Design and development of a Web-based hospital information system

Medical institutions have felt the need for a well structured computer-based patient record (CPR) for at least 20 years now. Hospital information systems (HIS) were conceived to serve that purpose. A pilot application is being developed to serve the needs of management of inpatient and outpatient medical record, the mechanism of patients' visits and bed reservation from the GPs (general practitioners) as well as the management of the drug store. Having these needs in mind we developed an intranet Web client-server application. The developed system provides a user-friendly graphical interface and features such as Internet access, access to complete electronic patient records, remote access, etc. The whole application was developed as an ActiveX Document that can be downloaded from a Web server and run from within a Web browser. The scope of this intranet based hospital information system is to improve the quality of health care provision, to minimise the institution's costs, to ameliorate time management, to increase training capabilities and to improve remote patient record access. This system will increase patient satisfaction by reducing waiting times and staff morale through high quality information systems and infrastructure.