I have been working on a Laravel based healthcare project. This project covers couple of states in US and handles a huge number of patient. It also has a huge network of practices (clinics). We recently got a request to add a feature that would suggest patients that are near to practices. This was so that they can scheduled patients efficiently with less drop outs and outliers.

We already have some support for this feature where, when looking up a patient we were suggesting practices nearby. This feature however took it to another level, where we needed to create a huge cross section of distances between all the practices and patients. And then coming out with the most appropriate combination of practices for all the patients..

It was exciting to handle this sort of complexity and calculation. I looked into options and zeroed on the use Redis for this situation. Redis recently released support for geo data and I was looking forward to make use of it. I had read about it in blogs and also saw it being used in some projects at ColoredCow.

I started architecting the solution and then implementing it. Given the scale of our project there were some roadblocks on the way. But the inner excited child held up with me and very soon I was able to sort things out.

It was a huge sense of achievement. We were always very excited to try out new things as a child. And there was so much excitement  that we felt when we completed one new things or practiced a new skill. As we grow, we often stop filling in to our inner child’s craving for excitements. But these small wins along the way go a long way in making us realise the beautiful feeling that we get in trying out newer things. We don’t necessarily need to look out of our work to try out new things, but rather just find small opportunities to do wherever we get a chance to do so.