What MedMeals is

MedMeals is the hospital product of an institutional food-services SaaS platform. It handles patient meal ordering, dietary-restriction compliance, multi-role staff dashboards, HIS (Hospital Information System) integration and payment processing. I am the sole owner of its backend, PostgreSQL schema, AWS infrastructure and deployment pipeline.

My role: Sole backend, database, DevOps and server owner (Apr 2024 – present).

The problem it solves

Hospital catering has a constraint ordinary food ordering does not: a meal delivered to the wrong patient is a clinical incident, not a refund. Orders must respect prescribed dietary restrictions that live in the hospital's own information system, ward and bed assignments change during the day, and the kitchen needs a firm cut-off while the ward needs late changes. On top of that, the platform is multi-tenant — every hospital has its own menus, staff roles and billing arrangements.

How it works

The backend treats the hospital's HIS as the authority on who a patient is and what they may eat, and treats itself as the authority on orders and money. Dietary rules are enforced server-side at order time rather than filtered in the UI, so a stale client cannot place a non-compliant order. Order state moves through an explicit state machine with database-level constraints instead of application-level checks, and payment confirmation — not a client callback — is what creates the order record. Tenant isolation is enforced in a middleware layer that scopes every query, so a missing filter fails closed rather than leaking across hospitals.

The outcome

The wider platform grew from roughly 1,000 to over 20,000 registered users while I owned it, and now processes about 50,000 meal transactions a month across campuses, workplaces and hospitals. Along the way I cut the AWS bill by roughly 60% without downgrading the service, and moved deployments to a zero-downtime PM2 and NGINX pipeline. Most of my technical writing is drawn directly from this system.

Technology used

  • Node.js
  • PostgreSQL
  • AWS EC2
  • AWS S3
  • NGINX
  • PM2
  • Sequelize
  • Supabase

Engineering highlights

  • Scaled the MealPe platform (which MedMeals runs on) from 1,000 to 20,000+ users with zero planned downtime
  • Architected scalable REST APIs - meal ordering, dietary tracking, multi-role admin
  • Reduced AWS infrastructure costs by ~60% by fixing logging inefficiencies and moving static assets to NGINX
  • Set up full server lifecycle: NGINX, SSL, PM2 cluster mode, CI/CD pipeline
  • Integrated HIS systems and third-party payment gateways (Razorpay, Easebuzz)
  • Implemented zero-downtime deployments with PM2 graceful reload