Designing of Information System Framework (ISF) for Digitized Referral Appointment System (DRAS): Case study of Tanzania

Abstract

The issue of making an appointment to access referral services in Tanzania, you need to have individual relationships to medical staffs as friendship or relatively. In many years ago, existing referral systems did not offer assurance to get specialty hospital services. The number of ICT projects has been adopted and put into applications but referral services remains forgotten. The problems of referral services in Tanzania include shortage of human resources, facilities, equipments, records keeping systems and referral appointment system. Basically, patients have to travel at one hospital to another seeking quality healthcare delivery on faith with 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 Information system framework through application of ICT to solve referral challenges. This solution will provide efficient use of few available health resources like medical specialty doctors, time and equipments. The proposed system designing will allow patient to book an appointment before travelling. Hence; this will provide medical staff awareness, reduction of waiting time, minimizing Doctors’ idle time and unnecessary costs to patients.

Keywords: Referral services, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Information system framework (ISF), Digitized Referral Appointment System (DRAS)