Get-a-Doc: A Doctor Recommender System

Abstract

A number of web and mobile based applications exist for finding and booking a doctor’s appointment through the application. However, these applications list multiple specialists instead of providing the perfect match of doctor according to user preferences. Though the present apps provide filters to shortlist the selection, yet a user needs to browse through the entire list of doctors. Moreover, only a single filter can be applied at once, in general. The current work presents a web-based application, Get-a-doc, which provides a user with the best match out of available doctors according to his preferences. A distributed approach to information retrieval has been employed, whereby the database of doctors’ data has been stored on a NoSQL based data store, MongoDb. This database has been sharded, into 3 divisions for scalability of the application. Results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach. Our main motivation for building the project was to reduce the effort and hassle that the user needs to go through when he has to go through a list of doctors, to find a suitable match accoding to his/her needs.