Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Introduction
The Environment
The Tung Wah Group of Hospitals founded Kwong Wah Hospital in 1911. It
came under the management of the Hospital Authority since 1991. The hospital
operates 24-hour Accident and Emergency services, and provides a full range of general,
specialist and allied health services to the population of the Mongkok and Wong Tai Sin
areas. Kwong Wah Hospital is the major acute hospital in the Hospital Authority’s
Kowloon West Hospital Cluster which also comprises Wong Tai Sin Hospital and Our
Lady of Maryknoll Hospital. The serving population of Kwong Wah Hospital is around
to 630,000.
With over 800 patient attendances, the manual registration process has many
problems. First of all, the queuing time for quota is long. Patients would have to
queue up for General Outpatient registration done by counter staff. For registration,
patients would submit their identification documents and counter staff would then
complete the registration procedures by writing down their names, General Outpatient
numbers in a form. Then, the counter staff will assign consultation rooms and queue
numbers accordingly and all these information will be put down in a queue ticket.
Since the manual registration is not efficient and the patient load is high, especially in the
morning, the queuing time may take as long as 4 hours.
Secondly, patient is unclear about the quota status and queue status in
consultation room. Since the quota is limited for both the morning and afternoon
sessions, patients at the waiting hall and at the end of the queue would not know the
quota situation. They could only line up to see if they could obtain a queue ticket.
Moreover, after receiving the queue ticket, patients did not know the serving number at
consultation room. As such, patients are crowded in the waiting area waiting for the
nurses to call them.
Thirdly, the patient list is required to send by facsimile to the medical record
store located at another floor for records retrieval. As the patient volume is as much as
800 per day, the counter staff member has to repeat the facsimile process frequently.
The Solution
In order to cope with the functional need for the benefits of patients, the
Automated Registration System is designed to streamline the registration process,
provide more user-friendly information to patients both waiting for the quota and waiting
outside the consultation rooms, and finally, to provide management information for
service review. The logical connection diagram is showed below: -
Automated Registration System
OPAS
Registration Processing PC Remote
Control PC
Kiosk
Data Capture
Terminals
(room no.)
Implementation
3) Display Panel
1 display panel is designated just outside the registration counter at ground floor of
GOPD in front of the waiting area for showing the quota remaining. 2 Central
Display Panels are fixed at the first floor waiting area of GOPD displaying
upcoming queue numbers of all consultation rooms. Each consultation room is
also equipped with 1 small display panel displaying current serving queue number.
Patients could obtain the information just at the doorstep of the GOPD and
consultation rooms.
Central Display Panel
4) Management Information
The ARS interface with OPAS that supports provision of valuable information for
services review and future planning purpose. Registration time and queuing time
figures could be easily retrieved.
Acknowledgement:
The author is indebted to the following person for their dedication and support
throughout the whole project: Dr William Ho, Mr. T. K. To, Mr. K Y Cheng and Miss
Winnie Kan.
References
Gilpatrick, E. G. (1999) Quality improvement projects in health care : problem solving in the
workplace. California, Sage Publications.
Government Center on Information Systems (1994) BPR in the public sector: an overview of
business process re-engineering. London, HMSO.
Lientz, B. P. (2000) Business process improvement: planning and implementation. San Diego,
Harcourt Brace Professional Pub.
Tenner, A. R. (1997) Process redesign: the implementation guide for managers. Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Appendix I
Approach counter
yes issuing for
New patient registration and
New card with
barcode
No
Consultation
Room
* OPAS : Out-patient Appointment System provided by Hospital Authority
Wk12-ARS at GOP