Patient Journey Timeline

February 2026 · 4 min

Overview

The Patient Journey Timeline provides a unified, chronological view of every clinical and administrative event for a patient -- spanning OPD visits, IPD admissions, lab orders, prescriptions, radiology studies, billing, and more. It is accessible from the patient profile under the 'Journey' tab and aggregates data from all modules into a single visual timeline.

Timeline Events

The timeline aggregates the following event types:

• Appointments -- Scheduled, completed, cancelled, and no-show appointments with doctor and department
• OPD Visits -- Walk-in and scheduled consultations with diagnosis, chief complaint, and attending doctor
• Lab Orders -- Test orders with status progression (ordered, collected, processing, completed) and result summaries
• Prescriptions -- Medication prescriptions with drug list, dispensing status, and prescribing doctor
• IPD Admissions -- Admission, transfer, and discharge events with ward/bed details, length of stay, and discharge summary
• Billing -- Invoice generation, payments, and insurance claim events with amounts

Each event shows a timestamp, icon, title, description, and a direct link to the detailed record.

Grouping & Navigation

Events are grouped by date (day boundaries) for easy scanning. Within each day group, events are ordered chronologically with the most recent first. The timeline supports:

• Date grouping -- Events clustered by day with clear date headers
• Event type icons -- Color-coded icons distinguish visits (teal), labs (cyan), prescriptions (green), admissions (magenta), and billing (orange)
• Direct links -- Click any event to navigate directly to the detailed record (visit, lab order, admission, etc.)
• Status badges -- Each event displays its current status (completed, pending, in-progress, etc.) with appropriate color coding

Data Sources

The buildTimelineEvents() utility function in components/patient/patient-journey-timeline.tsx accepts data from multiple tables and normalizes them into a common event format:

buildTimelineEvents({
  appointments,    // from appointments table
  visits,          // from opd_visits table
  labOrders,       // from lab_orders table
  prescriptions,   // from prescriptions table
  admissions,      // from ipd_admissions table
  bills,           // from bills table
})

The patient detail server page already fetches all these data sources and passes them to the PatientProfile component, which renders the Journey tab.

Use Cases

Common use cases for the Patient Journey Timeline:

• Doctor Consultation -- Quickly review a patient's complete clinical history before a follow-up visit
• Discharge Planning -- Review all events during an IPD stay to prepare the discharge summary
• Insurance Auditing -- Track the complete care pathway for insurance claim justification
• Quality Assurance -- Identify care gaps, delays between ordering and results, or missed follow-ups
• Patient Communication -- Explain the treatment journey to the patient or their family

Notes

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