THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTERIZE OUTPATIENT INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR THE SEFA CLINIC KADUNA

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.             Background of the Study

Before Healthcare System came into practice, keeping proper records of the daily activities of hospitals, patients’ information, maintenance schedule of equipment in hospitals, as well as the allocation and usage of funds happened to be a difficult and hectic task. This resulted in waste of money, time and manpower. Healthcare System is an information management system designed to help manage administrative, clinical and financial aspects of our modern day hospitals. It helps in monitoring and controlling hospitals’ daily transactions, as well as their overall performances. Hospital Management System enables access to the right information and automation of complex tasks, hence allowing staff to spend more time caring for patients than any other related but less important task.

Research on outpatient clinics shows that waiting times are patients’ main dissatisfaction with

Hospital services. According to doctors and other personnel, overtime and peak workloads are potential threats to the quality of services offered by hospitals across the globe. This research focuses on outpatient scheduling as a means of solving these problems for outpatient clinics, with the overall aim of enhancing the services provided by these clinics. According to (Farzandipour, Sadoughi&Meidani, 2003;Hasford, S.B. 2010; Hasford, S.B. 2011) access time is the time between the patient’s request for an appointment and his arrival at the outpatient clinic. A patient’s internal waiting time is the period between the scheduled starting time and the actual starting time of his consultation. Waiting time due to a patient’s early arrival is extracted from the internal waiting time, since it is not a consequence of the appointment system.

To address the above mentioned problems, there is the thirst of automating the entire process, to help patients book for appointments and access their medical records using a software. This will significantly reduce the number of missed appointments, unnecessary outpatient queue at the clinics, and long waiting time. The system will enable the outpatients to login with their number to appointment booking interface and view the scheduling calendar for the available receptionist, available time and room number of the available physicians. Then book an appointment by selecting from the list of available personnel’s that conform to the patient time. This paper titled “Design and Implementation of Outpatient Management System” presents the research, design and implementation of intuitive software in this regard.

Long waiting times are a serious problem for patients using urban health centers in developing countries.

A clinic is an institution with an organized medical and nursing staff, provide a range of medical service, like surgery, for people requiring intensive treatment or observation.

It may also include facilities for childbirth as well as various out-patient departments.

A clinic is make up of various departments where various cases are handled. For example

1. The surgery department where patients are operated on in the theatres.
2. Obstetrics and gynaecology unit where pregnant women are taken care of.
3. Paediatric department where children are treated.

An outpatient is a patient who does not reside in the clinic where he/she is being treated. The registers of the outpatients are used for documentation of the outpatients. The documentation of the outpatients. The data for outpatient registers are registration number, name of patient, age, sex, registration address etc.

The outpatient unit is made up of casually section, records, outpatient, theaters, various clinics etc.

The treatment of the outpatients ends in the outpatient department while that of the inpatients ends in their various wards.

1.2     STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

It could be very burdensome for someone who is seriously ill or has terrible symptoms to queue on clinic line waiting for the doctor to attend to him or to pay for service and also get drugs.

But when the designing and implementation of a computerize outpatient information system is achieved, a lot of problems will be documented for the outpatient. These problems includes:

1. Time wastage
2. Absence of doctors involved
3. File sorting
4. referral to nearby  hospital