An automated patients records index at Medicare Health Professional’s Clinic, Mengo

Abstract

The purpose of this project was to design and develop automated patient’s records index for Medicare health professional’s clinic (MHPC) that will provide a convenient, easy-to-use, internet based application for staff and users to retrieve and access the patients records. The objectives of the study were to: examine the manual system used in retrieval of patients records at Medicare health professional’s clinic, establish the challenges of indexing of the patient records at Medicare health professional’s clinic, determine the requirements necessary for in designing and developing an automated patient records index at Medicare health professional’s clinic, design and develop an automated patient records index for Medicare health professional’s clinic, Mengo to ease the retrieval of patients records. The study employed a case study research design while adopting a qualitative approach in data collection. The researcher purposively selected 10 respondents to participate in the study. Interview, observation, and document review methods were data collection methods used to collect data from the field. The study found out that Medicare Health Professional’s Clinic uses a manual retrieval system of patient records which is characterised by lack of immediate retrievals, lack of immediate information storage, lack of prompt updating, error prone manual calculation and preparation of accurate and prompt reports. The study concluded that the implementation of the automated patients records index, training of the medical staff, purchase more computers and a user friendly system interface would help to improve the storage and retrieval of the patient’s records at MHPC. The study recommended that MPHC should implement this automated patient’s records index, train and sensitise all the records staff. The merits and use of the automated patient records index in MPHC will ensure the access control to the patients’ records, easy search and retrieval of the patient records and provide the backup for the patient’s records.