Information System for Patient Medical Record of Butajira Rural Hospital
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Date
2004-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
No clinical computing topic is being given more attention than that of computer based
medical records. Efficient and effective healthcare depends upon accurate
information and timely decision. Computer-based medical records are
increasingly becoming a necessary and critical tool in healthcare to achieve
those goals. This study aims at examining the current paper-based patient medical record
system at Butajira Hospital and develops a patient medical database. The main
objective of the study is to propose and develop an improved and effective
information system for patient medical record of Butajira Hospital. On the process
of analyzing the existing system, document analysis and semi-structured
interview data collection methods have been implemented. Structured system
analysis and prototype system designs had been selected as system
development methodologies. Attempts were made to investigate problems with
the existing system and analyze requirements for the proposed system.
The study reveals that, the existing paper medical record system is subject to
several drawbacks. Potential misplacement, destruction, and storage space
consumption of patient charts, illegibility, inconsistency, incompleteness,
disorganization and redundancy of information on the chart are major ones. To
overcome these and other defects, and meet the analyzed requirements, a
computer-based patient record system (CPR) has found to be the best solution.
As appropriate software packages for African or developing countries hospitals
cannot be found off the shelf, to alleviate this problem, it was decided to develop
a database in-house. A RDBMS 'Microsoft Access ' has been used to build a
database locally. The capturing format of clinical data is also a point of concern
of the study. Both coded and free texts with narration are formats applied to
capture patient medical data in the database. Summary, within the database development, intuitive and easy to use interfaces have been created. Valuable recommendations have also been stated for better implementation of the proposed system.
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Keywords
Information Science