Hospital Management System for NIkaweratiya Base Hospital

Abstract

This dissertation focuses in the experience gained by developing a Hospital Management System (HMS) for the Base Hospital of Nikaweratiya. The HMS was implemented to automate and streamline patient identification processes, in the hospital and rapidly identify and communicate crucial information to the medical staff in order to optimize patient care. In developed countries, benefits of using open source software over proprietary software have been discussed extensively and the ways of quantifying the total costs of development have been derived. But in developing world, the use and development is still quite limited, although the use of open source software is becoming increasingly attractive. For Nikaweratiya hospital a free open source tool was selected and customized to adapt client requirements. A study was carried out at the out patient department (OPD) of Nikaweratiya Base Hospital to identify the issues faced in their daily routine work which is currently done manually. OPD patients’ records are maintained in documents making it difficult to access and maintain information. It takes considerable amount of time to retrieve these records and sometimes these documents are destroyed by natural means due to poor state of storage facilities. The system enhances workload efficiency and improves documentation and communication. The system is currently used by the OPD and Laboratory. The patient data are presented in a user-friendly format that improves the efficiency of data retrieval. Localization effort was greatly successful by language translation to Singhalese. The reporting module which was lacking in the original system was developed. Strategically, the hospital wishes to have more integration of information from few departments like pharmacy and radiology unit, in ways that would support operational efficiencies and then move towards capturing more extensive clinical data to support the wards and surgery unit. This would potentially entail development of a fully fledged Electronic Patient Record System.