DR-APP: An AI-Enabled Doctor Appointment Booking Platform with Intelligent Speciality Recommendation

Abstract

Timely access to appropriate healthcare services remains a persistent challenge due to fragmented appointment systems, limited decision support, and the absence of intelligent mechanisms to guide patients to suitable medical specialists. Most existing online doctor appointment platforms focus primarily on scheduling and payment processing, offering little assistance in symptom interpretation or speciality selection. This paper presents DR-APP, an AI-enabled, full-stack healthcare appointment booking platform with intelligent symptom-based speciality recommendation and integrated healthcare assistance. The proposed system is developed using the MERN stack and incorporates two AI-driven components: an AI Symptom Checker, which analyses user-provided symptom descriptions to recommend relevant medical specialities and assess urgency levels, and an AI Health Assistant, a conversational interface that delivers general, non-diagnostic health guidance in a safe and controlled manner. DR-APP further implements role-based dashboards for patients, doctors, and administrators, enabling secure access control, efficient appointment management, and streamlined administrative workflows. Secure online transactions are supported through Razorpay, while Cloudinary is utilised for scalable media storage. Experimental evaluation using simulated user workflows demonstrates that AI-assisted speciality recommendation significantly reduces appointment discovery time and improves decision clarity for users compared to conventional booking methods. The results highlight the effectiveness of integrating applied artificial intelligence into healthcare appointment systems to enhance usability, efficiency, and scalability, while maintaining non-diagnostic boundaries and real-world deployability.