Development of Patient Record Management System for Yendi Health Centre

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Over the years, medical care has become more complex, making complete patient medical history not accessible in certain situations. The quest for comprehensive medical history of patients for the purpose of continuity of care brought about the evolution of storing patient information electronically. Previous health information plays a critical role in the proper diagnosis and treatment of patients. Therefore, there should be an efficient information management system in place that can provide the patients’ health information need of health facilities providing care. Yendi Health Centre among several health facilities is still using paper-based system to manage patients’ records. METHOD: The development of the patients’ records management system followed the evolutionary prototyping model of System development life cycle. Design of the database employed entity relationship modeling with the use MySQL and Microsoft Office Visio tools. The database development was done using MySQL, coding was done in hypertext markup language (HTML) and hypertext pre-processing (PHP) with Sublime Text 3 as the code editor. RESULTS: The review of Yendi Health Centre patient information system which is paper based showed that the system is laborious, insecure and ineffective therefore the staffs were not comfortable using it. A prototype was then built which through the incorporation of user requirements evolved into the patients’ records management system. CONCLUSION: Based on the results of the review, the staff preferred an electronic system which is more effective and efficient. Hence, this study based on functional and user requirements developed a patient record management system capable of storing and retrieving detailed patient information.