ABSTRACT

The purpose of this thesis was to implement a hospital management software which is suitable for small private hospitals in Nigeria, especially for the ones that use a file based system for storing information rather than having it stored in a more efficient and safer environment like databases or excel programming software. The software developed within this thesis project was specifically designed for the Rainbow specialist hospital which is based in Lagos, the commercial neurological center of Nigeria.

 

The thesis firstly gave an overview of the different types of software development models that could be used for developing hospital management software. The models considered in this thesis were the Waterfall model, the iterative and incremental models, the V-shape model and the Spiral model. Therefore, the most relevant aspects of these models were presented.

 

The system development part was then considered, explaining some modules and the human interface with which a user can interact with the software to store or get information from the database. The software system itself and appendices contain the screenshots of the human interface after the completion of the system.

 

Microsoft visual studio 2010 and Microsoft SQL server management studio were used in developing the user interface and the database for the software.

1    Introduction

 

1.1     Background

The health sector in Nigeria is in a very poor state due to the fact that it is under funded by the government, therefore is extremely shortage of qualified health personnel at the primary health care level. Due to shortage, maintenance and under develop of health care infrastruc-tures, many qualified nurses, doctors and physicians are lured away to developed countries in search of lucrative jobs while a few of these went into private practice.

 

 

In Nigeria, ninety percent of government and privately owned hospital still use file systems to store their day to day activities and information; thereby putting at risk the loss of information should any of the files get missing. With this problem in mind, the Nigeria government passed a law in 2011 requiring all government and privately owned hospitals must go digital by the end of 2014 at the latest so as to avoid any information loss and to centralize the health in-formation of all Nigerians. To this end, Rainbow Specialist Medical Center, which is situated in Lagos Nigeria, decided to build software that will store the information of their daily activi-ties including but not limited to registration of patients in accordance to the law that was passed. (Helen Chapin Metz, ed. Nigeria: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1991.).

 

The company therefore required me to design software that is able to record all daily activities of their medical center. The medical center therefore suggest the name, hospital management software as the name of their software, therefore the implementation of Hospital Manage-ment Software will be called HMS from this point onward throughout this project. This pro-ject is a mini contract signed between myself and Rainbow Specialist Medical Center, as part of their effort to move from a file base system to computer based system.

 

 

1.2     Objective

 

The objective of this project is to develop hospital management software based on Microsoft window application with structured Query language ( T-SQL and SQL Server as a database) as the back-end database for Rainbow Specialist Medical center, with the hope of migrating from file based system to a computer database system. This software will help the company to be more efficient in handling the daily activities and registration of their patients. The purpose of this project is to give a complete requirement documentation, design, and implementation of the software. It also explains the user interface, hardware and software and different mod-els that could be used to develop software such as this.

 

 

1.3     Scope

 

The scope of this project is covers only to the requirement documentation, design and im-plementation due to secrecy of the project from which this thesis is derived. Therefore, the client who owns this project, Rainbow specialists Hospital, only permit me discuss only the above mention part. Hence, the testing and installation are not included here as agreed upon by both of us.