I apologize for the lack of posting these past few days, the past week has been pretty hectic. As mentioned before, our internship requires us to partake in 4 projects:
1. Gather feedback regarding the technologies from Rice design teams
2. Look for other problems to become potential design projects
3. Finish any projects the hospital may give us
4. Create our own project
In the past couple of posts I have talked about projects 1 and 2. I promise to write more about these in future posts! These past two weeks have been busy with the last two projects.
Hospital given project: DataPall Renovations
As a reminder, DataPall is a palliative care record keeping database using patients’ diagnoses, symptoms, and prescribed medications to produce reports. Designed by Rice interns two years ago, it has been successful in its long term goal: to be sustainable. It is still up to date with its data entries and has eliminated wasted hours in manual calculations. The palliative care doctors has asked us to eliminate the possibilities of duplicate records, create more readable and useful reports, as well as some other small enhancements to the database. Microsoft Access has been a challenge, but after a lot of research and looking up helpful websites (as well as reading Microsoft Access for Dummies and another Microsoft Access Help Book), I’ve definitely improved my knowledge of the database. To eliminate the duplicate records, Joao has created a searching algorithm that will produce matches once the database recognizes similar parameters between the name, age, and village. We will be adding graphs to the reports as well as organizing the charts to eliminate any confusion when reading them.
Our own project:
After spending a lot of time in the palliative care data records room, one of the doctors approached us with a problem. He is part of the Palliative Care Association in Malawi that meets once a month. Although St. Gabriel’s has DataPall, with one of its features being morphine usage record keeping, most hospitals do not have any electronic record keeping and must resort to the manual system. In their June meeting, it was clear that morphine record keeping needed to be addressed. Morphine usage records are necessary when the country imports morphine for the district hospitals to ensure that hospitals do not receive too little or too much morphine shipments. Most hospitals do this by hand and it can be very cumbersome and inaccurate due to human error as well as having duplicative patients. The doctor asked us to create a database that is similar to DataPall but much simpler and will only measure morphine usage and record morphine shipment records.
To make the morphine database more user friendly, on the home page I added a section where the database would keep updating the amount of morphine stocked up. It updates whenever a patient appointment is added with an output of morphine or when a new shipment gives an input of morphine. Next to do on my list is to add warning messages. Once the morphine stocks come under a certain limit, a warning message will come up to remind the user. Reports on how many patients are currently on morphine, what kind of morphine is being used the most (tablet or liquid, 5 mg vs 10 mg, etc), and other facts need to be readily retrieved. Many updates are coming and we have agreed to start a pilot study at the St. Gabriel’s pharmacy and see the outcome of it.
On another note:
This past weekend we ventured to Zambia for my very first safari! It was everything I expected it to be and more. At Marula Lodge we stayed in furnished tents right next to the Luangwa River. Across the River was the South Luangwa National Park. Elephants and hippos were able to cross the river to our side. We were able to see many hippos and elephants right in our camp!
