Implementing a Database for Women's Health Clinic

1. THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM IN ROMANIA

Romania has not yet produced a fully articulated, written health policy, although the Governance Program for 2000-2004 included health amongst its objectives. Health system reform has focused mainly on primary care, with little attention paid to hospital care. The government has tried to improve population access to services by offering free access for the poor rural population, young children and students.

Our health care system is one of the worst, Romania being on the second-last place in the European Union, before Bulgaria. These results were stated by the European Community Health Indicators for 2008.

The problems of our system are not related to the doctors’ competences, but mainly on the lack of funds, modern equipment and the poor organization structure of the hospitals and clinics, especially the state ones.

Solving the problems regarding the funds and equipment it’s a difficult task, but we can improve our system by improving the quality of the services provided by implementing in hospitals and clinics databases with detailed information about the patients’ medical history.

The implementation of a database helps doctors supervise better the patient’s general health state.

2. THE ROLE OF A DATABASE IN HOSPITALS AND CLINICS:

1) problem-orientated structuring of the patients’ medical records

The essential function of a electronic medical record is allowing doctors to follow on long term a symptomatic affection of the patient’s, which can progress in recurrent episodes and it can develop under different affections. Almost 90% of the European and American systems are based on this function.

2) Preventing the interaction of different drugs

The doctor is supervising all the patient’s affections and many times they have to prescribe medication over those received previously after specialty consults. Besides, people often buy drugs without a prescription (and Romanians are among first in the top of these usual consumers). Uncontrolled combination of a big amount of medicine can lead to canceling therapeutic effects or, worse, to lethal peril, through side effects. This is why the absolute necessity of including the information into the database.

3) Presenting graphically and simultaneously different laboratory data, the dozing of the medication, the symptom evolution etc.

For the patients with chronic diseases like diabetes, the simultaneous posting of the graphics of blood sugar, anti-diabetes doses, body weight and urinal symptoms it brings a new diagnostical and tracking of the treatment value.

"Database" is a word which is often used and misused by today's direct marketers. There can be many nuances to its interpretation. For the sake of this article, it will be defined in the following way:

A compilation of data about each consumer who has interacted with the products and/or services offered by a company, division or catalog. A database maintains individual data elements which can be brought together in an efficient manner to create useful information.

They can be manipulated in order to meet many needs of an organization, including product fulfillment, customer service, the generation of management reports, quantitative research and the selection of customers for subsequent contact.

Building a customer database requires many skills. However, from a management or marketing perspective, there are four important non-technical skills which you may not hear much about in these days of "database" hype:

1) Communication - All users and other participants must be honest with themselves and each other as to the needs, uses and limitations of such a system. This includes formalized documentation of perceived database needs. Operational people can be particularly helpful in the design stage, because they have to deal with the results of poor data design and retention.

2) Common sense - Know your business. Each issue must be thought through, identifying the options which make the most sense for your business. Database design is rapidly evolving as new solutions are developed.

3) Creativity - Be creative in thinking through the customers’ specific needs.

4) Attention to detail - What appear to be small decisions can lead to inefficiency and high cost if they are not thought out carefully. No matter how advanced the technical aspects of the database, they will be worthless if they result in a clever solution to the wrong problem.

It is also important to understand the criteria by which the selection of data worth keeping should be made.