A significant part of the operation of any hospital involves the acquisition, management and timely retrieval of great volumes of information. This information typically involves; patient personal information and medical history, staff information, room and ward scheduling, staff scheduling, operating theater scheduling and various facilities waiting lists. All of this information must be managed in an efficient and cost wise fashion so that an institution's resources may be effectively utilized.
The City Hospital currently uses a manual system for the management and maintenance of critical information. The current system requires numerous paper forms, with data stores spread throughout the hospital management infrastructure. There is a fair bit of initial training required for staff to become familiar with the paperwork and a fair bit of time is required to physically complete and manage/organize the forms correctly.
A major problem with the current system is that often information [on forms] is incomplete, or does not follow management standards. This requires corrections either at billing time, or worse, after a bill has been rejected by Alberta Health Care or an insurance company. For these reasons payments are often late (some being delayed by many months). Forms are often lost in transit between departments requiring a comprehensive auditing process to ensure that no vital information is lost.
Multiple copies of the same information exist in the hospital. It is not uncommon for patient information to be updated on some but not all data stores. This lag between the request for a change and the actual change may result in a potentially damaging misinformation of staff.
Finally, staff scheduling for both the wards and the operating rooms is difficult and fraught with errors under the current system. Staff scheduling conflicts are common, causing havoc when a ward is either understaffed or overstaffed. Sometimes, staff with the wrong skills are scheduled, or staff are required to work too many consecutive hours.
It is clear that the present manual system is quite cumbersome
and inefficient. While the current system is functional, the hospital's
human and capital resources are not being utilized in an efficient
fashion.
We would like to clarify that the primary purpose of the HMS
is to make sure that our resources are being well used. This means
having the right number and type of staff in all of the right
places. It also means ensuring patients on the waiting list are
notified and admitted when there is space available. The system
is not meant to keep track of specific medical information. A
future system could be developed to keep track of Medical information
and to interface with this system. If anything in the system were
to be considered extra to the project it would likely be the billing
system.
Customer Comment
The City Hospital has requested that Sirius Software Products
design and implement an automated Hospital Management System (HMS)
to replace their existing manual, paper based system. The new
system is to control the following information; patient information,
room availability, staff and operating room schedules, and patient
invoices. These services are to be provided in an efficient, cost
effective manner, with the goal of reducing the time and resources
currently required for such tasks.
We would also like to emphasize the point that the staff and
operating room scheduling system is not automatic. They are still
manually entered into the computer system to keep track of schedules
of the whole hospital. This would increase the efficiency of patient
placement into rooms and help balance of staff of all the wards
in the hospital.
Customer Comments
The proposed HMS will increase staff productivity and efficiency by:
Good, in addition to centralizing information and error checking, it would help if information could be auto entered where appropriate to speed up data entry and reduce errors.
Any person on staff at the hospital will be able to use the system.
Normally, clerks and admitting nurses will input patient information
and print invoices, while administration staff will prepare and
enter schedules. Doctors and nurses will also be able to access
the information in the HMS. In short, the people involved with
implementing the current manual system will be the end users of
the HMS.
Any person on staff is too broad. Not everyone is going to
have access to the database for obvious reasons. Furthermore,
the ability to update the database should be a predefined user
privilege. Also, "database access" should be clarified.
We need to clearly define who can read only or read/modify. Furthermore
some sort of security to access information would be a good idea,
for e.g. a password or a swipe card, assigned to only people allowed
to access it.
Customer Comment
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