Automated public health records management system

Abstract

The Automated Public Health Records Management System is developed to be used by public health officers and everybody associated with public health. It was noticed that there were some issues faced during data collection and data analysis even though the available IT-based public health surveillance systems.

We were prompted to develop a system that can the public health sector and the community about the detection of epidemics and pandemics as early as possible. There were also high concerns about depending on traditional data collection tools including the available systems in the public health sector that will not be so efficient and have many inconsistencies plus increase the workload for the public health workers.

A few existing systems were reviewed in a bid to find out what was missing in them for us to improve. Questionnaires, interviews and observation were the methods used to find out the requirements and the regions of Kampala is where we took the scope of study on the hospitals. These provided us with a lot of information to build our system.

During the design phase, we used different process and data modelling techniques to show how the different entities relate to each other and how they relate to the system. DFDs, ERDs and the system architecture were all drawn to direct the flow within the system.

The system was implemented using JavaScript programing language for the web system, HTML for providing the structure so that browsers know what to show and CSS for cascading style sheet. MySQL, a database management system program was used to create and manage the system's database. SQLyog, a GUI based database management tool for the RDBMS MySQL was used to provide an interface for creating and managing the database on the MySQL server, Notepad++ text editor was used for writing PHP scripts for accessing the MySQL database.

The system was thereafter tested and validated to make sure that it met all the intended requirements and to also make sure that there were no errors.