Hospital Management System

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Medicine like many other professions today is faced with major problem of information management and resource sharing, in that reason the essence of writing on this particular topic cannot be over emphasized. This is more so as the visits patients take to the hospitals require the need to keep records of their health statistics, in such a manner that they can be easily retrieved and updated in a concurrent and simultaneous manner, while health personnel who need to update these statistics could also do so easily via any workstation in the hospital. In developed societies, hospitals especially laboratories are equipped with computers to process patients samples and return the results to the operator (the Medical laboratory scientist). In such laboratories, details of previous visits by a patient such as attending doctors, laboratory attendants, nature of ailments etc are easily made available and help in a comprehensive medical record of the patients.

A comprehensive web-based system is the principal ingredient of a specialized Hospital Management System. It must possess all the ingredients of a centralized system with addition to procedures and processes that allow for simultaneous access to data at various points (nodes). Nigerians today have become also pre occupied with health and fitness that getting and staying healthy are quick becoming most of the greatest of all Nigerian pastimes. Being fit is now in vogue. There are many weekly and monthly health and fitness magazines, and currently diet and exercise books have consistently been among the “top ten” on non-fiction best-seller lists.

Health and fitness-club memberships have soared and a 24-hour cable Television health network now offers comprehensive medical, scientific and self-care information. All these activities are facilitated by the programmable electronic device i.e. computer. There are several thousands of areas the computer is applicable and new applications are being developed almost every day. This project highlights the role of computer in hospitals using a Web-based System for easy accessibility of patient’s medical record, and for easy diagnoses and treatment of ailments, easy referencing to patients past medical records, for management decision making. Consequently this is the foundation on which this project is mainly focused.

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Application of computers to process medical problems is found throughout the World of medicine. This ranges from medical research via Clinical application to health sciences. Many governments have promoted the use of computers in medical instrumentation. A medical research stresses computer technology in several ways and has recorded significant developing in areas like medical statistics, simulation, data- medical records. computer bases information system is installed in offices to previously done using the manual method of data a time like this when the government is putting all resources towards attaining improved standard of living for its citizen’s, the application of computers will aid in discharging efficient and improved medical services to the people. In developed countries, which have long absorbed Computerization, their health sector has continued to flourish while medical services are still poor in developing countries.

Patients do not have adequate care. This causes careless deaths in most cases and has drastically reduced the overall life expectancy of the average citizen. One reason is that the doctors being human cannot work beyond the limit of their abilities, and therefore sometimes make very careless errors of judgment under pressure. It is therefore the aim of this project work to introduce the “Application of computers in Hospital Administration” and at the same time bringing into limelight the numerous benefits associated with the use of computers to improve the health sector at least towards ensuring that our dream of health for all in future to come is realized.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

After careful investigation of the current method of rendering medical and allied services to the patients at the First Rivers Hospital following problems were discovered: 1) Non-integration of all parties involved in service delivery. 2) Delays in attending to patients.

3) In-accurate record keeping.
4) Information redundancy.

1.3 OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY

The objective of this project work is to design an efficient web-based system for the advancement of medical research and analysis, which will make it easy to follow up a patient’s medical record from any workstation in the hospital. This will thus replace the method of one point of entry and retrieval that exist in non-web-based systems. The work will also help in speeding up the processing, storing and retrieval of information, which will greatly assist medical personnel in the performing their duties. It will also help to improve decision making by reducing processing time as well as reducing the communication gap between the doctor and other staff still involved in the patient medical care. It will also help to reduce human errors to the barest minimum and improving confidentiality of file.

1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

In the area of health delivery, Hospitals can benefit a lot from the use and supportive roles that web-based systems will enhance.
• Stock inventory management/administration.
• Patient’s administration.
• Drug administration.
• Staff administration/management.
As a result, when all these are established they will in turn provide crucial information for proper management of the system.

1.5 SCOPE AND LIMITATION OF THE STUDY

As a result of resource limitations in both time and money, this study is based on patients management, secure access of users and hierarchy of information and integration of all users into the health care delivery process.

1.6 LIMITATION

A lot of setbacks were encountered in course of this project. There were constraints in many areas like: i) FINANCE: The high cost of materials for the project and the everyday constraint increase in transportation tax during data collection affected the research work. ii) DATA COLLECTION: The research work had a problem in collecting data from staff. However, I still remain indebted to the staff who generously contributed immensely making this project successful. iii) MATERIAL: Material constrains play a major role in that limiting some research that would have contributed immensely.

1.7 DEFINITION OF TECHNICAL TERMS

Some vital terms used for the purpose of carrying out this research are as follows: ONLINE: Online is the condition of being connected to a network of computers or other devices REALTIME: Real time is a level of computer responsiveness that a user senses as sufficiently immediate or that enables the computer to keep up with some external process (for example, to present visualizations of the weather as it constantly changes). Real-time is an adjective pertaining to computers or processes that operate in real time. Real time describes a human rather than a machine sense of time. AUTHENTICATION: is the act of confirming the truth of an attribute of a datum or entity.

This might involve confirming the identity of a person or software program, tracing the origins of an artifact, or ensuring that a product is what its packaging and labeling claims to be. VALIDATION: verification and validation (V&V) is the process of checking that a software system meets specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose. It may also be referred to as software quality control COMPUTER: This is the foremost and important term needed to carry out this research. It is an electronic device which operates by taking some raw materials in form of data and converting them into some useful results. NICE (Network Independent Communication Environment): a library providing a standard API allowing different modules to interwork according to a client-server approach, regardless of their mutual location over the network.

ACT MANAGER: provides a unified support for the definition of protocols and for the functional interworking of different units, in terms of request and delivery of services. COMMUNICATION: a way of provides a gateway for the interaction of the various components with external applications, through different types of protocols. AUTHORISATIONS: provides a unified support to the definition authorizations and rights of the individual users, according to legal and organizational requirements. PATIENT MANAGER: a person who provides a unified repository for storing summary personal and epidemiological information on the patient. INPUT: This means collecting and entering data into a computer system. OUTPUT: This means getting some useful information out of the computer.

DATA: This comprises of raw facts and figures that are processed into information. INFORMATION: Output from a system; this has been processed to give it meaning. PROGRAMMING: This is a detailed set of instructions for the computer to respond and implement. In essence it is a way of telling the computer what to do, how to do it and when to do it. COMPUTERIZATION: This is the application of computer on different areas of human life. INTERFACE: The circuitry which connects the CPU (Central Processing Unit) to its peripherals. PASSWORD: These are a set of character which may be allocated to a person, a terminal or a facility which is required to be keyed into the system before further access is permitted. OPERATING SYSTEM: Programs which control the resources off a computer and provide a link between hardware and software. ROM: Read Only Memory.

RAM: Random Access Memory.

ALGORITHM: This is a formula, series of steps, or well defined set of rules for solving a problem. FIELD: A column data on a database or a group of characters which represents a single data item. RECORD: A group of related field.

ENTITY: These are the most important elements about which a record is kept. ATTRIBUTES: This is a property of an entity of a relationship type. PRIMARY KEY: This is the most important attribute of an entity that uniquely identifies the entity. FOREIGN KEY: This is always. Responsible for the relationship between entities. The foreign key in a particular entity is the primary key in particular entity. DATABASE: This is a collection of structural data. The structure of the data is independent of any particular application. DDBMS: This is an acronym for Database Management System, it is the name given to the software that builds, manages and provides access to a database.

CHAPTER TWO
2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 INTRODUCTION

A Web-based system consists of a collection of autonomous computers, connected through a network and distribution middleware, which enables computers to coordinate their activities and to share the resources of the system, so that users perceive the system as a single, integrated computing facility. It can also be simply defined as a collection of independent computers that appears to its users as a single coherent system (Jussi Kangasharju 2008). 2.2 CHARACTERISTICS OF A WEB-BASED SYSTEM

* Multiple autonomous components
* Components are not shared by all users
* Resources may not be accessible
* Software runs in concurrent processes on different processors
* Multiple Points of control
* Multiple Points of failure

Examples of Web-based Systems

Fig 10: Local Intranet as an example of a Web-based system
Goals
* Making resources accessible
* Distribution transparency
* Openness
* Scalability
* Security
* System design requirements
Challenges for Making Resources Accessible
* Naming
* Access control
* Security
* Availability
* Performance
* Mutual exclusion of users, fairness
* Consistency in some cases

2.4 THE MODEL FOR WEB-BASED SYSTEMS

Traditionally, having a monolithic system run across multiple computers meant splitting the system into separate client and server components. In such systems, the client component handled the user interface and the server provided back-end processing, such as database access, printing, and so on. As computers proliferated, dropped in cost, and became connected by ever-higher bandwidth networks, splitting software systems into multiple components became more convenient, with each component running on a different computer and performing a specialized function. This approach simplified development, management, administration, and often improved performance and robustness, since failure in one computer did not necessarily disable the entire system (eHow, 2010). In many cases the system appears to the client as an opaque cloud that performs the necessary operations, even though the Web-based system is composed of individual nodes, as illustrated in the following figure. The opacity of the cloud is maintained because computing operations are invoked on behalf of the client.

As such, clients can locate a computer (a node) within the cloud and request a given operation; in performing the operation, that computer can invoke functionality on other computers within the cloud without exposing the additional steps, or the computer on which they were carried out, to the client. With this paradigm, the mechanics of a Web-based, cloud-like system can be broken down into many individual packet exchanges, or conversations between individual nodes. Traditional client-server systems have two nodes with fixed roles and responsibilities. Modern-Web-based systems can have more than two nodes, and their roles are often dynamic.

In one conversation a node can be a client, while in another conversation the node can be the server. In many cases, the ultimate consumer of the exposed functionality is a client with a user sitting at a keyboard, watching the output. In other cases the Web-based system functions unattended, performing background operations. The Web-based system may not have dedicated clients and servers for each particular packet exchange, but it is important to remember there is a caller, (or initiator, either of which is often referred to as the client). There is also the recipient of the call (often referred to as the server). It is not necessary to have two-way packet exchanges in the request-reply format of a Web-based system; often messages are sent only one way. Wolfgang Emmerich, (1997).

2.5 THE NEED FOR A HOSPITAL MANAGEMENT WEB-BASED SYSTEM

According to ACG InfoTech Limited, hospital management information systems (HMS) are “designed to improve the quality and management of clinical care and hospital health care management in the areas of clinical process analysis and activity-based costing.” Improved patient care, cost control and security are possible benefits of implementing such systems. However, the implementation of hospital management information systems must be accompanied by significant planning on the part of management to maximize results.

Hospital Management System are been designed to streamline the business practices of hospitals and clinics. Through its electronic patient information system, HMS ensures optimum use of the medical records of patients. Being patient-centric, the system makes it possible for all disparate files on a patient to be housed in a centrally located master file, ensuring retrieval and management of files effortless. Plus, easy integration ensures a faster start up. (ACGIL, 2010)

HMS has been so designed as to make its usage intuitive, which makes adoption of HMS by the hospital personnel quick and easy. Its high level of scalability ensures quick upgrades when change in the hospital’s business practices so demands. What is more, with information collection, collation and retrieval all digitized, patient care regains top of mind status with physicians and hospital personnel.

Hospital Management System provides the benefits of streamlined operations, enhanced administration and control, superior patient care, strict cost control and improved profitability. Hospital Management System may include the following modules Financial Accounting

Material Procurement
Inventory Management
Manager functions
Security

2.6 BENEFITS OF THE WEB-BASED HMS
2.6.1 Improve Patient Care

HMS can improve patient care: Properly implemented HMS can improve quality of patient care by increasing the timeliness and accuracy of records and administrative information. HMS provides simplified access to patient records and other administrative information for those who need it. It also sets a standard for patient care, making it more consistent across the board. In many cases, patients can also use the system to better educate themselves about their diseases and conditions as well as treatments and outcomes. 2.6.2 Improve Cost Control

Cost control is another benefit: The increased standardization of hospital management information systems improves cost control by improving efficiency and productivity. Personnel costs and inventory levels can be reduced through the avoidance of duplications and repetitions. HMS can also help eliminate confusion and delays that are caused by incomplete or missing records. These systems provide a managerial tool for decision making because they offer the functionality of assembling various types of data into usable reports. Data can be collected and categorized so that managers can analyze such information as patient lists, bed occupancy rates and statistics categorized by doctors. 2.6.3 Increased Security

HMS provides increased security of patient information: Hospital management information systems are secured databases of administrative and patient information that can be easily accessed only by those who need the information. HMS links departments without compromising the security of the information involved. For example, pathology, radiology and administrative offices each have access to the pieces of a patient’s information that are necessary to completing their individual job functions without allowing access to information that is not specifically relevant to that function.