Software design specification for mental health care patient management system

Develop an overall architecture for the system described in the assigned reading. Your architecture should be based on any one of the common architectural patterns e. Your architecture should be documented in text and in UML diagrams at minimum a class diagram and a sequence diagram. A patient information system to support mental health care is a medical information system that maintains information about patients suffering from mental health problems and the treatments that they have received.

Most mental health patients do not require dedicated hospital treatment but need to attend specialist clinics regularly where they can meet a doctor who has detailed knowledge of their problems.

To make it easier for patients to attend, these clinics are not just run in hospitals. They may also be held in local medical practices or community centers. It makes use of a centralized database of patient information but has also been designed to run on a PC, so that it may be accessed and used from sites that do not have secure network connectivity.

When the local systems have secure network access, they use patient information in the database but they can download and use local copies of patient records when they are disconnected. The system is not a complete medical records system so does not maintain information about other medical conditions.

However, it may interact and exchange data with other clinical information systems. The nature of mental health problems is such that patients are often disorganized so may miss appointments, deliberately or accidentally lose prescriptions and medication, forget instructions, and make unreasonable demands on medical staff.

They may drop in on clinics unexpectedly. In a minority of cases, they may be a danger to themselves or to other people. They may regularly change address or may be homeless on a long-term or short-term basis. Users of the system include clinical staff such as doctors, nurses, and health visitors nurses who visit people at home to check on their treatment.

The current system in used is a traditional based system or paper based system. It is too slow and cannot provide update list of patients within a reasonable time frame. The intention of this system is to reduce overtime pay and increase the number of patients that can be treated accurately. Requirement statements in this document are both functional and non-functional. Overall Description of the Proposed System.

Product Perspective The application will be windows-based, self-contained and independent software product. Database backup and recovery will also have to be handled by DBA. A summary of the major functions that the software will perform: I. A login facility for enabling only authorized access to the system. When a patient is admitted, the front-desk staff checks to see if the patient is already registered with the hospital. Otherwise a new Patient ID is given to this patient.

If a patient checks out, the administrative staff shall delete his patient ID from the system. The system generates reports on the following information: List of detailed information regarding the patient who has admitted in the hospital. System design aims to identify the modules that should be in the system, the specification of those modules and how the interact with each other to produce the results. The goal of the design is to produce a model that can be used later to build that system. The produced model is called design of the system.

System design is the process of defining the architecture, components, modules, interfaces and data for a system to satisfy specified requirements. Normally, the design proceeds in two stages: 1 physical design 2 Database design 7. An internal is an entity within the system that transforms data.

To represent the physical design of the system, we use diagrams like data flow diagrams, use case diagrams, etc. Data Flow Diagram Data Flow Diagram is a graphical representation of the "flow" of data through an information system, modelling its process aspects. A DFD is often used as a preliminary step to create an overview of the system, which can later be elaborated.

DFDs can also be used for the visualization of data processing. A DFD shows what kind of information will be input to and output from the system, where the data will come from and go to, and where the data will be stored. It does not show information about the timing of process or information about whether processes will operate in sequence or in parallel which is shown on flowchart. Data Flow Used to connect processes to each other. The arrowhead indicates direction of data flow.

Process Performs some transformation to input data to output data. Source or sink. Data Store A repository of data. Arrowheads indicate net inputs or net outputs to the store. Level 0 DFD 8. A context diagram is a top level data flow diagram. It only contains one process node process 0 that generalizes the function of the entire system in relationship to external entities. In level 0 DFD, system is shown as one process. It also identifies internal data stores that must be present in order for the system to do its job, and show the flow of data between the various parts of the system.

It describes how data is related to each other. An entity is a piece of data, an object or a concept about which data is stored. A relationship is how the data is shared between entities. Admin 1. Attribute An attribute describe a property or characteristics of an entity. Relationship A relationship describes relation between entities. It is a great improvement over the manual system. The computerization of the system has speed up the process. Since , the Buenos Aires Biomedical Informatics Group, a nonprofit group, represents the interests of a broad range of clinical and non-clinical professionals working within the Health Informatics sphere.

Its purposes are: Promote the implementation of the computer tool in the healthcare activity, scientific research, and health administration and in all areas related to health sciences and biomedical research. Promote cooperation and exchange of actions generated in the field of biomedical informatics, both in the public and private, national and international level.

Interact with all scientists, recognized academic stimulating the creation of new instances that have the same goal and be inspired by the same purpose. To promote, organize, sponsor and participate in events and activities for training in computer and information and disseminating developments in this area that might be useful for team members and health related activities.

The Argentinian health system is very heterogeneous, because of that the informatics developments shows a heterogeneous stage. Lot of private Health Care center have developed systems, as the German Hospital of Buenos Aires who was one of the first in develop the electronic health records system.

The first applications of computers to medicine and healthcare in Brazil started around , with the installation of the first mainframes in public university hospitals, and the use of programmable calculators in scientific research applications. In the early s, with the arrival of cheaper microcomputers, a great upsurge of computer applications in health ensued, and in the Brazilian Society of Health Informatics was founded, the first Brazilian Congress of Health Informatics was held, and the first Brazilian Journal of Health Informatics was published.

Health Informatics projects in Canada are implemented provincially, with different provinces creating different systems. A national, federally-funded, not-for-profit organization called Canada Health Info way was created in to foster the development and adoption of electronic health records across Canada. Provincial and territorial programs include the following: eHealth Ontario was created as an Ontario provincial government agency in September It has been plagued by delays and its CEO was fired over a multimillion-dollar contracts scandal in Today the netCARE portal is used daily by thousands of clinicians.

The mission of this office is widespread adoption of interoperable electronic health records EHRs in the US within 10 years. See quality improvement organizations for more information on federal initiatives in this area. Department of Health and Human Services to develop a set of standards for electronic health records EHR and supporting networks, and certify vendors who meet them.

For more details on this topic, see European Federation for Medical Informatics. The European Union's Member States are committed to sharing their best practices and experiences to create a European eHealth Area, thereby improving access to and quality health care at the same time as stimulating growth in a promising new industrial sector.

Work on this initiative involves a collaborative approach among several parts of the Commission services. The European Institute for Health Records is involved in the promotion of high quality electronic health record systems in the European Union. The NHS in England has contracted out to several vendors for a national health informatics system 'NPFIT' that originally divided the country into five regions and is to be united by a central electronic medical record system nicknamed "the spine".

The project, in , is seriously behind schedule and its scope and design are being revised in real time. Many organizations and bodies look on their own websites, as most have made their responses public in detail for information responded to the consultation and a new strategy is expected in the second quarter of The degree of computerization in NHS secondary care was quite high before NPfIT and that programmed has had the unfortunate effect of largely stalling further development of the installed base.

Almost all general practices in England and Wales are computerized and patients have relatively extensive computerized primary care clinical records. Computerizations are the responsibility of individual practices and there is no single, standardized GP system. Interoperation between primary and secondary care systems is rather primitive. A focus on interworking for interfacing and integration standards is hoped will stimulate synergy between primary and secondary care in sharing necessary information to support the care of individuals.

Scotland has an approach to central connection under way which is more advanced than the English one in some ways.

GPASS was accepted in It has been provided free to all GPs in Scotland but has developed poorly. In the early s it was prompted by those involved in NHS finance and only in the early s did solutions including those in pathology , radiotherapy , immunization , and primary care emerge. In part this was due to some areas of health services for example the immunization and vaccination of children still being provided by Local Authorities.

They will have increased control over their own care records. In , the idea of a profession of health informatics across the UK was first mooted and by a voluntary open register was established. Consistent standards express competences of health informatics professionals in both domain-specific and generic informatics professional areas.

In , self-assessment tools were introduced for use by any interested party. In conjunction with workforce development tools such as the NHS HI Career Framework it is possible for individuals to compare their skills against typical job roles, determine their professional level, and for employers to carry out detailed workforce analysis to meet the emerging requirements of the informatics strategies of all the home countries.

In gathering and collecting necessary data and information needed for system analysis, two major fact-finding techniques were used in this work and they are: a Primary source b Secondary source Primary Source Primary source refers to the sources of collecting original data in which the researcher made use of empirical approach such as personal interview and questionnaires.

Secondary Source The need for the secondary sources of data for this kind of project cannot be over emphasized. Reliable facts were got based on the questions posed to the staff by the researcher. These include admission card, lab form, test result, bill card Etc. These forms help in the design of the new system.

According to E. C and chapman R. Before moving into the major system design building blocks of this new system we need to analyze the existing system and identify their weaknesses. The existing system of medical system and drug prescription in Christ the King Hospital Enugu involves manual activities. It has been observed that to receive medical treatment in most of our hospitals the Patients queue according for several hours in the sequence of first come first serve FCFS though, a new patient usually register into the hospital by filling patients form which signifies that the person is an official patient of that hospital.

Also, this gives the person access to own a hospital folder. Which is used to store the basic information about the diagnosis and drug prescribed to the patient. Though, it sounds so easy but it has some stumbling blocks. This forms the input to the new system designed. The information required for entry into the system includes: 1.

Patients Name 2. Sex 3. Address 4. Age 5. Disease Symptoms 6. Date visited 3. The symptoms are processed to obtain the accurate diagnosis of the sickness.

Also the diagnosis will help in the processing of the system to obtain the best emergency health care system to be administered to the patient. The reports are displayed on the screen and can also be printed out as a hard copy.

Lack of Accuracy: This situation crates problem in the sense that proper and adequate medical attention is far-fetched. Due to doctors usually hurries over their duties in order to attend to all the patient present in the hospital and along the line they may became exhausted, and the cases of traits and errors may be practiced. In addition, the diagnosis, and prescription depends on the doctors memory so their brain are often loaded with different diseases, symptoms and various drugs for treatment, hence, to remember and process the hug information is his clinical work is very tasking.

Lack of speed of operations and effectiveness: It has been observed that to receive medical treatment in most of our hospitals, The patients queue up for several hours from one units of the hospital to another, Normally, the medical records system is based on the traditional file keeping system. Although, many patients are attended to with the method of information recording or retrieving an old file but above all, t wastes time. And at times many patients are as spillover.

Moreover, the problem of redundancy may occur due to human brain is too complex and may not perform and may not perform effectively especially when new folders and card save obtain each year. The new system designed will help the management to use computer system to find patients information with regards to billing, treatments, etc.

Accuracy is maintained, as the computer information will yield an accurate result. There will not be much congestion in hospitals, as the medical system developed will assist patients to be treated and the information stored.

The speed of operation of the medical system is high when compared to manual method. The output produced can be printed on a hard copy or viewed on the screen. The output generated includes: 1. Patients File 2. Bill Record 3. Treatment Record. The input form design takes the format bellow. The database design in the software is achieved using Microsoft access database. Bellow is the structure of the file designed in the database.

Patients 2. Query 3. Report 4. Exit Select Menu option Yes Option 1? Call patients form No Yes Option 2? Call query program No Yes Option 3? This is because the programming language has the advantage of easy development. There are two parts of the computer system, namely. The following minimum hardware specification is needed Intel Pentium 1. Since, the implementation of this system does more good than harm in our country especially health sector.

Hence not only does it provide good health with the help of the following factors, accuracy, flexibility, and speedy treatment. But, also it will be a big relief for medical doctors and nurses when attending to patients. This project is well designed with reliability and efficiency as our mainstay, have come just in time to correct those weaknesses and anomalies, which exist in the existing manual method. The achievements made up this design can be summarized a.

Result of high processing speed of the computerize system b. Billing system in the hospital will be more effective. These problems includes I was seriously faced with the problem of data collection, which helps in building the manuscript.

Because information they said is the tool of business so without solid data collection or material one finds it difficult to present a meaningful reports. So, inability to get materials on time really set my project back.

Actually, it took me more than five months to gather enough information needed for this project. Also for collection of data from my case study a lot of money is spent on transportation.

Hence for one to be effective in this project, money must be involved. Finally, the major limitations of this study were time, financial constraints and poor response by some medical doctors fearing that computers may take over the practice of medicine which in advance, they may lose their jobs.

For this reason the researcher is recommending compulsory information technology training for all the medical practitioners to enable them cope with the current trend in information technology. The implementation of a patient billing software for a hospital will be a big relief for medical doctors and nurses when operational. The system can be a tremendous help to hospital management.

It will also serve as a tool for quick operational decision making of the patient, thus enabling them to reach the solutions of their problem more quickly and more accurately than human being. Thus the overall effect of the use of computer in medical system is that patients acquire competence, accuracy, and effectiveness within the shortest time in their operations and can break into new ground with certainty. England: Smith and Sons. Habib, J.