Patient Management System : for Base Hospital, Homagama

Overview of the Problem

   Each one of us worries and takes care of our health throughout our lifetime. When we talk about Health Care we cannot forget about Hospitals. Hospital is a place that handles many different services like dealing with disease controlling, emergency ward handling for immediate treatments, maintaining units and wards for intensive care, long term care, child birth and for surgery facilities. And it also deals with clinics, laboratory tests, issuing drugs and so forth. So it is easily understandable, that a hospital is a complex system that handles various kinds of duties performed by different job roles.

   In Sri Lanka, although we see all the above jobs and duties are controlled in an organized manner in Private sector, with the use of computer systems along with other facilities, most of the government hospitals still survive on paper based information systems. This inefficiency has become the main reason for delayed hospital services for the patients. 

   The workers waste valuable time for jobs like preparing numbers to be issued to patients, preparing papers for the doctors to write prescriptions and for many other tasks that are actually not meant for them. Also nurses have to maintain records of clinical patients and they have to search those past records out of thousands of records when a patient arrives to take medication. As a result, the valuable time of both parties gets wasted. 

   Laboratory reports are also issued as handwritten chits where the basic structure of the report is rubber stamped. At OPD, as no records of patients are properly collected, there is nothing more frustrating and overwhelming to the patient than repeating same medications given by different doctors for the same disease in several visits. The hospital itself is suffering because of the lack of facilities in several ways, spending more time to recognize different hand writings, finding more space to store paper based records, maintaining and protecting paper based information, finding papers to prepare chits for prescriptions to be written, preparing reports in details for auditing, etc.

The Aim

   Our basic attempt is to build a simple system to minimize waits of patients, when there is a substantial increase in the numbers of patients. We need the outcome as a simple but an effective system, because the people that will be using this system are not equipped with a high standard of computer literacy.

How we Proceed

   A team of us recognized the above drawbacks after visiting the Base Hospital in Homagama along with the guidance and the supervision of our contact personnel, Dr. Haresh Senarathna. As the whole hospital possesses only about three computers, we could not start with an overall management system for the hospital. Besides, there was no pre-established network infrastructure between those computers. Until the bottlenecks like hardware facilities are cleared, we started with the laboratory services.

   Most of the reports generated at the laboratory are issued as rubber stamped reports, by filling values obtained during the tests. And about two types of detailed reports are computer generated using Microsoft office Word documents. As it takes a lot of time to prepare such a report, there are deferments. 

   To ensure the accuracy, efficiency and to ease off the process we started to build a system for the laboratory services. At the first visit to the hospital we figured out the overall functionality of the hospital and gathered some requirements for the laboratory system. Within a week we came up with a prototype and revisited the hospital to analyse further requirement specification. The doctors who are supposed to use the software were satisfied with the piece of prototype and we were able to gather more functional as well as non-functional requirements to ease out the procedure that they are involved with. 

   We hope that the system that is developing at the moment and the activities that we will proceed in the near future, will significantly help the officers to ease their duties as well the system will be able to cope the delays of the current scenario.

This project is in progress...

Our Team

• Yasura Vithana
• Lahiru Lasandun
• Tiroshan Madushanka
• Laksheen Mendis
• Janindu Arukgoda
• Mohamed Infaz
• Deepal Priyadarshana
• Suneth Vijayindu
• Hashini Senaratne
• Vishmi Abhinaya
• Supun Gothama