Developing An Electronic Health Record System For Health Facilities In Australia

Problem Statement

It is always a problem for the common health government of Australia to manage and keep track of the patient’s health record manually. Due to this approach health professionals tend to lose critical health details of their patient hence making the whole process hard to manage. This aspect has led to poor performance by the health facilities during service delivery to the patient hence need for an online “My Health System” as this system will allow proper monitoring and management of patient information AHRQ (2018).

This proposed system for all the health facilities in Australia will act like an Electronic Health Record System (EHRS) Diaz (2014) hence making it easy to:

• Save and retrieve every patient’s medical information.
• Keep track the number of the patients available
• Enable future reference to patient’s record.
• Access the Health system by doctors, health facilities and other health practitioners.
• Generate patient’s medical reports instantly.
• Monitor patient’s progress.

There are a number of benefits related to the new online system for the health care department in Australia Fein (2014). This system will enhance the following:

• Ensure patients medical records privacy and confidentiality.
• Provide accurate patients information which is also up-to date.
• It will make it easy for different health professionals to share their patient’s details faster.
• It will promote good relationship between the doctors and the patients.
• The cost of managing patient’s information will be drastically reduced.
• It will also be easy to retrieve patient’s information from the new proposed system.

There are a number of stakeholders that will play a huge role in the implementation of the proposed health record system (Cain & Haque, 2018). The map below shows all the stakeholders involved in this project.

As shown in the diagram above the following are some of the interest for the named stakeholders on this new health system.

Internal Operation

Stakeholders	Interest
Patient	Aimed at getting proper and good quality health care services
Doctor	The system will create a good environment for service delivery and relying on accurate patient details.
Healthcare Staff	Will be employed and paid for their service delivery
Trustees	Enhance availability of health record system
Health Service Providers	Will be able to practice their medical skills and enhance patient-doctor relationship

Stakeholders	Interest
Society	The online tool will be readily available to all hence promoting quality working platform
Local Authority	Team up with others to promote My Health Record System implementation and success
Equipment Suppliers	Supports the project by providing necessary equipment for this project at a cost.
Funding Contributors	Promote the implementation of this project financially
Government Bodies	Formulating laws and policies to regulate how this system will be used. Also help in funding the project.

Stakeholders	Interest
Board of Management	Monitors project’s status and the benefits it brings to the health sector
Hospital Administrators	Manages clinical activities using the proposed system
Directors	Manages the implementation costs of the project
Application Development Manager	Oversees the development of the proposed system at a cost

Stakeholders	Interest
Sponsors	Provide financial support to the implementation of this project.
Clinical Professionals	Paid for providing consultancy services such as advice on the project implementation
Shareholders	Invest in this new project and share the profit generated
Health Insurance	Gives registered patients health insurance cover
Health Care Social Workers	Volunteers to be part of the new system being implemented.

The questionnaire which is to be developed is that of patients as they are the major pillars and much more the beneficiaries of the proposed system that is anticipated to be developed.

Questionnaires are applied in this case so that they can help in determining the areas that may need some improvements which are on the basis of the feedback from the patients on the system usability (Swenger, 2015). The patient of the patient will be essential and important in the essence that it will help in determining if the system will be accepted or rejected by the users.

Figure 1: Use Case Diagram

(source: Rey, 2015)

1. Admin. This is the person who is responsible for the security and much more controlling all the overall management of the portal online from losing data and any access which is not authorized.  This person has the right to do an update, modifying data and controlling access to the information system DB (Srivyshnavi, 2013).
2. Patient. This is the person who has the rights to register and sign in to the proposed information system. The moment they log in to the system, they will have the rights to control all the access to the permitted information and thus able to share it with the professional in medical facilities and thus being able to get the best medical attention and prescriptions.
3. Professionals. These are people who have the right to access the information of the patients once the patient shares it with them. They can share such patient information with other professionals for better recommendations and much more guidance for providing much better prescriptions to the patient who shared the information.
4. Hospital. The hospital can do the sign-up, sign in and add as well updates the information with regards to the hospital as an entity in the system.  In addition, they can add the records of the patient and information to make it easy for other authorized users to access it.

Figure 2: Fully developed use case description for professionals

(Source: Swenger, 2015)

My Health Record system is a proposed system named online-medical-record-system that offer provisions of patient information to them and to professionals so that better and accurate service can be delivered and much more medical prescriptions and the recommendations. The system is made up of the 4 main actors namely:

1.    Administrator
2.    Patient
3.    Hospital
4.    Professionals.

The system is supposed to allow the professionals to sign-up, also sign in as well as access the records of the patients shared to them. In addition, the system has given the professional the capabilities to share the information shared to them by patients with other professionals so that they can seek professional opinions about some specific medical case and thus be able to provide better medical services as well as prescriptions (Holcombe, 2010).  The professional will then have to update the patient all the information with regards to the medical services on the system.

Conclusion

The proposed system will bring numerous benefits including ensuring patients medical records privacy and confidentiality, provide accurate patients information which is also up-to date, it will make it easy for different health professionals to share their patient’s details faster, it will promote good relationship between the doctors and the patients, the cost of managing patient’s information will be drastically reduced, and it will also be easy to retrieve patient’s information from the new proposed system.

References

AHRQ. (2018). Health Information Technology Integration | Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality. Retrieved from https://www.ahrq.gov/professionals/prevention-chronic-care/improve/health-it/index.html

Cain, C., & Haque, S. (2018). Organizational Workflow and Its Impact on Work Quality. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2638/

Diaz, B. (2014). Why It’s Important to Automate the Terminology Mapping Process. Retrieved from https://blog.healthlanguage.com/why-its-important-to-automate-the-terminology-mapping-process

Fein, R. (2014). Genomic data and the electronic health record (EHR). Applied & Translational Genomics, 3(4), 130-131. doi: 10.1016/j.atg.2014.09.007

Holcombe, W. (2010). Running an agile software development project. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.

Rey, K. (2015). Electronic Health Record Adoption. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.2567073

Srivyshnavi, P. (2013). Modeling For Software Quality Assurance. Saarbrücken: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing.

Swenger, J. (2015). Hospital management UML diagram examples – use cases, activities, domain, class diagrams, sequence diagram. Retrieved from https://www.uml-diagrams.org/examples/hospital-management-example.html