PROJECT TITLE: BUNGOMA DISTRICT REFFERAL HOSPITAL
ONLINE DOCTORS APPOINTMENT BOOKING SYSTEM.
NAME: SIMIYU WEKESA MARTIN
ADM: DICT/CC8228/020J
COURSE: DIPLOMA IN INFORMATION COMMUNICATION AND
TECHNOLOGY
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CHAPTER ONE
1.0 Introduction
Aim of this project is to create doctor patient handling management system that will help doctors
in their work and will also help patients to book doctor appointments and view medical progress.
The system allows doctors to manage their booking slots online. Patients are allowed to book
empty slots online and those slots are reserved in their name. The system manages the
appointment data for multiple doctors in specific areas of specialty at various days and times.
Each time a user visits a doctor his/her medical entry is stored in the database by that specific
doctor. Next time a user logs in he may view his/her entire medical history as and when needed.
At the same time a doctor may view patient’s previous medical history while the patient visits
him. The system also consists of Blood donor module. This module allows for Blood donation
registration as well as Blood group search. The module is designed to help urgent Blood
requirements through easy/instant searches.
1.1
The methodology used is waterfall.
Keywords: Doctors’ appointment booking system, online appointment booking, patients,
doctors, Customers, Online Doctors Appointment Booking System (ODABS)
1.2 Background Study
Doctors and patients are the key players in any given hospital for instance in Bungoma County
Referral Hospital. The service provision at this hospital in100% manual wgere the interaction
between doctors and their patients is based on the first come first served basiss. These services
provision methodology results into wastage of time, long queues and in some cases loss of lives.
It is the desire of every doctor to safe the lives of the patients under his/her wing and so is the
desire of every patient to get the doctors services within the required time so as to be treated.
In the previous cases, there have been challenges in the delivery of services to the prospective
customers within this hospital due the aforementioned challenges especially on the day numerous
patients stream in to seek for the doctors attention. Initially the patients were expected to queue
and booked appointments with their respective doctors physically at the doctor’s office. The
current system does not therefore provide relevant information about the availability of the
required doctor and the patient’s medical in nearly impossible to be accurately managed. There
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are lots of missed appointment, delays in the queue, time wastage, data mishandling, endless
paperwork prior to the delivery of the required services. This has been causing some loopholes
for corrupt dealings, high rate of patient complaints, data loss and to the extreme loss of lives.
The current system does not also tell the number of expected patients for a specific doctor per
given session since they rely on the population of the patients at any given time leading to equal
treatment of patient cases without any regards to emergency situations and agency of the
services. This is the main challenge to the doctors, patients and the entire hospital management.
1.2.1 Detailed Background Information of the Project.
The Bungoma County Referral Hospital has grown from scratch to its current status. It is level 4
hospital sponsored by National Government and the County Government Of Bungoma through
the Ministry of Health. It is located in Bungoma Town along Kanduyi-Mumias Road, opposite
police station, within Bungoma County. It offers both inpatient and outpatient services with a
bed capacity of 223.
The current system is a manual system where almost every service is done minus computers. The
prospective patients visit the respective doctors in person in order to secure of book an
appointment and by extension get the relevant services. They are therefore allocated doctor’s
time slices on the basis of first come first served. Afterwards they are given a non-specified
duration to see the doctors for the service. They have to then walk from one department to
another especially if the service they seek for is decentralized. These movements more often than
not cause disruptions in the delivery of the service as they have to go back and re-queue to
complete their needed services. This often results in chaotic queues, new infections during this
time and time wastage.
Organizational Structure
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1.2.2 Current System
Doctors Appointment booking is done manually using pen and paper or sometimes by word of
mouth where a patient is supposed to acquire a ticket number of card at the doctor’s office or
sometime beep at the doctor’s to seek for appointment to see him/her. This many times leads to
so much time wastage, poor resource utilization, favoritism in time allocation. The patients make
long queues to book appointments with their doctors’ appointments allocated to one patient at a
time. Delivery of the needed service is done after a lot of time has elapsed as much time is
wasted on the waiting queues. The patients with the social status are most times allocated time at
the expense of the poor or less fortunate patient who are in dire need the doctor’s time slice. This
makes it difficult to determine the actual cause of death of some patients attributed to doctor’s
negligence. This is the reason for my proposed system. The system is so slow, tiresome and with
a lot of loopholes as there may be some cases of manipulation on the allocation of Doctor’s time
slice which more often is marred by favoritism and general corrupt dealings from those in
authority.
1.2.3 Proposed system
The proposed system will provide online doctor’s appointment booking services where patients
log into the system after registration and interact with the system. The patients’ details will be
saved in the patient’s details database. The users will be allowed to create their various
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passwords which they will use along their NHIF numbers or National identifications numbers,
passport numbers and or huduma numbers to log into the system.
The proposed system will therefore allocate Doctor’s time slices to various patients within a
given day of the week and be able to generate reports for all the system stakeholders (Doctors,
Hospital Management and Patients).
1.3 Problem Statement
The current system of appointment booking does not take record of the availability of doctors,
the workload for each doctor per given session, the emergency cases, the agency of the service
and the utilization of the available resources which include; doctors, nurse, hospital life-saving
machines, space and time hence gives chance to any person to misuse, enter into corrupt deals,
favor some patients as long as they are fortunate enough to have money. Senior authorities and
the doctors themselves may exploit and manipulate the appointment booking allocation sessions
to suit their personal needs or in favor of their preferred patients which tempers with the doctor’s
oath of work. The current system consumes a lot of time since users have to queue in order to
book appointments with doctors which takes a lot of time and man power.
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The system will als0 generate the total number of patients for each doctor per given session.
and statistics on the expected number of patients having specified medical condition within and
without the county.
1.4 Objectives
1.4.1 Project Goal
To develop an online doctors’ appointment booking system that is Robust, secure, transparent
and user friendly.
1.4.2 General Objectives
To design, develop and implement an efficient, user friendly web-based doctors’ appointment
booking system.
1.4.3 Specific Objectives
❖ To Create Web based online Doctors’ Appointment Booking Management system.
❖ To manage all patients related information.
❖ To provide emergency information in critical situation.
❖ To optimize the available resources e.g doctors, nurses, space and time
❖ To enhance customer satisfaction and feedback
1.5 Research Questions
The proposed system is based on the following research questions.
1. How will the proposed system capture doctors’ and patients’ details?
2. How will the proposed system facilitate online appointment booking?
3. How will the proposed system generate reports for the entire process?
1.6 Justification
The proposed system will be implemented for better user experience. The system will be very
easy to access. It will establish real time communication, using modern and updated technology.
So, user can see the update without reload or refresh. This system will be compatible with user
device such as pc, laptop, tab & smart phone. So user can easily access the system anytime
anywhere. This system is very simple & user friendly so, any user can use this system easily.
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Its success can also be replicated in other hospitals. The project is coded in HTML + JavaScript+
CSS +PHP for the web platform.
1.7 Scope
For the purpose of coming up with a doctors’ online appointment booking system, a case study
of Bungoma County Referral Hospital(Kenya) was used. The study assumes that doctors and
patients registration can be completed successfully and the patients can have login credentials to
log in, view all the available doctors in respective areas of specialization and finally get the
service/s booked for. The proposed system will only work on the web platform.
1.8 Limitations of the proposed system
The limitations that hinder the entire process of system development were:
● Financial constraints. It is expensive to acquire software and to manage.
● Lack of enough programming knowledge.
● Late delivery of hardware component.
● Due to the small scope the project may not represent the whole spectrum of the online
doctors’ appointment booking system.
● May sometime require IT specialists to manage the system.
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1.9 Project Schedule
Project Gantt Chart.
Week Week Week Week Week Week Week Week Week Week Week Week Week Week Week
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Jan Jan Jan Jan Feb Feb Feb Mar Mar Mar Mar Apr Apr Apr
9-,202 16 23 30 Feb 6 13-,20 20-,20 27-,20 6-,202 13-,20 20-,20 27-,20 3-,202 10-,20 17-,20
Activity Name 3 -,2023 -,2023 -,2023 -,2023 23 23 23 3 23 23 23 3 23 23
Submit Project
Proposal
Project
Planning
System Analysis
System Design
Implementation
Documentation
Submit final
project
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1.10 Budget and Resources
Budget
S/NO ITEM COST
1 A computer system (preferably 64bit), windows operating system available
version(7,8,10)
2 USB flash disk 32 GB 1000
3 Camera/web cam 2500
4 Xamp server 2500
5 MySQL 3000
6 Miscellaneous 3000
TOTAL 13000
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