Health Care Information Management System for Senior Citizen
Project Context
Leading healthcare organizations have stressed the importance of integrating information technology (IT) into healthcare systems to improve provider practices, increase the quality of patient care, and reduce medical errors. One missing link plaguing the deployment of technology into healthcare is how to incorporate practical, usable clinical information systems into the work environment of providers. This missing link is most evident in the organizational structure of nursing homes.
As appealing as today’s senior living communities may be for many people, some seniors just prefer to stay in their homes as long as possible. The reasons to remain at home may be practical or sentimental, but for many seniors, a significant support network must be put in place to help this happen.
A nursing home is normally the highest level of care for older adults outside of a hospital. Nursing homes provide what is called custodial care, including getting in and out of bed, and providing assistance with feeding, bathing, and dressing. However, nursing homes differ from other senior housing facilities in that they also provide a high level of medical care. A licensed physician supervises each patient’s care and a nurse or other medical professional is almost always on the premises. Other medical professionals, such as occupational or physical therapists, are also available. This allows the delivery of medical procedures and therapies on site that would not be possible in other housing.
Upon reaching, the proponents that there is nursing home care both public and private existing now in the Philippines. Nursing homes that are privately owned offers different type of support and care, services and programs and facilities and amenities that is equivalent to specific rate. On the other hand, public facilities only rely on donations and volunteering.
The concept of this project is to help Senior Citizen Office to update their existing manual system in which the staff list down the patient information when they admit a patient. The proposed project provides user a more efficient and reliable system. This is also the improvement of the system that will serve as the key to have a good and organize of their records. Using database, it will serve as the list of record of the patient including their medical records and the activities of the orphanage. This concept is created to help Senior Citizen Office orphanage to improve their manual system into a new and good computerized Nursing Home Care Automation System.
Purpose and Description
The purpose of the study is to discuss the development of the automation system for nursing homes and its implementation at Senior Citizen Office. Also discussed in this paper is a description of how the automation system works its technical functional and non-functional requirements and future development of the system.
The project is a system that performs the accessibility of information and prepares the needed report about the patients. There will be different level of permission which will be assigned to different users ensuring the security of the records. Developing this system will make record keeping easy and segregation of information would be faster and more secured. The features of the system include managing the medical records, admission of the patients, the schedules and tasks of the volunteers, the planned activities and calculations of donations and funds.
This will be implemented and beneficial to the following:
For the Senior Citizen Office
The propose system will lessen their work and can manage their work efficiently. The implementation of the system will provide easy access to data and information. The management of the organization can also be tracked and definitely be secured by using the system. Also, since Senior Citizen Office is non-profitable organization there is a shortage of volunteer nurse or staff, the system will allow the organization to overcome staff shortage as it will manage the tasks and schedule effectively. In addition, the system is capable of cutting the operation cost because it can reduce the paper work which will save time for volunteers.
For the Developers
The project serves as a basis of their study. It enhances their knowledge in programming activities to create an automated system. It will also serve as a tool to sharpen their knowledge and ability in developing an automated system.
For the Future proponents
This project will serve as guide in their future study. It will give them knowledge on how to create their own study together with their capabilities to create an automated system.
Objectives
To innovate the traditional manually patient record monitoring to an automated system, the proponents suggest replacing the patients log book to a computerized system for Senior Citizen Office.
This study specifically aims the following objectives:
- To create features that includes medical records, admission of the patients, schedules and tasks.
- To track all the services and programs also the specific facilities they wanted to use
- To make an accurate, complete, accessible automation
- To focus also to the special care needed for them
Scope and Limitations
The projects scope encompasses the modules contained within the system. The purpose of Automation System is to know the personal information about the Lola’s and the medication they need. The purpose of Nursing Home Care Automation System is to utilize the patient’s medical information and use it for analysis thereby improving patient care.
The system was designed to create features that includes the patient information and their medical records the database system that enables the users to have ability to input, access, manipulate and delete data from the database.
Definition of Terms
This section provides the conceptual and operational definition of terms which is a great help to understand the study.
Automated-operating with minimal human intervention; independent of external control
Computer- A device that computes, especially a programmable electronic machine that performs high-speed mathematically or logical operations or that assembles, stores, correlates, or otherwise processes information.
Data flow diagram-Is graphical information that illustrates the movement of data between external entities and the processes and data stores within the system
Database-It is an organized body of external body of related information
Patient record is the repository of information about a single patient. This information is generated by health care professionals as a direct result of interaction with a patient or with individuals who have personal knowledge of the patient (or with both). Traditionally, patient records have been paper and have been used to store patient care data.
Computer-based patient record (CPR) is an electronic patient record that resides in a system specifically designed to support users by providing accessibility to complete and accurate data, alerts, reminders, clinical decision support systems, links to medical knowledge, and other aids.
Technical Background
The developers worked on VB.NET considering that it is the most applicable and recommended language in developing a system. Visual Basic is used to create and develop running environment and program of the developed system .Visual Basic 2010 is a programming language and development environment created by Microsoft Visual Basic, which provides a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows the developer to drag and drop objects into the program as well as manually write program codes. Visual Basic is designed to make software development easy and efficient. This programming language does have the capability of creating executable files and ActiveX controls.
The developers also used MySQL Query Browser which is a cross-platform GUI client program that is intuitive and easy to use. MySQL Query Browser provides a graphical interface to the MySQL server for querying and analyzing data and similar in style of use to MySQL Administrator, but is oriented toward accessing database contents rather than server administration.
In this project, the developers used the MySQL Query Browser as the back end of the system in saving and holding all the necessary information about the products and its transactions. It also organizes all important data used in the system in one database.
