Web Based Appointment and Patient Management System for Dermatology Clinic at Teaching Hospital Ragama

Abstract

The aim of the project is to develop a web base patient appointment and management system for the Teaching Hospital Ragama. There are lots of hospital in the private sector of Sri Lanka which provides online services and mobile services for the patients and the hospital staff to make their life easy and spend it efficiently. The hospitals of government sector provide more services to their patients and staff than the private hospitals, but with poor technology and less efficiency. It makes a vast gap between the government hospitals and private hospitals in efficiency, attraction, and convenience. This project is an aim to bridge the gap between the services of the government hospitals and the services of the private hospitals. This Web Based project is to solve most of the inefficiencies in the areas of patient‟s appointments, registration and diagnosing in the Dermatology clinic at Teaching hospital Ragama.The system helps the patients to get an appointment through SMS or e-mail without visiting the hospital. It lets the patients to visit the Clinic shortly before their visiting without coming very early. If the patient makes an appointment on a date when the clinic will not be held, the patients will be informed by the system. This system provides fast, accurate and efficient patient registration and issue of clinic numbers. It is easier for the clinical staff to schedule the patients. In this system a special dermatology template which is designed for the doctors to enter the patient‟s diagnostic information saves the doctor‟s time on documentary works and increases their patient‟s diagnosing time. The pharmacist of the hospital pharmacy is provided with the patient‟s prescription with the clinic number to make sure the medicines are ready when the patient visits the pharmacy. This could avoid the rush inside the hospital pharmacy in the Dermatology clinic at Teaching hospital Ragama. It helps to store relevant data on patient‟s and provide necessary reports on time. The system was implemented using WAMP server (Windows operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP programming language). The system consists with a separate template for the dermatologists to enter the patient‟s diagnostic information. The system is authorized for different user categories conveniently. The system users are allowed to logon the system remotely through internet or mobile app. The system is provided with simple message notification service and email service through AWS(Amazon Web service)and ASN (Amazon simple Notification service ) It is portable and it has user friendly interfaces. Therefore it can be easily implemented and extended to facilitate for the entire hospital clinic system. It will help to solve problems of more patients and staff members .It can be used in the Dermatology clinics in other hospitals there is a diagnosing template designed for the Dermatologist to enter patient‟s records. The system can be implemented to send reports to another hospital in referral of a patient.