Testing NeoCliniQ

What this software is

Software for a small clinic: a doctor's computer that holds the patient records, a pharmacy tablet at the counter that bills them, and a QR code in the waiting room that lets a patient join the queue from their own phone.

The clinic's own computer is the system of record. Patients, visits and prescriptions live there and keep working with the internet unplugged — that is the central design decision, and it is worth testing directly (Part 7). The server we run holds licences and relays the patient QR flow; it never becomes the place a clinic's records live.

What you need

• A Windows 10 or 11 PC for the clinic app.
• An Android 9 or later phone or tablet for the pharmacy app. A second Android device can stand in for the doctor's if you have no PC — the clinic app runs on Android too.
• Both on the same Wi-Fi for most of it. Part 7 asks you to break that on purpose.
• An email address you can read. Setup sends a code to it once.
• A second phone, or the same one, to scan the waiting-room QR as a patient.

Part 1 · Set the clinic up

1. Install the clinic app and open it. The first screen asks whether this is a new clinic or an existing one. Choose new. The second tab matters: a reinstall, a replaced laptop or a second computer at the same clinic all take that route. Registering again there would create a duplicate practice.
2. Enter a clinic name and an email address. You are not asked to invent a clinic code — it is generated from the name and is permanent.
3. Read the code from your email and enter it.
4. Create the first account. This is the clinic's super admin: it can sign in to both the clinic app and the counter. The password is hashed on your machine and never sent to us. We only ever learn the email address, because that is what a licence is keyed to.
5. Go to Settings → Patient QR. Print it, or leave it on screen — you will scan it in Part 3.

Worth trying: close the app halfway through setup and reopen it. It should resume where you left off rather than start again.

Part 2 · Pair the counter

1. Install the pharmacy app on the Android device and open it on the same Wi-Fi.
2. It searches for clinic computers by itself. With exactly one on the network it skips straight to asking for a code — there is no list to choose from when there is only one answer.
3. On the clinic app, open Settings → Pharmacy devices. A six-digit code is already on screen, with a countdown.
4. Type it on the tablet. Typing the sixth digit submits it.
5. Sign in on the tablet with the account you made in Part 1.

If discovery finds nothing — many clinic routers block the multicast it uses — the same screen offers the clinic's address typed by hand, and a QR to scan. That is a supported route, not a workaround.

Also try: the wrong code, and a code left until the countdown runs out. Both should be refused in one sentence that does not tell you which of the two was wrong.

Part 3 · A patient arrives

There are three ways in, and all three should end with the same person holding a token. Try each.

1. The patient's own phone. Scan the waiting-room QR. Choose a doctor, describe the complaint in your own words, get a token. Works on mobile data with no connection to the clinic's Wi-Fi at all.
2. The counter. On the tablet, Walk-in. Enter a mobile number; anybody already registered on it appears. Register somebody new and issue them a token.
3. The doctor's own desk. Patients → Add in the clinic app.

The one to try properly: a family sharing one phone. Put three people on the same mobile number, then look them up at the counter — all three should appear as separate patients, and you should be able to tick more than one and issue them a token each. Their token numbers must all differ.

Part 4 · The consultation

This is the screen the product is judged on. It is meant to be faster than a pen, and the whole of it works from the keyboard.

1. On Today or Queue, call somebody in.
2. Type a complaint, vitals and a diagnosis. They save as you type; there is no save button to forget.
3. Prescribe. Type a medicine name — suggestions are learned from what this clinic has typed before, so the second prescription is faster than the first. There is deliberately no drug catalogue.
4. Set the dose. Five ways, and they are the point of this screen:
   • Slots — morning / noon / night, tapped with + and −. Before or after food, per slot.
   • By hour — 8am, 2pm, 8pm. For a drug where the spacing matters and "morning" is too vague.
   • Interval — every 30 minutes, optionally only between two times. Try 8am to 8pm and watch the dispense quantity halve.
   • As needed.
   • Typed — free text, for anything the other four cannot say.
5. Open the Patient history panel on the right: previous consultations and chronic conditions, without leaving the prescription. Add a chronic condition and close the panel — you should land back on the prescription, not be asked whether you want to leave the consultation.
6. Sign. It goes to the counter immediately.

Keyboard: in the grid, Tab moves on and accepts the highlighted suggestion, Enter adds a row, Ctrl+Backspace deletes one. Elsewhere T, Q, P, U and S move between Today, Queue, Patients, Users and Settings, and Escape backs out. Try prescribing without touching the mouse at all.

Things that should be refused, and say why: signing a medicine with no dose set; a dose with no number of days. Both used to save silently and reach the counter as ×1. Signing with no medicines at all should only ask — a consultation that ends in advice is legitimate.

Part 5 · The counter bills them

1. The signed prescription appears on the tablet's Counter tab within about half a minute, without anybody pressing refresh.
2. Open it. The dosing is drawn, not just printed — you can see at a glance which slots are dosed and whether it is before or after food.
3. The medicine the doctor wrote cannot be edited. If it is out of stock, use substitute: the row then says what was given instead of what, and keeps the schedule and the quantity.
4. The quantity is calculated from the dose and the duration. The price is yours — that is the one thing a shop knows and the clinic does not.
5. Take the payment. Then hand the patient their copy: Print or save for a PDF, or Send, which puts the prescription and a written message into one WhatsApp share.

Read the patient's copy properly. It should say "1 in the morning and 1 at night · after food · for 10 days" — not 1-0-1 af. The till receipt and the patient's copy are deliberately different documents.

Part 6 · Looking back

• Prescriptions on the tablet — every bill this counter has closed, searchable by name, patient code or bill number. Try Today, 7 days and 30 days; a bill closed today must appear under all three.
• Patients in the clinic app — search by name or code, open a record, read the visit history.
• Day close on the tablet — what was taken, split by cash and digital, by pharmacist and by doctor. The number of people seen and the number billed are separate figures on purpose.
• Users in the clinic app — add a pharmacist, watch them sign in at the counter. They are handed a temporary password and must change it before doing anything.

Part 7 · Things worth breaking on purpose

These are the tests that find real faults. The happy path above mostly works; what matters is what the software says when something is wrong.

• Unplug the internet at the clinic — router still on, both devices still on the Wi-Fi. Everything clinical should keep working: signing in, the queue, a consultation, a prescription, a bill, a printed receipt. This is the product's central claim.
• Switch the clinic computer off with the counter open. The counter must say the doctor cannot be reached, and name them. It must not show an empty list — "nothing waiting" reads to a pharmacist as "the doctor never sent it".
• Take the tablet off the Wi-Fi and onto mobile data. If the clinic paired a cloud fallback, billing should carry on through the internet.
• Sign in with a wrong password, and with a username that does not exist. The message and the time taken should be identical — a difference tells an outsider who works at the clinic.
• Sign in at the clinic app as the pharmacist. It should be refused, and should say the account is for the counter. The reverse must work: a doctor can work the counter.
• Disable a user in Users while they are signed in at the counter. Their next action should be refused.
• Issue a token, then have the same patient scan the QR. They should not end up holding two places in one queue.
• Leave the clinic app open overnight, or change the computer's date. The queue should roll over and token numbers start again at 1.
• Start a consultation and back out of it. The patient should go back into the queue and be callable again, with anything typed still there.
• Try it on a phone, not a tablet. Both apps are built for 360dp screens. Anything overlapping, cut off or unreadable is worth reporting.

What is not finished

Named so you do not spend time reporting them, and so the list is honest.

• Windows warns on first launch. The build is not registered with Microsoft yet. Choose More info → Run anyway. It is a paperwork step, not a fault.
• There is no Mac build. Deliberately absent rather than offering a stale one.
• Reports and Insights do not exist. The design has them; nothing is behind them yet, so they are not in the app either.
• Two clinics working offline can mint the same patient code. Known, and it needs a database change to fix properly.
• Searching a patient by name at the counter needs the clinic's field keys, which arrive when the tablet is paired. A tablet paired before version 1.23 will say so and ask to be paired again.

Reporting something

What makes a report actionable, roughly in order of usefulness:

• What you did, in order, from a known starting point — which screen, what you typed, what you tapped.
• What you expected, and what happened instead. Both, even when the difference feels obvious.
• A photograph of the screen. More useful than a description almost every time.
• Which device and which version — the version is at the bottom of Settings in both apps.
• Whether the internet was on, and whether both devices were on the same Wi-Fi. A surprising number of behaviours turn on this.

If something reads badly — a message that blames the wrong thing, a word a pharmacist would not use, a screen that says nothing when it should explain itself — that is worth reporting too. Wording is treated as a defect here, not a nicety.