Web-Based Specialty Care Interface Referral Service System for Outpatient-The Development and Implementation

Communication gap and poor coordination of care among primary care, secondary care, tertiary care, and specialty care providers lead to major inefficiencies in healthcare delivery. In resource constrained settings, these inefficiencies exacerbate mismatches between the demand and supply for specialist services. The overall sufferers are the patients. This paper, therefore, intended to address these challenges developed and implemented a workable web-based referral service system that filled this communication gap, and solved the poor coordination existing in the healthcare delivery. This is achieved by designing a workable model of the web-based referral service system and a referral workflow chart. Quantitative data were collected from the department of Health Information Management (HIM) of Federal Teaching Hospital, Ido-Ekiti, Nigeria, and structured interview was also carried out with the staffs of HIM and some of the hospital's specialists. For the implementation, the web applications are deployed on 2.0 GHz Core 2 SQL server with 2GB on 64 bit running Windows 8 OS and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate VB.NET programming language. The major result achieved in this research work is the system's acceptance. This acceptance was due to the perception that the system substantially improved access to specialty care, quality of care, and administrative efficiency in submitting and managing referral requests. However, poor and unavailability of information and communication technology (ICT) equipment and the security issues attached to cyber applications pose significant problems for some clinics.