Free Essay on Intensive Care Unit Monitoring System

ICU computer system for inpatient and outpatient

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is a particular department in the hospital or a healthcare facility that is specifically set aside to provide utmost care to the critically ill patients who need intensive treatment and attention from the doctors and the nurses. The Intensive Care department is usually staffed with highly trained personnel specialized in caring for the critically ill patients. The critical environment around the Intensive Care Unit requires efficient and well-maintained software for running the highly sensitive equipment used for supporting the lives of the patients in the ICU. The software employed in the Intensive Care Units are always very complex with multiple functionalities and bug-free.

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The software has been proven very effective in monitoring and supporting the lives of the patients as compared to the doctors and nurses. Automation of the processes in the Intensive Care Units is essential to help improve the quality of care offered to the patients. Several routine applications within the Intensive care Unit and other departments in the hospital require support from reliable software systems that will ensure the safety of both in and outpatients (Glandon, Smaltz, & Slovensky, 2014). System applications like Order Entry Capture, Radiology, Pharmacy, Documentation of nursing and ICU monitoring are used in supporting sound decisions made within the facility.

ICU System

Designing such critical systems involves conceptualizing, drawing the systems framework, implementing the framework, commission the development, and modifying the systems, as it is being developed to accommodate the changes that may arise in the process (Zhu, 2005). The software design activity comes after the specification of the requirements stage and before the actual coding of the system application. The software design process incorporates the user experience design and user interface design that defines how the users interact with the systems (Zhu, 2005). A good design must comprise of storyboards that determine the specifications of the software. Most of the Hospital software, however, are fully automated thus lack the user interfaces. In such cases, a flow chart is needed to help plan the sequence of events. Other standards like Unified Modeling Language and Fundamental Modelling concepts may be employed. Every step in the design process must be documented to allow easy integration of any changes that may arise (Zhu, 2005). The critical hospital software requires a critically depended and very accurate system. The foundation of the efficient healthcare system is accuracy, speed, and availability of the individual patient information at any given time. The given hospital software is going to be designed to adapt to any specialty that may arise.

The ICU Hospital System for inpatients and outpatients is going to be a self-contained system that manages the activities of the hospital and data of the in and out patients of the facility. The requirements of the system will include both functional and non-functional requirements (Zhu, 2005). The functionalities will include the registration of the patients, both in and outpatients, patients check out, and report generation on the patients’ medical history and bills (Glandon, Smaltz, & Slovensky, 2014). With such complex functionalities, the system will require a MySQL database integration for storing the patients’ information. The functional requirements will include registration, check out, and report generation while the non-functional requirements will include security that entails privacy of the patient's medical history, performance requirements, maintainability, and reliability of the hospital system.

Reference

Glandon, G. L., Smaltz, D. H., & Slovensky, D. J. (2014). Information systems for health care management. Chicago, IL: Health Administration Press.

Zhu, H. (2005). Software design methodology. Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann.