CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION:
1.1 Background of the Study
Membership management systems are used by primary and specialty care clinics to manage access to service providers, as well as by hospitals to schedule elective surgeries (Wijewickrama and Takakuwa, 2008). Many factors affect the performance of appointment systems including arrival and service time variability, patient and provider preferences, available information technology and the experience level of the scheduling staff. In addition, a critical bottleneck lays in the application of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IE/OR) techniques (Wang, and Gupta, (2011). The most common types of health care delivery systems are described in this work with particular attention on the factors that make membership management challenging. For each environment relevant decisions ranging from a set of rules that guide schedulers to real-time responses to deviations from plans are described. A road map of the state of the art in the design of membership management systems is provided and future opportunities for novel applications of IE/OR models are identified (Yang and Quek, 2008). Membership Management system is a desktop application that is designed to help schedule members from the management of organization and the customers, send messages to members either by phone or email. With this computerized system there will be no loss of record or member record which generally happens when a non computerized system is used. It is designed in PHP and SQL database used is PHP Wamp Server.