Hello All,

Yesterday I was at a hospital to oversee a patient's discharge. It took a whole day for them to simply discharge the patient. What was surprising was that even though the hospital had computers in practically all departments, they didn't seem to maintain records progressively. They made small hand written bills for various medical activities and put them in a patient's file. This file would then be passed on from one dept. to another. Finally during discharge, the billing dept. would enter all these records one by one into their computer. This was a long process and to add to the delay was a pile of many such files to be entered into the computer at a time. Ultimately inspite of having lots of computers with them in the entire hospital, they were underutilizing this usefull resource.

There are many software developers on this list who are also into database management. This is just a suggestion. Whenever they create softwares for hospitals, they could create a system wherein every department creates its bills directly into the computer and prints it out on a tiny printer just like the one used in restaurants and STD/ISD booths. So when a patient's portfolio is created on admission it is stored on a central server. Every department's new bill is added to this record at the time of creation itself. So during discharge the billing department does not enter any bills into their computer, instead they simply click a button to get a final print out as per their format. In order to overcome local networking glitches that may temporarily prevent access to the main server, a sub server database can be kept running in every machine that is used to enter data. This server will store a backup of all its own records and also act as a buffer holder when network is down. When the network is up again, it will automatically locate the main server and update the main database. This will be a background process that will run without user intervention, thus allowing records to be created inspite of network loss.

Regards,

Rony.

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