5.2. System development life cycle
The systems development life cycle (SDLC)was applied to
provide a descriptive or prescriptive characterization of how the CPOE
systemwas developed. The SDLC describes phases of the software cycle and the
order in which those phases are executed. (Ragunath, Velmourougan, Davachelvan,
Kayalvizhi, & Ravimohan, 2010).
According to the SDLC approach, we followed the phases cited
below for the design of the system (Parsons & Oja, 2014):
1. The planning phase
2. The analysis phase
3. The design phase
4. The development and testing phase
5. The implementation phase
6. The maintenance phase
The implementation and the maintenance phase involve the
installation of the new information system and the conversion of the
organization procedures to use it. In this study the deployment of the new
system in a hospital is not planned so the implementation and the maintenance
phase was not part of the study.
5.3. The planning phase
The planning phase is the fundamental process of understanding
the main reason for building the new information system (IS).Itdetermines how
the project team will proceed to achieve the goal. It has two steps: the
project initiation and the project management (Dennis, Wixom, & Roth,
2012).
During project initiation, we have to identify the task
performed by different actors in the lab order management and the challenges of
using manual system or no optimized system to manage lab test data. The
structured interview technique is one of the efficient way of collecting
information on the user needs. Based on the information found in the literature
reviewrelated to our study, the laboratory order communication between medical
staff within the hospital, the risk of miss to follow-up of the patient lab
results and the notification of the test results to both referring clinicians
and patients are the main problems identified at the health facility that
provide advance clinical care, laboratory and diagnostic techniques to a lot of
people in a clearly defined area. Thus, these problems could correspond to the
problems found at the district hospital based on the functional levels of
health care distribution in Ghana. Since we did not work with a particular
district hospital due to time constraint and the limited budget we have
consider the district hospital structure in Ghana as study setting, and the
information used at this step are based on existing literature as stated in the
background section of the work. The project management step plan correspond the
research study plan and the deliverable is the CPOE system.
At the end of this phase, the recommendation done to the
hospital management can be formulated in the terms of designing a Computerized
Provider Order Entry System for laboratoryorder management with notification
capabilities using SMS and Email.
5.4. The analysis phase
5.4.1. The existing
situation
According to the study, a district hospital with a manual and
paper laboratory based system constitute our study setting, and the aim of the
project is to create a new automated system for laboratory order management.
The loop-holes found in the manual system according to the literature reviews
are: inappropriate test request from clinician, error in patient identification
and specimen collection, failure in communicating laboratory result to both
patient and referring clinician (Plebani, 2010) and breaking in the workflow
communication process between clinical staff within the hospital
setting.(Maslove et al., 2011)
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