Designing of elements for Digitized Referral Appointment System (DRAS) towards enhancing booking appointments in Tanzania

Abstract

The issue of making an appointment with accessing referral services, you need to have individual relationships to the medical staffs like friendship or relatively. In Tanzania, many years ago, the tradition referral systems did not offer assurance to access specialty hospital services. Numbers of ICT projects have been adopted and put into application but referral area remains forgotten. The challenges to referral services include shortage of human resources, facilities and equipment. Tanzania has several regional hospitals with a few medical doctors who are not specialized in referral services. No way, patient has to travel from one hospital to another seeking for quality healthcare delivery by faith without assurance of being served. Thus, create long waiting time for patients, doctors’ idle time, unnecessary cost to patients and disturbances.

The major purpose of this paper is to design detailed elements of Digitized Referral Appointment System (DRAS) through application of ICT to solve referral challenges by allowing patients to book an appointment to access referral services before travelling. This solution will provide efficient use of few available health resources like medical specialty doctors, time and equipments.

Keywords: Referral services, Patient appointment system/Technology (PAS/T), Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Digitized Referral Appointment System (DRAS) and E-healthcare.