Design of an Integrated Computerized Pharmacy Inventory Monitoring System (ICPIMS): A Case of University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH)
I. Ele Sylvester *
Department of Computer Science, University of Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.
W. A. Adesola
Department of Computer Science, Cross River University of Technology, Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.
A. O. Ofem
Department of Computer Science, University of Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.
P. A. Ackley
Department of Nursing Science, University of Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The healthcare sector today are looking for opportunities to improve their daily operations efficiencies, increase pharmacist and pharmacy technician efficiency and improves patient care by promoting medication dispensing accuracy and allowing pharmacists to spend more time on patient care activities. The aim of this work is to design and model an Integrative computerized pharmacy inventory system that would have the capability to improve patient care by promoting medication dispensing accuracy and also allow pharmacists to spend more time on patient care activities, using University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH) pharmacy as a case study. The specific objective of the system is to provide better security by more securely controlling access to medications in the pharmacy, Saves space – reduces pharmacy storage footprint, aids in Joint Commission compliance by providing complete audit trail of all transactions. In this paper we adopted the structured system analysis and design methodology (SSADM). UML (Unified Modeling Language) is used for the model design. The interface between the front-end and the back-end is through SQL (in WAMPSERVER) and through an application program interface (API) defined in PHP. PHP is used as back-end for managing access structures, query evaluation and optimization, concurrency control and recovery. NetBeans IDE was used as front-end to develop forms, report-trail, and graphical user interface.
Keywords: Pharmacy, inventory, drug