Electronic Patient Record System for psychiatry units

Abstract

Electronic Patient Records can improve the quality of patient care in psychiatry units. Many patients have long term illnesses and have multiple patient encounters with psychiatric services. Although manual data gathering is available at the moment, data retrieval is time consuming and as files have to be manually searched. Storage of past data is hampered by lack of space. We describe the first electronic patient record system developed for use in a psychiatry unit in Sri Lanka. The system facilitates an electronic storage of data and easy retrieval of information. The system identifies a patient by a unique number and allows different episodes of in-patient and outpatient care to be linked together. The systems' value is enhanced by the generation of reports to assist and improve health administration. Clinical care is enhanced by linking different episodes of care of a patient over time. Discharge reports follow up reports of outpatient attendance and reports of analysis of data are generated by the system. The follow up report identifies outpatients who default treatment enabling community follow up. This would help improve compliance and reduce relapses. This is not currently done as it is not feasible to identify all those who default using a manual record keeping system. Analysis of patients based on different criteria such as diagnosis and treatment will assist in identifying trends of illnesses and also provide a database for research. The system is developed using mysql database and is hosted on apache server. As this uses only open source software this can be deployed in both Linux and windows environment allowing easy, and low cost deployment in other such wards. The system is web based and can be connected to a network expanding the access capabilities.