The local medical clinic has decided to automate its scheduling services. You have been assigned to design the initial version of the schedules. The basic functions that the clinic has in mind are doctor check-in and check-out and patient check-in and check-out.
A doctor checks in by telling the scheduler his or her name, an examination room number, and a medical specialty code. Each doctor has a favorite room. The scheduler checks to see whether the room is free. If so, it assigns this doctor to the room; if not, it rejects the request with a message, and the doctor can try again to check in. When a doctor checks out, the examination room is freed.
A patient checking in gives a name, age, specialist code, and emergency indication. The scheduler tries to match up the patient with a doctor according to a set of rules that are described here. If there is a match, the patient is seen by the assigned doctor. If this doctor is currently seeing a patient, the new patient is queued to see the doctor.
The rules for assigning doctors to patients are as follows:
l. Any patient under age 16 is assigned to see a pediatrician.
2. Patients age 16 and older are assigned a doctor according to the specialty requested. If there is no doctor in the clinic with the requested specialty, the patient is assigned to a general practitioner (GP). If there is no GP, the patient can be assigned to any doctor.
3. If there is more than one doctor of the requested specialty, the patient is assigned to the doctor with the shortest waiting list.
When a patient checks out, the doctor he or she was assigned to is available to see the next patient if there is anyone in the waiting list.
Because this is an interactive system, your program should prompt the users to input the correct information. The initial prompt is
Type D for Doctor or P for Patient:
The next prompt is
Type I for check-in or O for checkout:
According to the request, your program should prompt the user for any other needed information, as indicated in the following table:
| Action | Additional Information |
| Doctor check-in | Doctor's name, Speciality code |
| Doctor check-out | Room number, Speciality code, Doctor's name |
| Patient check-in | Patient's name, age, specialty (code requested), room number |
| Patient check-out | Patient's name, age, room number |
You may define the format for the input processed by your program.
The output for each request is in the form of messages to the user, according to the request, as indicated in the following table.
| Action | Message |
| Doctor check-in | Confirmation that room is available or Error message if room is in use. |
| Doctor check-out | Good-bye message |
| Patient check-in | Message telling patient which room to go to and which doctor has been assigned. If no doctor is available, apologetic message. |
| Patient check-out | Good-bye message. At a later time we may add billing information at this point. |
In addition to printing the messages on the screen, you should also write the requests and messages to a transaction file (trans.out), to be turned in with your program listing.
1. There are 20 examination rooms at the clinic, each with a waiting room attached.
2. Specialty codes are as follows:
Pediatrics PED
General practice GEN
Internal medicine INT
Cardiology CAR
Surgeon SUR
Obstetrics OBS
Psychiatry PSY
Neurology NEU
Orthopedics ORT
Dermatology DET
Ophthalmology OPT
Ear, Nose, and Throat ENT
3. You may assume that no patient leaves without checking out. (That is, every doctor becomes free eventually.)
4. No one leaves before he or she sees the assigned doctor. (That is, no one has to be taken out of the waiting queue.) The clinic is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
5. If a doctor checks out while there is still a waiting list of patients assigned to him or her, the patients must be reassigned to other doctors.
The basic data structure is a list of examination rooms with waiting lists attached to each. Because the number of rooms is fixed, you may use an array of records to represent it. It is the waiting list attached to each examination room that is of interest to us. We have seen that patients are seen in the order in which they are added to the list (a simple queue).