Automation of a clinic billing system

Abstract

The paper based system of keeping patients’ cards and files makes the process tedious and slow since it involves handling a number of bulky cards. A lot of time is taken to deliver invoices to companies who receive health services from the clinic; this could take a whole month or more after the closure of the financial period. The main objective of the study was to create an automated billing system for a clinic. Currently, the doctor does the billing; from the prescribed drugs and computes the fee that the patient has to pay for the drugs. The system requirements were gathered and determined by interviewing the staff and management of Kololo Polyclinic and X-Ray Service. The requirement specification was done using Data flow diagrams, context diagrams and Entity Relationship diagrams. The automated clinic billing system is built on a C# platform running MSSQL as the Database Management System. The application computes the billing of patient records automatically. The new system is able to generate financial reports for the accountant and general reports about the patient financial records.