Project+Overview

=Project Overview: =

The background of Health Central rests on the fact that no current system of this kind exists in Ontario. However, a similar system exists in the UK. We do not feel competitive with this product because of large differences between the UK and Ontario health care systems.

Currently in the Ontario Health care Industry the Chief Medical Officer of Health’s Report to the Ontario Legislatures reported these key improvements: • Improvements to the province’s capacity to deal with infectious and communicable diseases • The creation of the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion • Investments in the renewal of the Ontario Public Health Laboratories • Improvements to health emergency preparedness and response through the creation of the Emergency Management Unit in the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care

Interestingly, these improvements did not include, shortening patient wait times, creating a system to locate regional doctors and specialists, and create an efficient system to manage appointments.

The biggest challenge we faced was creating a user interface as accessible and user friendly as possible. We made special considerations to accommodate special needs software, for example, screen readers for the blind, or visually impaired. Another challenge was how to integrate the medical databases in the safest way possible to protect user information. We solved this by creating a user name and password unique to each user, their health card number as user name, and last four digits of the home phone number as the password.

The Ontario College of Health and Technology currently uses [|www.Bookingcalendar.com] to create and maintain their even appointments. [|www.Bookingcalendar.com] is a basic event planning resource. The Ontario Ministry of Transportation uses a customized booking system that offers the next available time only to users booking driving tests. The user chooses the month, week, and day, and the software responds by offering only available times to be chosen and booked. Unavailable times are not visible to the user.

The only research found on the Ontario Health care system was a study called Using Financial Modeling for Integrated Health care Databases. But the study focused on a way "…to develop financial models that will assign each clinical case in the patient-specific data warehouse a dollar value, representing the cost incurred by the Ontario health care facility which treated the patient." So it was considered irrelevant to our project.