Electronic hospital referral system. A case study of Mulago National Referral Hospital

Abstract

The electronic hospital referral system (EHRS) enables a hospital physician to easily and conveniently manage referrals online. The project was developed because in various hospitals in Uganda, primary doctors go through lengthy and many paper work procedures in referring patients with their medical history to other specific hospitals. These procedures limit the time for the secondary doctors to access information about the referred patient hence making the doctor to redo clinical tests. This leads to doctors taking more time to work on individual patients thus increasing congestion and long queues. The researchers used interviews and questionnaires to get information from the respondents. For example, they interviewed doctors and administered questionnaires to patients. The collected data was analyzed using excel spreadsheets. The project was designed using Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs) for the process model and Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) for the data model. It was implemented using technologies such as; Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for the interfaces, Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for styling the interfaces, bootstrap for responsiveness, Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) for connecting the database and the interfaces and MySQL for the database. In conclusion, the project met all the objectives intended. It is, however, recommended for use by all hospitals and health centres.