second system to keep in step — when reception calls a token, the screen has already changed.

Each screen is configured for the queue it belongs to, so the cardiology waiting area shows cardiology and the laboratory shows the laboratory.

What it shows is deliberately narrow: the token being served, the room to go to, and the tokens coming next. It never shows patient names, and it never shows clinical detail. A waiting room is a public space.

If the display loses its connection it keeps showing the last state it knew rather than going blank, and reconciles when the connection returns.

Hospitals with more than one front door.

Most hospitals above a certain size have several reception desks, several entrances, and departments with their own registration. That is where single-queue systems usually fail.

Several entrances

Kiosks at different doors draw from the same series, so arrivals are ordered by when they happened rather than by which door they came through.

Several desks, one queue

Multiple receptionists can serve the same queue at once without two of them calling the same patient.

Departmental registration

A department that registers its own patients still issues tokens from the shared model, so the hospital keeps one view of who is waiting where.

Rooms, not just doctors

Queues are served by a room and a clinician together, so a doctor moving rooms does not orphan the patients waiting for them.

Questions this usually raises.

Do we need kiosks to use this?

No. A kiosk is one way to issue a token; the front desk can issue exactly the same token without one. Hospitals often start at the desk and add kiosks later at the busiest entrance, because the token model does not change when they do. Where kiosks are used, the slip prints as the token appears on screen, and a patient who prefers a person can still go to the desk.

What happens if the network drops?

Waiting displays keep showing the last state they received rather than going blank, and reconcile when the connection returns, so a patient never sees an empty screen and assume they have been forgotten. Because tokens are issued centrally rather than derived locally, a kiosk that cannot reach auraCare stops issuing rather than issuing numbers that may already belong to somebody else.

Can we see how long people are actually waiting?

Yes, because there is one queue rather than several. Each service point shows how many patients are waiting, how many are in a room and the longest current wait, measured from when the patient joined that queue. That is an operational number staff can act on during the day, not a report assembled afterwards.

Tell us where your queues break.

The most useful first conversation is about your desks, your entrances and the moments where a patient currently gets lost between two lists.

We will show you how that would run as one queue, and where it would not fit yet.