MedTracker

Motivation

Medication adherence is a coordination problem, not only a reminder problem. I built this to explore how separate patient and caregiver experiences should work when one person depends on another for setup, monitoring, or accountability, without turning the product into a second EMR.

Overview

A full-stack MERN app for medication and appointment tracking. Patients log doses per time-slot, track supply with low and empty alerts, and manage appointments. Caregivers link patients, view combined schedules and adherence summaries, and can manage medications and appointments on their behalf. When a caregiver is linked, the patient-facing UI becomes read-only so permissions stay honest in the interface.

Approach

I treated dose-level logging as the source of truth: one row per medication, date, and time slot, instead of a single taken flag per day. That removed ambiguity when a drug is taken morning and night. Caregiver flows reuse the same domain rules with explicit authorization in the API so the UI can stay simple. Dates are normalized (YYYY-MM-DD and consistent time-slot identifiers) so filters, logs, and summaries agree.

Features and design

Core features include schedules with instructions and notes, undo for mistaken logs, appointment statuses (Scheduled, Today, Completed, Missed, Cancelled), JWT auth, and an onboarding tutorial from settings. I kept logging flows short so daily use feels lightweight.

What I learned

• Dose-level logging matters: tracking taken per time-slot per day avoids collapsing a complex schedule into one misleading status.
• Permissions are product features: caregiver versus patient required explicit rules and UI state that match them, not only API checks.
• Date and time normalization across UI, API, and analytics reduced edge cases more than extra UI polish would have.
• Keeping schedule and adherence logic in shared utilities prevented duplicated rules across React components and Express controllers.

The repository on GitHub walks through structure, API routes, and sample fixtures if you want to go deeper.