During the summer of 2020, I was contracted by a local orthodontist, Doctor Serino, to make website to screen patients for Covid symptoms. They were using an Covid questionnaire created at the beginning of the pandemic for doctors that wasn't configurable. The website was provided as-is, and wasn't updated after initial creation. By summer, the questions were outdated, and important questions were absent. I was asked to make a replacement questionnaire with certain extra features; however, partway through the initial development, the company that provided the original questionnaire released a new, updated service, at a cost far below what I was contracted for, with all the requested features and configurability. Unfortunately, the contract fell through.
The website was composed of two questionnaire pages, an administration page, a database, email notifications sent to Serino's receptionist, and SMS notifications sent to patients. The patient flow began with an SMS message sent by an appointment reminder system that Serino used. The reminder message would contain a link to the main questionnaire page. The on the main questionnaire page, patients entered basic identifying info, and answered several questions about Covid symptoms, exposure, travel outside the country, etc. Once submitted, those responses were inserted into the database, and were checked for flagged answers (like responding "yes" to recent exposure). A summary of the patient's responses were then emailed to the receptionist, including either the flagged answers, or an all-clear message. The night before the patient's appointment, an SMS message was sent to the patient with a personalized link to the second questionnaire page. The second page was visited by the patient when they arrived in the parking lot. The patient would provide a description of their car, and possibly other questions if configured. Finally, an SMS message was sent to the receptionist with the patient's responses.
The website that I made for the contract used several AWS services, to minimize cost. The entire questionnaire was configured through an SQL database. The webpage was rendered server-side by the Lightsail instance to minimize database network traffic costs. The rendered HTML was hosted on a Lightsail instance, along with the administration page. The administration page was able to edit the questions for each questionnaire, and configure which responses were flagged. Questions could be either a short text box, yes or no questions, or multiple choice with any number of options. In order to comply with medical record storage regulations, database entries older than a few days would be deleted, possibly first sending them to an email address. JSON web tokens were used to generate personalized links sent to patients, and to secure all REST endpoints. The Lightsail instance used endpoints to mediate all communication between public facing web pages and the SQL database. The instance used ExpressJS to serve endpoints, and Mustache to perform server-side rendering.