Chapter One: Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study

Hospitals are key institutions and there is need for efficient service delivery in the hospital as
good health is paramount to a happy society. As a result of this there is need for a system that
will enable hospital management in making effective and efficient decision (Oparah, 2006)
. Recently, efforts are continuously being made in designing and constructing a user friendly and
reliable database system to satisfy hospital or medical management system, (James et al., 2006).
On the other hand, many hospitals and medical centers are still adopting the manual system of
hospital management. These methods of medical management system have continued to pose a
lot of setbacks and problems to medical practitioners, nurses, patients and other staff in both
government and private hospitals.
All large enterprises need the database systems for handling the information (Abdullahi,
2004). One kind of those enterprises is the hospital. Because of large number of patients, doctors
and other staff in hospitals, data processing becomes more crucial. Data Management in hospital
can be used for achieving the patient’s information, arranging the doctor’s schedule and
accounting business. Doctors should access the patient’s record for giving the best diagnosis to
cure the patient (Kusis, 2002). On the other hand patient can access their lab results and all kinds
of information that doctors indicate. Data base hospital helps to control the accounting business
easily
In the database management system all information including prescription, survey, and diagnosis
of patients can be carried out. 1) All information includes prescription survey, diagnosis of
patients. 2) The patients and the doctor can handle all information 3) Patients can take
appointment time for visiting and can access their information via interest if the organization is
online. 4) Administration can access the statistics about the hospital such as patient’s capacity,
number of employee etc
Yobe state university Clinic. The hospital provide qualitative Health care services but
maintains that they do not just heal mere physical illness which attacks the human body, but a
much deeper and holistic healing of the entire human person.The Hospital since its establishment
has demonstrated a very keen interest in the staff recruitment and development of highly skilled
and very dependable medical and paramedical personnel. Presently, their work force stands at
460. Due to high number of staff and patients, manual paper and pen method of documenting
hospital processes is no longer feasible. Misplacement of records occurs frequently and this
among other problems has necessitated the design of a computerized system to manage the
hospital processes.
Patient prescription management system is a management system that is designed to
improve accuracy and to enhance safety and efficiency in the pharmaceutical store. It is a
computer based system which helps the Pharmacist to improve inventory management, cost,
medical safety etc.

The system allows the user to enter a manufacturing and expiry date for a particular product or
drug during opening stock and sales transaction. The system will also give report showing the list
of products expiry after a specified date before the product eventually expires. It also involves
manual entry upon arrival of new batches of drugs and upon drug movement out of the pharmacy
for a certain period, e.g. every month, the pharmacist may want to generate report for the
movement of drugs in and out of the pharmacy, getting information about the drugs e.g. expiry
date, date purchased, number of drug type left, location of a drug in the pharmacy.At present,
manual system is being utilized in the pharmacy. It requires the pharmacist to manually monitor
each drug that is available in the pharmacy. This usually leads to mistakes as the workload of the
pharmacist increases.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

It has been observed that to receive medical treatment in most of our hospitals, the
patients queue up for several hours from one unit of the hospital to another starting from
obtaining a new hospital folder, or retrieving an old one before consulting a doctor, to the
laboratory unit for lab test then to the pharmacy to get the prescribed drugs and so on. With the
manual processes involved in handling the patient most of them waste the whole day in the
hospital. Very often, patients leave their homes very early in the morning in order to be among
the first group to see the doctor. Otherwise, they may end up wasting the whole day without due
attention.
This situation is discouraging to most patients and sometimes forces them to turn to non-
professionals or even resort to self-medication for quick recovery.

The keeping and retrieval of accurate records on patients are poorly carried out in most of
our hospitals. Files may be misplaced; the record in them may be wrongly filled. Hence, it is
not easy to obtain accurate and timely information or data.

This is also the case with obtaining other medical information and data especially when
new folders and numbers are obtained each year.

Finally, the keeping of folder for each patient manually takes a lot of time and money and
some of the information are redundant. All these have net effect of loss of lives and inefficiency
on the part of management.

1.3 Aims and Objectives of The Study

1.3.1 Aim of the study

The main aim of this project is to design a patient prescription management system
for controlling the flow of patient’s data in the hospital. The aim is to solve most of
the problems encountered in the hospital using the old and manual system of
medical administration.

1.3.2 Objectives of the study

This study is centered on the following objectives.

1. To design and develop a system that examine the current procedures employed in our
hospitals with regards to patient’s admission, diagnosis and treatment.
2. To design and develop a system examine the associated problem(s) or flaws in the current
system

3. To improve on the already existing system by designing an efficient practical patient

prescription software, this is aimed at an accurate, faster and reliable patient‟s
information system.

1.4 Scope and Limitation of the Study

The scope of the project covers the development of a computer based database
application for use by the sections (patient prescription and management) at the general hospital
to replace their old paper notebook recording system. This research work is limited to patient’s
admission and prescription information system including treatments, and prescription. The
software developed will be carried out using HTML, PHP and MYSQL to manage the database.