Database schema for kind of Hospital Management in Laravel - laravel

Question

I am trying to start an application but it's not for managing hospital, it will be for doctors and patients. Where there will be multiple types for users will be able to login such as Doctor, Patients/Guardians.
Doctors can have multiple clinics at multiple locations and doctor can manage patient records. Once the patient account has been created by doctor then patient can take appointment from doctor or update his appointment status and many more stuff will be there next.
The thing is how to go with the ERD?
I will have
User //User accounts used to login in to the system
Doctor
Patient
Guardian
Role
Permission
These are the models I have currently created, but they don't seem right to me.
Should I remove role columns as I already have different tables for different pre-defined roles?
Or should it be there? But how to manage permissions on users if no roles table is there?
Also, most importantly, how to go with one to one with users? I mean should I go and create functions in user model such as:
public function doctor(){}
public function guardian(){}
public function patient(){}
Or is there a better approach to follow?

Answer 1

If they are all users, you can extend different users from a base user model.
If they require different columns in database, consider single table inheritance.
If roles are static, I would create a class called UserType and have constants of each user type mapped to an integer. In the database, the user table will have a type column which is mapped to this integer.
For example:
class UserType {
const DOCTOR = 1;
}
In your application you'll be able to check the type of user by doing $user->type === UserType::DOCTOR
In the Eloquent itself, you can extend newFromBuilder method to check the type attribute and return the child class (like Doctor) instead of User. So even when you do $user = User::find(1);, you'll still get the class Doctor.
When creating users, you can just create Doctor itself but make sure in __construct to set the appropriate type attribute.
So now you have a base User class, your shared functionality can go here. Specialised methods such as relation to clinics can go in the Doctor class.
This is somewhat similar to the above: https://github.com/Nanigans/single-table-inheritance