A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1979

MIS concept has been applied to the management of the outpatient medical records at the Ramathibodi Hospital (Bangkok, THAILAND) in order to provide the most efficient means of collection, storage and retrieval of the records. This study is concerned with the conceptual structure of a computer-based medical information system. It includes the study of the existing system, determination of information needs for each of the users, proposed system operation and data base requirements. The factors considered in the proposed system lie in the areas of manpower, significant information loss, physician's utilization time, patient's waiting time in the system and the amount of paperwork loads. In the existing system study, an information flow diagram for the whole hospital is developed; to be able to look at the hospital's information requirements as a series of interlocking subsystems. Included is the identification of the outpatient clinic subsystem under study together with its current serious problems. In the determination of information needs, three groups of users are classified - Health care provider, Accountants & payors for services, and All other users. In the proposed system operation, system objectives and constraints are stated together with general system operation which includes five stages - Registration, Scheduling, Laboratory, Physician Office and Pharmacy Office. As 'for the data base requirements, the central data base is suggested to be composed of five files - REGISTRATION, PROBLEM-LIST, MEDICAL-HISTORY, PHARMACY-ACCOUNT, and STATISTICS files.