MediCare: Building a Doctor Booking and Medication Reminder App

The brief: doctor visits and daily medication in one place

MediCare was built for a healthcare client under NDA. Patients were booking appointments by phone, choosing doctors with little information, and leaving the surgery with prescriptions that were easy to misread or forget.

The goal was one app that covers both sides of care: finding and booking the right doctor, and then staying on track with treatment day to day.

What the app does

• Doctor profiles with specialty, ratings, patient count and working hours.
• Appointment booking in a couple of taps.
• A calendar-based schedule that turns prescriptions into daily pill tasks with dosage and timing.
• Timely medication reminders.
• A private history of past care to review with the doctor.

Building a doctor appointment booking app

Patients choose a doctor more confidently when they can see who they are booking. Each profile shows specialty, ratings, number of patients and working hours, so the decision is made on information rather than on whoever has the next free slot.

Booking shows only times that are genuinely available: slots are worked out from the doctor's working hours minus existing appointments. The harder problem is two patients tapping the same slot at the same moment. The booking is checked in the database itself, so only one of them can succeed and the other is offered the next available time.

Building a medication reminder app that people can rely on

A reminder that does not fire is worse than no reminder, because the patient has stopped keeping track themselves. Each prescription is broken down into daily tasks with the dose and the time, shown on a calendar, and every task gets a reminder.

Reminders are scheduled on the device, so they work without a network connection. Android adds complications: some manufacturers aggressively stop background work to save battery, and exact-time alarms need specific handling. Reminders are rescheduled whenever a prescription changes and after the phone restarts, so a reboot never silently clears them.

Time zones and daylight saving changes are the other trap. Dose times are stored as local times of day, so a pill due at 8am stays at 8am when the clocks change or the patient travels.

Keeping patient data private

MediCare runs on Supabase, which is built on PostgreSQL. Access rules are enforced in the database itself with row-level security: each patient can only read their own appointments, prescriptions and history, even if a bug in the app tried to request someone else's. Enforcing privacy at the data layer rather than in the interface is the single most important decision in a health app.

The security mistakes we most often find in apps are covered in why vibe-coded apps have security vulnerabilities.

Designing for patients

• Large, readable type and short flows, because many users are older or unwell.
• Today's doses shown as a simple checklist.
• Reminders written in plain language with the dose included, so the notification alone is enough.
• Past care kept in a private history that patients can show their doctor at the next visit.

Stack and approach

The app is built in React Native with TypeScript and NativeWind for iOS and Android, on Supabase for authentication and data. A seven-person team covered product, design, mobile, backend and QA across the mobile app and its web side.

What we would do differently

We would bring a compliance review into discovery rather than near launch, because the regulations that apply depend on the country and the type of provider, and they shape data storage decisions from the start. We would also add caregiver sharing, for patients who rely on a family member to help manage their medication.

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