Clinical System Design Requirement - Essay Example

?CLINICAL SYSTEM DESIGN REQUIREMENT November 11, Part1 Stakeholders Stakeholders are the people whose work is affected by implementing the system. They include:- 1. Clinical providers- Clinical providers include Doctors, nurses and pharmacists. The doctors will be involved in providing prescription to patients after diagnosis. The prescription will also be billed by the doctor. The pharmacist dispenses the medication which makes him to be part of the system. The nurse can be involved in providing the check up services to the patients. These checks up results are the one used by the doctor as part of making decision on the patient sickness. All these information provided by the different clinical providers is input into the system. 2. Senior leadership- They are involved in providing cash to purchase a new system in the clinic. They are also involved in making decisions whether to change the workflow of the system. These activities make them to be consulted anytime a change is to be made to the system. 3. Medical records staff- This is the person charged with the responsibility of registering patients into the clinic. The staff has also a role of maintaining the medical records. The medical records may include drug supply and releases which is an important aspect to the clinic. Maintaining the drug supply will ensure the doctors do not prescribe a non existing drug. The medical records staff can carry these activities by feeding the data in the system to help in calculations. 4. Administrators/ clinical managers- These group have a role of seeing the smooth running of the clinic every day. They also ensure quality improvement in delivery of services leading to the need of including them in requirement collection. 2. Workflow This the procedure followed in a clinic before a patient receives treatment. The workflow starts when a patient visits the clinic to the time they leave. 1. Patient walks into the clinic 2. a. If new patient collection of registration details which includes name, contact information and medical history. b. If an old patient retrieval of the medical record is done by the clerk. 3. Patient moves to the waiting room. 4. The clerk forwards the patient’s medical file to the doctor on duty. 5. Patient proceeds to the check up room 6. Check up on blood pressure, temperature and weight is carried on the patient. 7. The patient proceeds to the doctor’s office with the written form on check up results. 8. The doctor enquires on the reason of the visit. This will establish the sickness of the patient. 9. Doctor prescribes medication and billing to the patient. 10. The patient proceeds to the cashier’s desk and pays for the medication. 11. Collection of medication takes place at the pharmacies desk and advice on the way to take it. 12. The patient checks out of the clinic. 3. Improvements to the workflow The main factor affecting the clinical workflow was overbooking by patients. The system should eliminate this by ensuring that the numbers of patients who visit the clinic per day do not exceed the needed number. This can be done by establishing a procedure where patients books appointments long before seeing the doctor. This ensures patients scheduled for a day do not exceed the maximum number a doctor can handle. Another improvement required is to eliminate the delay by patients at the registration desk. The study showed patients spent a lot of time giving information at the reception desk. The main solution would be to reduce the amount of data collected on a specific patient. The contact information would just include the phone number leaving the rest of the things like physical address, zip code and city. This would reduce the amount of time taken to attend to each patient. Improvement on information passing from the different offices was also required. Automation is supposed to allow once a clerk logs a patient visit the doctor can access the patient’s files online. The manual tracing of files can also be eliminated with an automated system. This system will reduce look up time reducing the time taken to serve a patient. Part2 Software to improve workflow 1. Free med This is an open source record keeping software. The software will help in our case by allowing easy maintenance and retrieval of patient’s record. The receptionist will only require a unique identification number to trace an existing patient. The system also has an external billing module which will reduce the billing time on patient. Once a doctor prescribes medication to a patient the system will automatically do the billing saving the time taken in serving the patient. The system will also produce a receipt for the medication eliminating the need of writing it manually. 2. Medin Tux software This is open source medical software that can run online in a networked environment. The ability to work on a networked environment suits our problem because once a receptionist fills in the data all the other concerned personnel’s can access it from their offices. This will help, when the patient visits the checkup room no paper will be carried out but the data collected is fed into the system. The doctor will be logged in and will access the same data from the office. The doctor’s prescription will be accessed by the pharmacists immediately they are made. The pharmacist at this situation will have prepared the medication before the patient arrives. This system tries to automate all the activities of message passing reducing on time used to serve a patient. 3. Dynacrates Clinics will have to purchase this software if they need to use it. The system has a specialized module for managing Doctor’s appointment. One of the problems we had identified was overbooking so leading to other patients being delayed in the queue. This system eliminates this by rejecting overbooking on a certain day. Doctor’s sets the maximum number of patients who can be seen in a certain day and once it is reached the systems alerts the administrator. The system has also a module that helps in the lab analysis. This comes in hand in eliminating the total time taken by the lab people before delivering a lab result. The system has shown to be of great importance to the business by improving on efficiency. References Laura Einbinder. Transforming Health Care through Information. New York: Appress, 2009. Read More