DESIGN & IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTERISED HOSPITAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

CHAPTER ONE 
1.1   GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
Healthcare establishments like hospitals, rehabilitation centers, health-saloons etc. are seen as figures of hope by the sick and diseased. Just like other organizations, medical establishments are also well-organized, following rigid and complex processes. These establishments require efficient and strong manpower for proper management of their processes. Their main objective is to offer quality healthcare to patients in a proper and cost-effective way. In recent years, there has been noticed a rapid growth in the health sector in the country, which in turn has created a need to build an application that will address most of the issues address in this research work. This research work will be of paramount importance to the medical sector as it will be design to address most of the challenges that delay some of the administrative work.  Hospital software easily automates the whole process of collating; retrieving and gathering patient information and as a consequence it results in improved response time towards the patient's demands. Doctors and other senior staff of the hospital would be capable of spending their precious time in other clinical activities over simple clerical activities. Sometimes it happens that accounting becomes very much complicated and pathetic. Using the software will remove all such complexities as it helps you retrieve your information accurately.         
1.2   INTRODUCTION 
Chapter one introduces the research work and the problem definition of the research, and to know the aim of this research work, research justification tells us why it is important to research on this topic; it also covers areas like scope and limitation of study which entails the boundary of this work. Definition of terms gives summarize what each chapter entails.   
1.3   PROBLEM DEFINITION
This research work was undertaken to uncover some of the problems with conventional hospital management systems. Where record entry, updating relevant patient information in his/her record, calculation, storage and retrieval of records are still being done manually. Using these conventional moods of operation may pose delay in the administrative system in the institution. 
1.4   OBJECTIVE OF STUDY
In view of the problems mentioned above, this project is aimed at implementing a hospital management system which will exclusively:
Automate the daily operations of the hospital such as assigning unique id for every patient when creating his/her record, staff automatically. Simultaneously update changes made to any record in its database.
Efficiently handle the hospital billing facility.       
1.5.    RESEARCH JUSTIFICATION
This research work will provide a reliable way of handling patient’s record effectively and eliminate the lag time in file recovery and also with an inclusion of a billing system. Furthermore, it will aids structural document representation and eliminates the tedium of performing monotonous transaction. This research will also contribute to existing literature in this area and will serve as a guild or blueprint for an undergraduate student.     
1.6   RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 
This research work “design and implementation of an interactive system for hospital management” will be a web-based application and will be implemented on a relational database system(MySQL). Html(hypertext markup language), css(cascading style sheet) and Jquery will be used to design the web-user interface, php (hypertext preprocessor) will be used as the serve- side script language to link the interface and the database. 
1.7   SCOPE AND LIMITATION OF STUDY
This research work is to develop a system capable of handling most of the administrative task in the hospital; such as storing patient’s record with each patient giving a unique id by the system, retrieve these records with ease when needed, facilitate record update, restricting access in the database with the allocation of privileges to authorize personnel. The system will also incorporate in its design a billing system that will record and prints patient’s bill for every service offered in the hospital. The system will not incorporate in its development all the functions of a health record system but will focus only on the aforementioned functionalities. The system will not be responsible for any loss of data if its environment (network/system installed on) is corrupt. 
1.8.0   DEFINITION OF TERM   
PATIENT: A person receiving or registered to receive medical treatment.           
1.9.0   CHAPTER LAYOUT 
This section  was  put in place to explain what each chapter does, chapter one introduces the project to the reader by explaining the problems the project is supposed to solve, objective of the study and research justification is to describe to the reader the purpose and the  importance of  researching on this topic, research methodology is all about the method used in implementing the research work, scope and limitation describes  the boundary of the research work and where the project work can be put into use.           
Chapter two deals with the literature review and state-of-the-art.This chapter discusses literature review, what people have published related to this research work and their shortcoming, how this present research can improve their shortcomings.              
Chapter three deals with the system design methodology i.e. collection of tools methods and practices for achieving a task; the requirement specification states the expectation of the system analysis, and design which is the blueprint of what the system would carry out.              
Chapter four has to do with the implementation, system testing strategies, target computer system requirement, software maintenance etc.                   
Chapter five discusses the recommendations and conclusion part of the research work and how this work can be applied to the problem domain.