Doctor's Digital Desk
The prescription pad, rebuilt
A digital prescription pad with PDF export and WhatsApp sharing.
Tools I used
How it started
A prescription pad that had to be legible, printable and sendable on WhatsApp, because that is where patients actually read things.
What actually happened
Doctor's Digital Desk is deliberately small. One route, a form on one tab and a formal prescription preview on the other, with patient details and a list of medicines each carrying dosage, frequency, duration and instructions. Export happens entirely in the browser: html2canvas photographs the preview element and jsPDF wraps that image into a PDF. There is a second export path I like more than the PDF — a wa.me link that formats the prescription as text with the clinic credentials attached. Everything is held in React state, so a refresh loses the lot. For a tool used inside a single consultation that was an acceptable trade, and it is also the first thing I would change.
Moments that changed the build
- Me: "It has to look like a real pad." → A preview component styled as the printed prescription, then captured as-is for the PDF.
- Me: "Send it on WhatsApp." → A generated wa.me link with the text version encoded into it.
- Me: "Do I need a login?" → Not for one doctor on one device. That answer changes the moment patient records are stored.
What broke
Refreshing the page. With no backend and no auth, a half-written prescription disappears and a previous patient cannot be looked up.
What I learned
The browser can produce a real document without any server. But state that only lives in memory is a decision about risk, not a shortcut.
The ebook from this project
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The Doctor's Digital Desk Story
The prescription pad, rebuilt
Ebook · $9.00