Analysis of an ICT system for a medical clinic.

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Medical Clinic and Pharmacy System                Joshua Isted 11X        

Description of the Problem

Moss Pharmacy in Caistor manages the medicine for most of the inhabitants of the town. It operates a small shop selling necessities and also runs a prescription service with the medical clinic. Medicine arrives according to demand through large lorries from pharmaceutical companies. It is a vital location in the small town, as Caistor is fairly remote.

Currently it interacts with the local medical clinic, so that it can obtain information about which prescription drugs are needed and who to give them to. At the moment, when the doctor prescribes medication, he gives the patient a handwritten note, or ‘prescription’ with a watermark. The patient (or a carer on behalf of the patient) then hands the note to the pharmacy dispenser, who gives them their medication if it is in stock.

It is surprising, however, how many people there are who will try and take medication that isn’t theirs. Because everyone knows one another in the town, the dispenser must currently use their judgment as to whether or not the person hasn’t simply found the prescription or forged their own. This will inevitably be a problem, as staff are replaced with less experienced dispensers and if people try and claim medication that shouldn’t belong to them. Consequently, the client would like a system implemented in which customer’s identities can be verified to a better standard.

In the past there have been legal problems concerning the giving of medicine to people who have forgotten their prescriptions. Much as alcohol cannot be supplied to people below a certain age, the pharmacy is legally bound to not give prescriptions to patients without the proof of a doctor’s consent. As some patients are known to lose or forget their receipt and can create a dilemma and often means that they have to go without their drugs unless they visit the medical clinic again. For that reason the client would like the system to keep tab of a prescription that can be created by the doctor at the medical clinic and seen by the employees in the pharmacy in case a customer doesn’t have proof on paper.

There are also great precautions that need to be taken with the data-protection act. The doctor’s computer can have any information that it needs about the patient, but they are bound by law not to send this data on to the pharmacy via prescription or otherwise unless it is a desperate emergency. Therefore when the system is automated, it has to make sure that only the allowed fields are printed on a prescription or sent over automatically to be accessed by the pharmacy employees.

If a patient has a prescription for a certain kind of medicine they expect that the pharmacy will have that in stock. However this isn’t always the case and the pharmacy has no way of seeing if there are more prescriptions for certain drugs than there are drugs in stock.  

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As well as the prescription service, there are several aisles of items in the shop for anyone to come in and buy, such as shampoo and aspirin. The amount of stock is currently ordered and filed on pen and paper, with sales records in large cabinets, which are cleared out monthly when it has been a year since the purchases. To know how much is in stock at the moment; somebody working at the chemist must count the stock on the shelves in their head and keep a tally every couple of days. This works sufficiently enough at the moment, ...

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