Background

The accounting software in development is designed to address the accounting needs of Ramakrishna Mission Sevashrama Hospital (RKMS), Thiruvananthapuram. The hospital has two major departments IPD and OPD. Our application handles both OPD and IPD Departments.

The hospital came to provide the following facilities:

• OP Section with both morning and evening sessions,
• Inpatients’ wards with 200 beds (116 free and 84 paying),
• Maternity and Child Welfare (20 maternity beds),
• Psychiatry Ward with arrangement for shock therapy,
• A well-equipped Operation Theatre,
• Weekly or bi-weekly Clinics in ENT, Dentistry, and Orthopaedics
• Eye clinic,
• A well-equipped clinical laboratory,
• X-Ray,
• Cardiography and
• Diathermy

The Ashrama also runs a nursing school with an intake of 25 students every year.

Time line

Approach

We use Oracle Application Express 4.0.2 (APEX) in development process to actualize better  requirement  understanding, fast delivery and cater to the changing requirements. Oracle    Database 11g Express Edition has been used as the development framework.

Project Scope

• Develope accounting software which will automate the billing process at the OPD, IPD, Physiotherapy and collection counters. This will in turn help in partially automating the budgeting and auditing processes.
• Incorporate easy transitioning between manual and automated handling of patient services accounting.
• System can easily provide the detailed report of all the expenses of services in case of  medical insurance which covers full payments and partial payments depends upon on the insurer, the plan which patient obtain. The more comprehensive the cover is, more expensive will be the policy.
• Provide role-based access control to staff in-charge.
• Handle different kind of discounts and merging of discount in the account of services.
• Bill generation according to the payment capability of patient at a time.
•  Record keeping and easy Search options.
• Providing options of reports for Daily collections.
• Work with imprecise information recorded during patient visits to generate meaningful aggregate statistics regarding discounts offered and services provided. The last aspect could greatly help RKMSH in adopting a more pro-active role in improving services to better serve the needs of  patients and the community.

Key Challenges:

• It should be least disruptive to the current running of hospital as there is shortage of staff.
• Should be able to fallback to manual system in case of system failures and synchronizationize the data at a later time.