Abstract
It has always been an issue that most veterinary hospitals do not have efficient methods of handling data for patients. There are often cases where the doctors offer wrong or repeated medication for a patient mostly because they do not have a standard record keeping facility that allows them to follow up a patient’s medical record from registration to discharge as well as check-up visits. It is in the light of this problem that the needs for strong, efficient, error-free and cost-effective methods of record keeping have to be brought into place. This project is the design and implementation of a web application for Veterinary Hospitals. The objective of this project is to provide a reliable record keeping facility for both medical practitioners and patients alike, provide a means for monitoring patient medical behavior in order to make for easy diagnosis and medical analysis, and improve the overall working experience of the Veterinary Hospital staff by making information management c
1.0 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Veterinary medicine is a branch of medicine that deals with the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease, disorder and injury in non-human animals. As a branch of medicine, it is necessary for the doctors to take active part in ensuring that the patients are well taken care-of and well followed up with respect to illnesses, diagnosis and the prescription of drugs. To do this, they often need an efficient management system in their clinics or hospitals that would keep track of the daily visits and returning visits of patients and the progress made in the treatment of the illnesses. This project aims at building an efficient, flexible, versatile web-based intranet for the patient management of veterinary hospitals and clinics.
1.1 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
In most hospitals, it is often ambiguous, time consuming and exhausting with respect to the issue of patient management and follow-up. This is due to the following issues;
- Loss of patient data: Patient data is sometimes kept in physical storage file which get worn-out over a long period of time and get prone to wear and tear. Also, there is the issue of document losses which occur periodically.
- Time Cost: Most hospitals receive more than 200 patients daily. And each patient has a file dedicated to him / her. Having to write to these physical files everyday can be time consuming. Also, in a case where the patient re-visits, sorting out files is often a time consuming fact and also energy draining.
- Space: Physical files need physical space for storage, this physical storage space is often not available and often limited. As a result, there is often the need to create a complete apartment for the storage of these files, which, in the long run, is often not enough.
1.2 OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
The objective of this study is to achieve the following;
- An efficient, light and portable means of storing patient data in veterinary hospitals.
- An efficient method of communication between the various divisions in a hospital with respect to the treatment and transfer of patients from one department to another.
- To reduce the time cost of processing data. With a database management facility, the issues of sorting, searching and traversing manually comes to an abrupt end. Database management systems have very fast means of searching for data using keywords and identity keys. Such of which is not possible with manual technology.
1.3 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROJECT
This project is significant in the sense that it revolutionizes the patient management systems in veterinary hospitals, it will make communication faster and much easier, it will make data processing much more efficient and less prone to errors, it will allow one to treat each patient as a separate entity instead of being a part. If efficient, it could also be used in human hospital management systems as well as other areas where personnel data and activity management is involved; places like schools, industries, offices etc.