EMR - Healthcare Application

EMR - Healthcare Application

Project Description

The application was an appointment scheduler that maintains a list of doctors, clinics and resources. Doctors have availability slots for each workday and off-days that must be factored while recording appointments. Information from patient database must be auto-populated in lookup fields and forms while recording appointments. The appointment history and schedule can be reported for any time period as per the chosen criteria. Appointments can be viewed and managed in an integrated way across all clinics (currently two, but this must be scalable). The client was a healthcare provider (multi-location hospital) for the local resident patients having sleeping disorders. Quality Excellence's scope of consulting was for their Seattle, Washington, USA based operations and expected to extend the services to other USA states and globally, later.

Capability Analysis :

In this section we have attempted a comprehensive list of application features both at the level of user capabilities as well as integration requirements. Hence we have listed the features under the following sub-sections:

User Capabilities

1. Login, Change Password and Logout
2. Update Own Profile
3. Maintain Patient Profiles - Add / Edit / Delete the list of Patients and their profiles
4. Add an appointment for a patient by linking to an available timeslot, available doctor, available location (clinic) and available resource (optional). Appointments was also linked to reported problems and have a remarks field. Provide edit (reschedule) and delete facility for managing appointments. Each appointment has a status that can be updated. User friendly GUI must be provided a convenient interface with day, week and month view and a calendar to navigate across dates
5. Search for appointment using application wide criteria including name of doctor, name of patient, date booked, date of appointment, associated properties, specialty and time slot among others. Must be comprehensive
6. Manage a Wait list of patients who need appointment for a particular doctor that was overbooked or not temporarily available at the time preferred by patient

Admin Capabilities

1. Login, Change Password and Logout
2. Manage User Profiles
3. Manage User Access Rights
4. Maintain List of Clinics
5. Maintain Doctor (Provider) Profiles - Add / Edit / Delete the list of Doctors and their profiles
6. Manage the list of specialties associated with doctors
7. Define availability Schedule of each doctor
8. Manage the list of Locations (associated with a clinic)
9. Associate doctors with locations
10. Define availability schedule for each location
11. Manage the list of resources
12. Associate multiple user definable properties with resources
13. Associate doctors with resources
14. Define availability schedule for each resource
15. Update and Print Super Bill (Summary of Clinical Charges)
16. Manage the list of reported problems. These was the types of ailments that patients mention while asking for an appointment
17. Export data related to appointments, doctors, clinics, locations, patients and resources to a delimited text file
18. Backup and Restore Database as per a configurable schedule

Reporting Capabilities Lists

1. Appointment List
2. Patient List
3. Resource List
4. Patient Recall
5. Break List
6. Provider List
7. Reason List
8. Super Bill Tracking List
9. Appointment Status
10. No Show Report
11. Print Appointment Grid by time period, doctor (provider), resource, location, clinic, reported problem or by patient Print Super Bills

Appointment Analysis

1. By Provider
2. By Reason

Appointment Wait List

Connection with Patient EMR Database - Connect to the tables of existing EMR database for lookup fields related to patients or referring / primary care providers and ABILITY TO ADD A PATIENT / REFERRING CARE PROVIDER (Capability 32)

Solution Architecture:

This section describes the server configuration and application linkages to any external applications. The application was built using VB.Net with MS SQL Server 2005 as RDBMS. This application was run on Windows 2003 Server and we suggested that the database should reside on a separate dedicated computer, preferably running on Windows 2003 server with at least 1 GB RAM and 500 GB hard disk.

Using the enhanced SQL database, MS Windows (Dot Net & WinForms), other reporting (RDLC & Crystal reports) and networking technologies improved the processes involved in Electronic Medical Records (EMR) , Reports generation and processing & mail correspondence & task and appointment management.

In Phase 2, a web interface may be added to make the reports and analysis features accessible via a browser. That will require the server to have a Static IP address.

Business Benefits

1. The easiness in record maintenance and report generation along with appointment handling at various locations
2. Synchronized information at the run time had made the solution more robust and resulted in increased number of patients treated with the same hospital infrastructure. Hence increase in the market share for the client.
3. Powerful features had made the application administrators' job easier and hence increased his productivity with the lesser effort.
4. The business managed with future based technology solution provided by Quality Excellence to handle all its needs. This has decreased the constant budget allocation for enhancements and hence increased the client's profit margin significantly.
5. The client's installations were pronounced as a paper less hospital and document processing premises.