WEB BASED PATIENT INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR WARD 59, GENERAL HOSPITAL COLOMBO

Abstract

Ward 59 of National Hospital, Colombo is one of the few psychiatric facilities available in the country. Many patients have long term illnesses and relapses may occur resulting in multiple encounters with psychiatric services. Although manual data gathering is available at the moment, data retrieval is time consuming as files have to be manually searched. Storage of past data is hampered by lack of space. The system is the first electronic patient record system developed for use in a psychiatry unit in Sri Lanka. The system facilitates an electronic storage of data and easy retrieval of information. It identifies a patient by a unique number and allows different episodes of in- patient and outpatient care to be linked together. Clinical care is enhanced by linking information regarding different episodes of a patient over time. The systems value is enhanced by the generation of reports to assist and improve health administration. Discharge reports, follow-up reports of out- patients, reports based on analysis of data are generated by the system. The follow up report identifies outpatients who default treatment enabling community follow up. This would help improve compliance and reduce relapses. It is not feasible to identify all those who default treatment using a manual record keeping system. Analysis of patients based on different criteria such as diagnosis and treatment will assist in identifying trends of illnesses and also provide a database for research. The system is a developed using PHP, HTML and Javascript. All data resides in a mysql database and apache is used as the web server. It can be deployed in both Linux and Windows environment allowing easy and low cost deployment in other such wards. The system is web based and can be connected to a network expanding the access capabilities.