Find a clinic. Hold your place. Watch your number come up.
BK ClinicQ is clinic discovery plus digital queue management for public and private clinics. Join the queue from your phone before you leave home: by app, by USSD on any phone with no data, by WhatsApp or on the web. Then watch your ticket count down on the clinic's own waiting-room screen while staff run the whole line from one dashboard.
One queue, four doors in
Every channel calls the same service. A walk-in ticket and a ticket joined from a taxi take numbers from the same sequence, in arrival order; no channel jumps the physical line.
Four screens, one system
Mock-ups of the surfaces we are building, with illustrative data only. The board below is live: watch it call the next patient and the ticket on the phone move one place closer.
Find the nearest clinic with the shortest queue, join it, then watch your position tick down. Wait times are always shown as a range; a false-precision number that slips does more damage to trust than no number at all.
What reception keeps open all day. Every active queue side by side, each card answering "is anyone stuck?" at a glance. When the connection drops, the dashboard says so instead of showing a frozen queue that looks current.
Triage / vitals Nurse A
Doctor Room 1 Dr N.
Doctor Room 2 Oldest 41 min
Pharmacy Window 1
A browser tab in kiosk mode on any TV, driven by a ~R1,000 signage box. Privacy is applied on the server: under the default number-only mode a patient's name is not in the payload at all, not merely hidden, so a mis-styled template can never leak it.
The feature no global queue vendor offers. USSD reaches a feature phone with no data and no airtime to browse; WhatsApp reaches the app most patients already have open. Both are thin adapters over exactly the same services the web uses.
USSD · *120*4357#
WhatsApp bot
Sawubona 👋 What would you like to do?
Estimated wait 15–25 min.
I'll message you when you're next.
What we are building
What BK ClinicQ does, for the three people who use it: the patient holding a place in the queue, the clinic running the line, and the platform underneath both.
For patients
PostGIS radius search with a public/private/all toggle, live queue length, open-now status, map and list.
A ticket number and live position before you leave home, from the app, USSD, WhatsApp or the web.
Push, SMS or WhatsApp, with quiet hours, opt-outs and hard per-clinic cost caps.
Booked slots that convert into a live ticket automatically at the right moment.
Scan a QR at the door instead of queueing to talk to reception at 07:30.
One household, one smartphone: a parent for a child, a daughter for her mother, with consent recorded.
Recurring medication-collection nudges with a one-keypress join.
Wait nearby: you are called forward accounting for how long you say you need to travel.
English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans and Sesotho, across menus, messages and the spoken call-out.
For clinic staff
Every active queue live, with one very large Call Next and an honest offline state.
Same sequence as remote joins. One fair queue, printable stub, optional SMS.
Triage → doctor → pharmacy, with transfers that keep the visit intact.
Bump a visibly unwell patient in two taps, with a reason code and a permanent trail.
Number, time, privacy-gated name, audio call-out and unattended recovery after load-shedding.
Hours, holidays, closures, queues, services, staff and display mode. No developer needed.
Wait times, no-show rate, channel mix and the busiest-hour heatmap.
One question, one tap: a service-quality number a manager can take to their district.
Platform, privacy & compliance
Five roles: a clinic can never read another clinic's data, and cross-site access returns 404, not 403.
Every new clinic starts number-only. Names and reasons are opt-in, consent-gated and audited.
Reason text and visit notes are deleted automatically after a short window, with a test that proves it.
Hash-chained append-only log: a retrospective edit is detectable.
A patient can ask what is held about them, and have it deleted: POPIA rights, built not promised.
Anonymised area-level wait trends with small-cell suppression, for health-department planning.
Why this doesn't already exist here
Digital queue management has run abroad for over a decade. Most South African clinics still run paper-and-shout queues, because the existing products were built for different budgets and different phones.
| System | Where | What it does | What it assumes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qminder · Qless · Wavetec · Qmatic | Retail, banking, government | Digital tickets, SMS alerts, staff dashboards, analytics | Retail/corporate budgets; a smartphone with data |
| NHS App · e-Referral Service | UK healthcare | National appointment booking, integrated with patient records | A single national health system and its funding |
| NHS outpatient kiosks & boards | UK hospitals | Kiosk check-in and called-name display screens | Hospital IT budget and on-site integration |
| Solv · Zocdoc | US urgent & primary care | Online booking, virtual waiting room, "you're up next" texts | Insurance-funded private practice; smartphone-first |
| BK ClinicQ | SA public & private clinics | Discovery + queue + four channels including USSD, priced for a clinic, near-zero hardware | Any phone. Any budget. No existing clinic system required. |
One queue, whichever door you came in
A morning off work should not be the price of a twenty-minute consultation. Take a look at what BK ClinicQ does, or sign in to the console.