e-HAMS: A Unified Model-based Integrated Healthcare Services Management System for Low-and-Middle Income Economies

摘要

The emerging proliferation of fragmented healthcare applications has accounted for an overwhelming high cost of maintaining healthcare services and facilities, clinical data security and privacy concerns, decentralized data redundancy leading to snail-speed of improvement in healthcare services’ delivery efficiency and more often than not, a total shutdown of health facilities. Due to lack of communication among these decentralized and often similar health applications, their relative characteristics and advantages are either misaligned and/or duplicated in most cases. Hence, needs be that robust and integrated healthcare services management applications, that can collaboratively deliver consolidated healthcare objectives and facilitate huge cost savings, seamless clinical information workflow, optimum access and sharing of centralized clinical data, highly-efficient quality of service (QoS) and real-time accountability, be developed especially for the healthcare systems in low-and-middle-income economies. In this paper, an integrated web-based electronic HealthcAre Management System (e-HAMS) for low-and-middle income economies was developed. e-HAMs is a composite mobile-compliant system with a collaborative framework that accommodates electronic patients’ health record, electronic cash flow audit, electronic personnel record management, electronic pharmacy services and the electronic healthcare services payment management systems. Prior to its development, a users’ needs assessment was conducted and the possibility that e-HAMS would offer some cost-savings benefit was also modelled. The collaborative model when evaluated based on Closed World Assumption (CWA) reveals that cost-savings benefit is huge. An underlying architecture for the integrated development plan was also developed. Unified modeling language and V-shaped software development model were employed to co-design and orient the development of e-HAMS. Interactive graphical user interfaces were developed to implement e-HAMS’ designs in a visual studio integrated development environment using C# language. The system database was developed using a SQL server application. At the testing stage, a qualitative users’ assessment of e-HAMS was conducted to evaluate the performance of the developed e-HAMS system. Results obtained reveal that cost savings benefit of e-HAMS is rated at 96%, reliability (92%), availability (90%), privacy (90%), security (89%), quality assurance (86%), user interface design (82%), ease of use (78%) and user friendliness (76%) in that order. Thus, e-HAMS is best suited for low-and-middle income economies to realize improved Quality of healthcare services delivery and facilitated efficiency of operations while offering timely generation of informed decisions.