The hospital gives around-the-clock medical care, diagnosis and treatment to the sick and injured on both an inpatient and an outpatient basis. The hospital is divided into several wards, described below. The medical team is comprised of physicians, technicians (technical staff), nurses, and administrative assistants.
Wards have rooms for patients to stay in. Rooms have beds, and beds are numbered per room, so a combination of the ward, room, and bed number will uniquely identify every bed in the hospital.
The pieces of equipment in a ward can be mobile or stationary. If stationary, a piece will be assigned to a single ward room or unit; and if mobile, it will be assigned to the general storage area in the ward. Equipment is not shared between wards. For each piece of mobile equipment, there is a booking calendar to keep track of when and where the piece is needed.
Wards also have units, such as critical care units and operating room units. The set of units varies from ward to ward, but every ward has a single general storage area unit. Each unit has a textual description outlining its responsibilities, as well as a list of equipment in that unit.
Every ward unit and room has a display and a scanner. The display can show everything from a medical team member's schedule to a patient's history. The scanner is connected to the display, and can be used to scan both the wrist band of a patient (described below) and the id card of a member of the medical team.
Each medical team member has a name and a unique id number, and all team members carry an id card containing that information.
Nurses are affiliated with a single ward, while physicians and technicians can be affiliated with several different wards. All personnel have access to a calendar detailing the hours that they need to be present at the various wards. Nurses record physicians' decisions such as diagnoses, medical procedures that are to be performed (and when), new prescriptions (including medication, amount, and schedule), cancelled prescriptions, whether a patient needs to be transferred (and to which ward), and whether a patient can check out of the hospital. These are written on paper and handed to an administrative assistant to enter. The administrative assistant needs to figure out who needs to be at a particular procedure before they enter it in the system.
Here are some necessary items for the system:
Unless new patients are in a life-threatening situation, they must register at the hospital. This involves an administrative assistant scanning their health card, which contains their name, address, and a unique health card number. After registering they receive an early diagnosis by a physician in which they are classified as either an "inpatient" or an "outpatient". An inpatient is a person who is admitted at least for one night to the hospital; and an outpatient is a person who visits the hospital for diagnosis or treatment without spending the night. This is determined by the physician doing the initial assessment.
Outpatients on a return visit may arrive at the hospital and go straight to the ward where they are to receive treatment.
Each patient, be that an inpatient or an outpatient, has a profile capturing the patient's name, address, health card number, and their general health-related remarks. For each outpatient visit, an outpatient visit record is created storing the date and time of the visit, the patient's health problem, the name(s) of the physician(s) who attended to the patient, the diagnosis, and the prescribed medication. For each inpatient visit, an inpatient visit record is created storing the date and time of admission, the patient's health problem(s), the early diagnosis, and the name(s) of the physician(s) involved in making the early diagnosis. To facilitate the management of inpatients, a wristband is produced for each inpatient at admission. The hospital's medical team will use special handheld scanners to scan the wristbands and fetch the inpatient visit records, described below.
During each stay at the hospital, an inpatient may be transferred several times between different wards and between different parts of a single ward. For each ward stay, a ward stay record is created. The information stored in a ward stay record includes a list of intra-ward stays, a list of medical procedures performed on the patient during their stay at the ward, the name(s) of the physicians attending to the patient while at the ward, a ward-specific diagnosis and a ward-specific medication chart. The ward nurses use these charts to administer the required medication. The information stored in an intra-ward stay record includes the date and time when the patient checked in the corresponding ward room or unit, the checkout date and time, and if applicable, the id of the bed assigned to the patient within the room or unit.
Patients in a life-threatening situation are assessed and treated as normal, but without registering them first. They are all issued a wristband at some point for identification, and flagged in the system as not having registered.