Health Care Information Management System for Senior Citizen

CHAPTER I

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
1
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.
2
 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.

3
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:

1. To create features that includes medical records, admission of the

patients, schedules and tasks.

2. To track all the services and programs also the specific facilities they

wanted to use

3. To make an accurate, complete, accessible automation

4. To focus also to the special care needed for them

4
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

5
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.

6
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.