CHAPTER ONE

1.1     INTRODUCTION

Hospital is health care institution or a place where people who are sick injured and wounded are given medical treatment, surgical care and cure, while billing is a process of showing an invoice on how much one owes or has to pay for service rendered. In summary hospital billing is amount of money to be paid or charges given to a patient for treatment care, cure of illness and other services render by the doctor. Hospitals are responsible for the supply of drugs to patients at specific drug rate, but their billing has been manually processed. The aim of this project work is to design and implement hospital billing system. Before now there have been numerous problems faced by the hospital in operating the manual system of billing which is not very efficient, a lot of paper work has been done, receipt, irrespective of the number of patients take long period of time to prepare, due to the voluminous numbers of drugs used. Records of patients serve as information for preparing management decision are very difficult to locate manually, because of these problems errors arising from such system become very noticeable.

The hospital billing software is to hold information on patients bills in different departments in the hospital. The development of the system is to ensure that the number of patients being attended to on daily basis is known or track down and also at same time accounting for bills of the patients. It helps the hospital to know with ease how much they realize. This information can be used by a hospital to determine and calculate the average number of patient that is treated in the hospital in a week, month or year. The total cash the hospital can make and expenditure in a particular period of time can be determined using the figures.

1.2     STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Over the year, the problems existing with the current manual processing information in the hospital are:

1. Files and records are not properly kept due to the use of paper to keep records.
2. Inability to search for a particular record when the need arises.
3. Slow processing of information.
4. Errors are easily made and hardly detected.
5. The manual system does not ensure durability of record storing.
6. Information is not well maintained.
7. Time consumption due to the use of calculator, pen and paper to compute the patients’ bills.

• AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The purpose of this study is to design and implement hospital billing system that will ensure efficient record process in the establishment such as:

1. To design a computerized system for managing hospital billing.
2. To design a system that will accurately compute total bill of patients.
3. To create a system that will be used to obtain reports of billing records of patients.
4. To implement a system that can be used to update billing information of patients.

1.4     SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The work will be beneficial to both the management and staffs within the establishment to create awareness of billing system using the software for the calculation of bills in the hospital, it will enable the management to know the total number of patients and the payment made by patient as the software will keep tracks of all the patients transactions with the hospital. It will ensure that patients are attended on time and a how a patient can get registered first, before the proper bill process.

1.5     SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The scope of this project work covers design and implementation of a computerized hospital billing system, it provide a program that will effectively handle the operations of the hospital billing system. A program that will be interactive whereby they must be an operator (staff) to supply patients billing data into the computer system.

• ORGANIZATION OF THE RESEARCH

This research work is organized into five chapters. Chapter one is concerned with the introduction of the research study and it presents the preliminaries, theoretical background, statement of the problem, aim and objectives of the study, significance of the study, scope of the study, organization of the research and definition of terms.

Chapter two focuses on the literature review, the contributions of other scholars on the subject matter is discussed.

Chapter three is concerned with the system analysis and design. It presents the research methodology used in the development of the system, it analyzes the present system to identify the problems and provides information on the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed system. The system design is also presented in this chapter.

Chapter four presents the system implementation and documentation, the choice of programming language, analysis of modules, choice of programming language and system requirements for implementation.

Chapter five focuses on the summary, constraints of the study, conclusion and recommendations are provided in this chapter based on the study carried out.

1.7     DEFINITION OF TERMS

HOSPITAL: Is health care institution or a place where people who are sick, injured are given medical treatment and care.

BILLING: Is a process of showing an invoice how much one owes or has to pay for services rendered.

PATIENT: Is a person who receive or in need of treatment from a doctor in a hospital.

SYMPTOMS: A change in body or mind that shows that one is not healthy.

PHYSICIAN:  This is a qualified medical doctor who practices medical service.

OUT-PATIENT: Is a patient who is not hospital for 24 hours but visited hospital clinic for treatment.

IN-PATIENT: Is a patient admitted to the hospital and stay over night usually several days, weeks or months.