Integrating Antenatal and Postnatal Pregnancy Services to Hospital Management System

Abstract

Antenatal and postnatal processes and services is a component of Hospital Management Systems that has been given very little attention. Most healthcare institution carries out the antenatal and postnatal processes manually and keeps records of the whole processes on paper. In most cases in most hospital, records kept on paper and files get missing or misplaced leading to the loss of important records of clients which would have been very helpful for future pregnancies and clinical diagnosis. Report generation and statistical figures are difficult to generate with the manual based system. Data errors, security, and privacy are another problems associated with the manual system. In this paper, the antenatal and postnatal services were incorporated into the Hospital Management System of Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto with a view to reducing the issues and inconsistencies encountered with the manual procedure. Dreamweaver, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, HTML and MySQL are the technological tools used to automate the incorporated antenatal and postnatal services in the system. The usefulness of the proposed system was evaluated using the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire and some clinical users. The experimental evaluation shows that the developed system is beneficial to the clinic and the general public based on the result obtained in this study. The results also demonstrated that the developed system can fit into the antenatal and postnatal routine of many hospitals with little or no modification.