Walk in Clinic free essay sample

Many of these are because of a strong need for a more comprehensive range of health services, the increasing complexity of identifiable disease and treatment patterns and the fact that more people today than ever before are demanding high-quality medical care. This act was a great challenge to the modern clinics which are dependent for its day-to-day operation on an accurate, rapid and efficient information flow. The solution is to develop an integrated clinical database to help meet the information processing needs of the clinic in an optimal way. A major problem was the lack of an appropriate clinic database design methodology which was the issue we faced initially as we were working on a hypothetical company, but we had in our minds what are the common walk-in clinic issues these days and how would our group want the database to be designed and implemented if we were running the walk-in clinic. By definition a walk in clinic is â€Å"A facility, often associated with a hospital or medical school that is devoted to the diagnosis and care of outpatients†. There are no appointments needed unless assigned by the doctor on a prior visit according to the patient’s medical needs. The effectiveness of databases derives from one single, comprehensive database much of the information relevant to a variety of organizational purposes may be obtained. In a health care organization the database may be used by walk in clinic for patient care recording, for monitoring of patient status, and for treatment advice; it can also be used by researchers in assessing the effectiveness of clinical procedures and drugs. The fact that data are shared promotes consistency. The database we are developing can be defined as a computer-based communications and data processing system which receives, transmits, stores, processes and displays information relevant to the needs of the clinic; that is, information on patient management and patient administration, as well as organizational information concerning the management and running of the clinic and information concerning laboratory and the schedule of employees. Description of the company The walk in clinic receives numerous patients a day with different requirements depending on their health needs. As the walk in clinic is open to serve all patients who walk in through the entrance, the need for a database management system becomes dire. The principal goal of the clinic’s database system can be defined as an information system which acts as the timely delivery of relevant needed information to the appropriate users in order to improve medical care. We identified the objectives of the our database as follows (a) Maintenance of clinically relevant, readily accessible medical data for each patient; (b) Satisfaction of the necessary administrative data for each patient; (c) Satisfaction of the communication needs of the hospital between different departments such as laboratory, administration and doctors information in terms of speed, accuracy and efficiency; Problems Difficulties in keeping a track of patients. Unauthorized Access Confidentiality of patient data. Duplication of records Decentralized control of the system. Difficulty keeping a track of employees. Services and laboratory tests rendered to patients. Appointments cannot be managed systematically. Updating existing data. Justification A DBMS would help the clinic in numerous ways ranging from keeping a track record of the patients, there personal contact information and health details to be stored into the clinic database system. Thus ensuring that, a returning patient’s file would be easy to access and quick. The DBMS at the clinic would also further help in assisting managing the staff and nurse’s on hand. Other than that it shows the current appointments, and the treatments and services offered by the clinic. The DBMS at the walk in clinic also helps in keeping a record of the doctors and the nurses on duty, and the doctors and nurses on call. The DBMS would also help the clinic of getting rid of redundancies and inconsistencies, another reason for using DBMS is that in conventional systems, availability of information is often poor since it is difficult to obtain information that the existing systems were not designed for. Through a DBMS the information can be accessed and retrieved easily as now all the information is centralized. One of the major reasons for using DBMS in walk in clinic is the security of information which cannot be enforced in a conventional system. This is a major requirement as there is a lot of confidential information about patient which needs to be secured. Another justification of using DBMS in this type of environment is the flexibility of DBMS which is not possible in a conventional system e. g. patient taking a specific treatment switches to an alternate treatment, it is easier to edit the data as all of the information is linked through relationships. We do not need to edit the data everywhere. Description of Database and Application Design In order to design application, we have to make sure that the database model is normalized. Let’s have a look at the flow chart diagram before designing a database. By looking at the flow diagram above we can see that there are s even entities required in order to operate the database system accordingly to meet our specified criteria. We created one sample query based on total visits per month and the details of the visit such as, who visited, what were the diagnoses, what are the services implemented and their charges. This query help to generate the report in order to calculate the total charges per month and the sub total at the end of the report. Database Application Utilization: As soon the application is utilized, it requires a password in order to access the database. The permission would be granted according to employee’s position and level access designated so they can do their duty but can not add or update the data they are not permitted. This secures the database management system and also helps the organization to keep customers record confidential. As we move forward after inserting the user name and password, the database will show the switchboard where administrator (employee) can click and run the application they want, such as patient visit form where it allows employee to register a visitation for customers and also book an appointment if they need any. Database Administration Issues One of the top issues of the administration is the accessibility of computer hardware. In the case of walk in clinic there will be only one entry level administrator at a time based on employee schedule. In order to provide security in depth, the administration username and password would be assigning to each administrator and in scenario of having human error we would be able to see who the employee was on that time and also be able to know the detailed actions applied by asking an employee in course of processing any entry. The confidentiality is still highest priority concern which would be resolve through the accessibility of permitted data by recognizing an authenticated user to it. One of the client’s concerns is the time efficient system or in other words easy and fast way to process entries, which is definitely getting resolved by this designed database system. The database system is allowing administrator to enter visit and appointment information in a same form which means they do not have to open a separate form in order to do both entries. Reports are the next factor which can definitely be designed as per client’s requirement and as it has mentioned above that to provide a sample look we created a query based report as per visit record in a monthly basis and the alculation per service charges of those visits. It also provides the employee schedule. Designing a large, complex, so that they satisfy established specifications is generally a difficult task. This is mainly due to the large number of parts, the interrelationships involved. Conclusion A major problem in the task of designing a database for the clinic has been the lack of an approp riate database as we mentioned earlier. The design methodology that we developed should help overcome some of the difficulties and meet the database requirements in an optimal way. The walk in clinic in this case was regarded as the major systemunder study. The database divides the functions of clinic into smaller partitions which are easier to handle and which simplify the procedures and the functions in a walk in clinic. This database can be successfully implemented in a walk in clinic. The strength of this database we developed is that with some modifications in the design and the relationships can be made according to the user specified requirements.