National health practitioner informatics system

Abstract

ICT tools are continuously changing business processes while the Zimbabwe’s public health sector still lags behind. The commercial industry has completely evolved because of e-Commerce business models but an e-Health strategy has not yet been implemented in the health sector. The need for a tool to track the areas in the country with critical shortages of public health care professionals and ease manipulation of health practitioner’s data stirred the development of the National Health Practitioner Informatics System (NHPIS). The NHPIS system is a health informatics system that allows ease querying, updating, deleting, inserting of health practitioners’ data. The term current system was used to refer to the existing system.

The primary purpose of this study is to document the problems of the current system, objectives of NHPIS application, the development procedure and steps, and maintenance of the NHPIS system. This documentation is phased in five main chapters, which include Introduction, Planning, Analysis, Design and Implementation Phases. The introduction phase is an introduction of the research study and a historical background of the organization. The planning phase details the scheduling of the study and a feasibility study which was conducted to evaluate viability of the system. From the feasibility study, the project proved to be feasible.

During the analysis phase, the researcher analyzed the weaknesses and strengths of the current or existing system and evaluated whether to develop, improve or outsource the software. The researcher had the relevant skills needed to develop the system. The researcher gathered user requirements using questionnaires, interviews and observations. After analysis phase, the design phase followed, in this phase the researcher designed the database using MySQL Database management system, input forms, menus and output forms using diagrams to illustrate the major functionalities of the NHPIS. Security designs were done at this stage

The last phase was implementation, during this phase the researcher converted the pseudo code into Java source code using Netbeans IDE. The researcher validated, verified and tested the system. The system was deployed using the parallel system conversion method. System maintenance is an ongoing process. Better versions of the NHPIS will be developed continually.