CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

An Electronic Patient Management System is any tool used to assist in the delivery of clinical care from point of care initiation to completion. Tools include computer based attendance scheme for patient, payment processing software and information technology systems, blood group and genotype to avoid test result mismatch of data.Electronic based attendance scheme for Patients is used by hospital to create process and record their attendance scheme for patient’s information. This system is used to calculate the nurse punctuate to work. It’s an effective tool in the hands of the hospital management.

Duty is a term that conveys a sense of moral commitment to someone or something. The moral commitment is the sort that results in action, and it is not a matter of passive feelings or mere recognition. When someone recognizes a duty, that person commits himself/herself to the cause involved without considering the self-interesting courses of actions that may have been relevant previously. This is not to suggest that living a life of duty precludes one from the best sort of life, but duty does involve some sacrifice of immediate self-interest.Cicero is an early philosopher who acknowledged this possibility. He discusses duty in his work “On Duty”. He suggests that duties can come from four different sources:

1. It is a result of being human

2. It is a result of one’s personality place in life (your family, country, and job)

3. One’s own moral expectations for you can generate duties

From the root idea of obligation to serve or give something in return, involved in the conception of duty, have sprung various derivative uses of the word; thus it is used of the services performed by a minister of a church, by a soldier, or by any employee or servant.Nurses today have a broad scope of responsibility as health care providers that require them, under some circumstance, to exercise independent professional judgment. When nurses exercise their judgment negligently, they may be held liable because courts hold them to a correspondingly higher level of accountability.Nurses have been held liable for their failure to monitor and/or promptly respond to patients by informing physicians of significant changes in patient’s condition. Under these types of circumstance, nurses have an affirmative duty to exercise their professional judgment to ensure that all adequate steps are taken to treat patients appropriately.

Usage of Information Technology (IT) remained comparatively very less in Health sectors that other sector despite having more potential. Health Institution, which is an important sector, should encourage IT usage resulting better productivity, effectiveness, efficiency and economics leading to better health care of all. This paper tells a success of implementation of ICT (Information Communication Technology) in monitoring of medicine in health institution. System work on low-end resources and E-mail (Electronic mail) based data transfer from District Head Quarter to State Head Quarter.Implementation of Med-Centre in all the district of Enugu result in checking on pilferage (the act of stealing amounts or small articles) for medicine, increase in availability of medicine at Government institution.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

Prior to the problem encountered with patient’s attitude to their check up and treatment, the nurse’s laxity (laziness) over their duties, the need arose to develop a software that will be able to solve the problem. The problem caused by the use of manual method of keeping outpatient information and the use of manual method of keeping attendance scheme for patients can only be solved by computerizing the hospital attendance scheme for patients and computerizing the hospital outpatient information system. The problems that this project is set to solve in the manual method of keeping outpatient information are:

1. Improper documentation of patient payment record.

2. Difficulty in retrieving patient payment record.

1.3 Objectives of the Study

The primary purpose of this project is to enhance the reliability, security, and convenience in the administration of Shonahan Hospital, Nsukka, Enugu, and to have a database that contains complete and comprehensive details of patient departmental payment records as well as a computer based attendance scheme.

The subsidiary objectives of this project are:

1. To improve checkup and treatment load functionality: Staffing level and appropriate skill-mix per shift can be more easily determined by the shift modules. This leads to less time spent in designing and amending roasters.

2. Better care planning: Time spent on care planning is reducing, while the quality of what is recorded improved. This makes for more complete care plans and more complete assessments and evaluations.

3. To facilitate diagnosis of patients thereby reducing patients wasting time

4. To exploit the use of ICT as a platform for medical services

5. To better drugs administration

6. For better maintenance of duty rosters