Full Project – Design and implementation of a web based health care management system

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

A hospital is an institution for health care that provides patient treatment by specialized staff and equipment. Health is generally said to be wealth. It takes healthy people to generate the wealth the nation requires for the general well-being of its people. There is therefore the need for adequate Health care management especially in the area of keeping diagnosis, staffing and patient management and treatment records of diseases. Since there is a good relationship between the job output and health of the workers, a good Health care management system is very vital. The goal of any system development is to develop and implement the system cost effectively; user-friendly and most suited to the user’s analysis.

The Federal Medical Center, Otuoke (F. M. C.) is a prestigious hospital situated in Ogbia local government area with an average but growing patient capacity due to the introduction of the Federal University in the community. This number is increasing at a rapid pace with each passing day. The management of the hospital is concerned with the increasing effort in keeping records of the patient and recording their activities, as there are many issues facing Federel Medical Centre Otuoke such as the handling and managing of patients, proper and neat record keeping of drugs, equipment, instruments, tools, payment.

Federal Medical Center Otuoke currently runs on manual platform where all details of the system are run on paper. This approach is susceptible to so many disadvantages such as loss of records due to natural disasters like fire, inability of the staffs to access the records when needed or reaching member being limited by distance. So the proposed web based Health management system will make it easy for you to combat the challenges of the existing system such as; Inability of members to access their records as at when due, Loss of records due to natural disasters, Not always easy for members to get appointments and other assistance as at when due.

Hence, this call for a need for the creation of an easy user friendly method of handling Federal medical center Otuoke patients and records by creating a web based health care management system for them, which will not only benefit the community or students in the community but also the staff and the entire medical management in the hospital.

Unfortunately, in most developing nation (including Nigeria), this adequate Health care management system is lacking due to low standard of technological know-how and manual handling of most medical problems. As observed by Lyiama H.C. and D.C. Chukwu, “very often, people in developing countries who are critically ill are rushed abroad for special treatment because it is felt that health care management facilities at home are inadequate. This is partly because computer – aided Medicare has become a reality in many developed countries”. It is also a known fact that the production of qualified medical doctors and other medical personnel and consultants is on the increase, but this is not enough to meet the health needs of the increasing population.

Considering the rate of population growth the medical care and facilities available, and the health needs of the people, computer-aided health care management system is inevitable for more accuracy. The wide range of the use of computer is due to its versatility as a data processing machine and its ability to do things including complicated tasks faster, better and more accurately than human beings would.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

It has been observed that to receive medical treatment in most of our hospitals (especially F.M.C, Otuoke), the patients queue up for several hours from one unit of the hospital to another starting from obtaining a new hospital folder, or retrieving an old one before consulting a doctor, to the laboratory unit for lab test then to the pharmacy to get the prescribed drugs and so on. With the manual processes involved in handling the patient, most of them waste the whole day in the hospital. Very often, patients leave their homes very early in the morning in order to be among the first group to see the doctor. Otherwise, they may end up wasting the whole day without due attention. This situation is discouraging to most patients and sometimes forces them to turn to non-professionals or even resort to self-medication for quick recovery.

Moreover, the volume of work for the hospital personnel is much. Patients outnumber the doctors, nurses and other medical personnel that too much are required from them. In this regard, to examine all his patients for the day the doctor hurries over his work without adequate attention and expertise to his clients. Still, at the end of the day he is exhausted.

In addition to this, the diagnosis and prescription depend on the doctor’s memory and drug of choice. Their brains are often loaded with different diseases, signs and symptoms, complications and various drugs for their treatment and so on. Some of which are very similar. To remember and process this huge information in his clinical work is very tasking. For this reason accurate diagnosis and prescription may not always be obtained.

The keeping and retrieval of accurate records on patients are poorly carried out in most of our hospitals. Files may be misplaced; the record in them may be wrongly filled. Hence, it is not easy to obtain accurate and timely information or data. This is also the case with obtaining other medical information and data especially when new folders and numbers are obtained each year.

Finally, the keeping of folder for each patient manually takes a lot of time and money and some of the information are redundant. All these have net effect of loss of lives and inefficiency on the part of management.

1.3 Aim and objectives of the study

The aim of this project is to design and implement a health care management system.

The objectives of this research work are;

To examine the current procedures employed in our hospitals with regards to patients admission, diagnosis and treatment.
To examine the associated problem(s) or flaws in the current system.
To improve on the already existing system by designing an efficient practical patient billing software, this is aimed at an accurate, faster and reliable patient’s information system.

1.4 Research Methodology

The steps necessary to achieve the objectives of this work are:

Review of the relevant literature on Health care management system.
Design the system components and features using unified modeling language (UML) using the Water fall Model.
Implementation of the design using relevant web development tools like HTML 5, CSS3, Php, JavaScript and SQL for the database management.
Face to face interview with the staff of Federal Medical Center, Otuoke.
Books and journals.
The use of internet search engines and materials from internet.
Personal observations.

1.5 Significant of study

The study is important to the hospital patients since they could have medical information without experiencing delays and incorrect information. If they wanted to access their medical history, they would not be going through a difficult process. The hospital especially the pharmacy and billing department would not go through a lot of paper reports when it comes to payments and accounting records. The use of paper would still be there but it could be reduced so that excessive paper loads would not be a problem.

The study was also significant to the staffs since they would be able to register, update, delete, and search information within the system. It was beneficial to the hospital since it could improve their management through connecting all their existing computers in one system. In general, the study was important to the hospital and patients for it could serve as an applicable tool to maintain the productivity and quality of service in the hospital.

Health system functioning depends on production and use of quality health data and information at all levels of the health system. This study serves as a starting point for the assessment of HIS based on the situation in public to identify the strengths and weakness of the system in improving health system functioning. The study forms a basis for further research on evidence based management of health services in Otuoke and specifically lead to generation of new ideas for better and more efficient management of health facilities in Bayelsa and the country at large.

Findings and recommendations of the study would contribute towards the ongoing efforts of ministry of health to develop better health management operations system that would benefit facilities and healthcare workers identify their weakness and thus propose better ways that could help improve their efficiency through improved information use. The findings of the study will be used by all health care workers and health care managers as and will not rely on haphazard personal experiences or subjective personal judgments or of friends/relative other than base their decisions and actions on concrete evidence and thus help re-invent themselves as problem solvers.

1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

This research work is limited to Federal Medical Center Otuoke patient’s admission information system including treatments, bills and payments. The software developed will be carried out using php, html, css and MySql to manage the database. The system is tested with the records of Federal Medical Center Otuoke.

1.7 Limitation of the Study

This project work has certain limitation which is Funding; Fund was the first and most import part of every project work. The economy is actually hard and getting fund to push the project beyond its scope was really an issue, as money for internet access was required and money for partaking in clinical services as a patient so as to investigate patient to clinical staff relation was also a problem.

1.8 DEFINITION OF TERMS

Electronic Health Record– An electronic health record (EHR) (also electronic patient record (EPR) or computerized patient record) is an evolving concept defined as a systematic collection of electronic health information about individual patients or populations

WEB – The developments in the way that people use the internet that allow users

Free access and give them control over the information (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 9^th edition). Also from webopedia definition, web or World

Wide Web is basically a system of internet servers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in markup language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that supports links to the other documents, as well as graphics, audio and video files.

INFORMATION – Information is data, or raw facts, shaped into useful form for human use.

SYSTEM – A system is a combination or arrangement of parts to form an integrated whole, working together to achieve specific tasks. A system includes an orderly arrangement according to some common principles or rule.

STAFF – According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, staff is all the

Workers employed in an organization considered as a group.

Expert system: is software that uses a knowledge base of human expertise for problem solving, or clarify uncertainties where normally one or more human experts would need to be consulted.

Health information system (HIS): variously also called clinical information system (CIS) is a comprehensive, integrated information system designed to manage the administrative, financial and clinical aspects of the health center. This encompasses paper-based information processing as well as data processing machines.

MIS– Management Information System is the system that stores and retrieves information and data, process them, and present them to the management as information to be used in making decision. It can also be defined as an integrated machine system that provides information to support the planning and control functions of managers in all organizations. By these definitions, MIS must serve the basic functions of management, which include planning, organizing, staffing, directing and controlling. Information systems that only support operations and do not have managerial decision making significance is not part of MIS.

MCS– Management Control system is a form of Information System used by the management of an organization to analyze each application of information system in terms of input, storage, processing and output. The MCS has functional subsystems such as the hardware system, the operating system, the communication system and the database system. Management control systems are human artifacts. This means that MCS exits only because human beings design and build them.

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