ADVCOMP 2018 : The Twelfth International Conference on Advanced Engineering Computing and Applications in Sciences

CLINIC: A Web Healthcare Management System for Enhancing Clinical Services

Ahmad R. Qawasmeh, Dema Awni, Raghad Mohammed, Rufaida Sabri, Ghydaa Ahmad

Department of Computer Science

The Hashemite University
Zarqa, Jordan
Email: ahmadr@hu.edu.jo, Owais.dema96@gmail.com, raghad-aboawais@bayt.net,
rufaida.sabri@yahoo.com, ghydaaah22@yahoo.com

Abstract—Clinic systems have become widely used nowadays by it comes to clinic systems where management is the main
everyone involved in the medical field. These systems can be concern.
either desktop applications, Web applications, or even mobile
applications. However, most of the currently available systems
In this work, we propose an open-source Web healthcare
are either limited to one clinic, hospital or organization, restricted application (CLINIC) that provides various features and ser-
in terms of usability, hard to maintain and modify, or lacking vices commonly used and required in clinic systems. The
important communication features. In this work, we propose an application offers a suitable environment for users (clinicians,
open-source medical Web application called CLINIC targeting nurses, patients, and administrators), who are involved in the
patients and clinicians worldwide. CLINIC allows clinicians to healthcare process. Our application provides an interactive way
register upon identity verification. It enhances patient-clinician for communication between clinicians, nurses and patients,
communication and provides new useful services that include, while maintaining high standards of security and functionality.
but are not limited to secure registration by patients and CLINIC offers a variety of services to any clinician who needs
doctors, secure storage of patients’ records, instant chatting for a reliable management system to his/her clinic.
consultation, helpful medical articles and first aid tips, and user-
friendly interface. CLINIC has good potential to become widely The main motivation of this work lies in the following
used because of its new features, services, and ambitions. points:
Keywords–Clinic system; Performance analysis and improve- • Clinicians need to have an interactive system that
ment; Patients monitoring; Healthcare management system. allows them to manage and access the records of their
patients conveniently regardless of location or any
I. I NTRODUCTION other constraints especially in the case of emergency.
Clinic systems have been growing rapidly in the last few • Patients need a user-friendly system that allows them
decades to provide better healthcare for patients via reliable to check the status of their cases, schedule a new
computer-based applications. Clinic systems are responsible appointment, get information about clinicians, and
for the management of a healthcare facility while meeting the check the orders of their pharmacy medications and
high standards of security, functionality and technology that labs while saving cost, time and effort.
must be associated with patients’ medical records. • Requesting a consultancy through common websites
According to [1], a healthcare system contains four nested may take so long. This makes online chatting very
levels: (1) the patient; (2) the care team (e.g., physicians, useful and even necessary in urgent cases.
pharmacists, family members, etc); (3) the organization (e.g., • Maintenance, usability, security, cost and performance
clinic, hospital, etc.); and (4) the political and economic are critical factors that must be handled efficiently by
environment (e.g., regulations, financial payment methods). any clinic system.
Any computerized healthcare system should adapt to the
aforementioned levels in one way or another. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the
related work. Section 3 describes the methodology, implemen-
Due to the massive growth of modern computer-based tation, and Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the proposed
methods, it has become much easier to simplify the difficulty of system. Finally, Section 4 concludes our contributions and
maintaining patients’ manual records by computerizing them. mentions directions for the future work.
This computerization process has many advantages that include
efficient patient data retrieval and sharing, secure data protec- II. R ELATED W ORK
tion, confidential accessing, better clinic productivity, and low
management costs while reducing human errors. While a clinic Different desktop, Web and mobile applications have been
system can be developed as a desktop application or mobile developed to facilitate the process of healthcare all around the
application, Web applications can provide better features with world. These applications vary in terms of efficiency, usability,
more convenient access. In terms of desktop applications, reliability, and security. In this section, we tried to cover the
they have to be installed separately on each computer while most recent and relevant clinic systems.
also having a usability constraint depending on the physical Hakeem [2] is a program that was developed to automate
location where they are installed. On the other hand, mobile the public healthcare sector in Jordan. Hakeem aims to provide
applications overcome the aforementioned desktop constraints, high-quality healthcare in Jordan via the implementation of an
but convenient usability remains a big issue especially when Electronic Health Record (EHR) solution. Hakeem provides

Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-61208-677-4 28

ADVCOMP 2018 : The Twelfth International Conference on Advanced Engineering Computing and Applications in Sciences

Figure 1. Main components of CLINIC

online access to medical history examinations, lab results, Doximity [13] is the largest medical professional network in
clinic visit notes, etc. Clinicians can electronically access the U.S used for communication, reading medical news, and
medical records of patients by simply entering the patients career management. Medscape [14] is another app that can be
national ID number. While Hakeem facilitates the process used to look up medications and drugs, check medical news,
of healthcare, it lacks patients’ involvement and access to and more. As can be figured out, mobile apps are not designed
their records. Altibbi [3] is a website that focuses on medical for clinic systems. However, they are beneficial in terms of
consultancy. This website has more than 10000 registered measurements and medical news.
clinicians, who respond to patients queries in short time. It also There are other applications that have been developed and
shows recent medical articles and news. However, consultancy used in the context of clinic systems. However, we tried to
is not for free. OpenClinic GA [4] is an open-source Hospital focus on the most recent and relevant ones.
management Information System (HIS) that has been used
in more than 500 hospitals and clinics in many countries. III. M ETHODOLOGY AND I MPLEMENTATION
OpenClinic provides many healthcare modules that include
patient administration, financial management, medical records As design is so important in any Web application, we
and imaging, among others. E-HAS [5] is an online-offline HIS tried to develop an attractive graphical interface that provides
for Healthcare organizations. It provides various paid features convenient way of interaction for clinicians/patients. In other
and modules. Medical Digital-Ray (MDR) free system [6] is a words, user can easily register in our application and choose
healthcare system created to enhance the efficiency of medical the required action depending on his/her permissions. Our
and administrative processes of small hospitals and clinics. system responds by displaying the wanted information in a
user-friendly manner. Figure 1 shows the main components of
AMD [7] is an eye-specialized program that offers sim- our proposed system.
ulation of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), which
captures both the detailed operation of an eye clinic and the In our application, we used Hyper Text Markup Language
broader social care of AMD sufferers. (HTML), Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) and Java-script to design
the front-end environment, while using Personal Home Page
There are other light-weight systems [8]–[11] that can be (PHP) for implementing the back-end functions and methods.
used to maintain the records of patients in small clinics. We also used MySQL to create our database, which consists
In contrast with the aforementioned apps, our application of 13 tables while taking into account the cardinality and
is a free-access system that allows patients to get involved relationships among them.
in the healthcare process, while offering various beneficial
management, administrative and communication features. A. User Interface
In terms of mobile applications, there are many apps, which The home page of our application, shown in Figure 2,
can be installed on both IOS and Android systems. Epocrates contains four tabs reachable easily by the user. By clicking on
[12] is being used by doctors to search for drug info, find other the “Doctors” tab, all registered clinicians will be displayed.
providers for consults and calculate beneficial measurements. By clicking on the “Join us” tab, Figure 3 will be displayed.

Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-61208-677-4 29

ADVCOMP 2018 : The Twelfth International Conference on Advanced Engineering Computing and Applications in Sciences

This figure contains two clickable images; one for clinicians password and captcha letters and click on the Signup button.
and the other for patients. Once the clinician clicks on his A request will be sent to the admin page shown in Figure
image, he will be transferred to the page shown in Figure 4. 5. The admin must verify the identity of the clinician by
contacting the doctor’s syndicate. Once the verification process
is done, the admin allows the clinician to use the application
with all its features. The front-desk staff of any clinician can
help any patient to register in the application via his/her SSN.
Once the patient registers, his credentials will be saved in the
system to be used for any future visits. The last tab in the
home page is “Careers”, where any clinician can attach his
information and resume without the need for registration for
future consideration. The career page is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 2. Home page

Figure 5. Admin main page

Figure 3. Join us page

Figure 6. Career request page

The clinician page, shown in Figure 7, has different activ-

ities. The clinician can add a medical record to any patient
upon treatment completion, as shown in Figure 8. The Orders
textbox can be one or more of pharmacy medications, labs
(e.g., Complete Blood Count CBS, Blood group, Kidney Func-
tion Test, etc), radiology (e.g., X-Ray or Ultrasound), and/or
Nursing (e.g., injections, nebulizer, wound change, etc). The
clinician can also add an article, view his/her patient(s) medical
Figure 4. Signup page with captcha history as shown in Figure 7, and check any online consultation
requested from him. A clinician can display his/her patients
The clinician needs then to enter his doctor’s syndicate ID, records only. The clinician can view either all his/her patients’

Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-61208-677-4 30

ADVCOMP 2018 : The Twelfth International Conference on Advanced Engineering Computing and Applications in Sciences

Figure 7. Clinician main page Figure 9. Patient main page

Figure 10. Medical articles page

Figure 8. Add patient’s record page

records, a specific patient’s record based on a specific SSN, or

patients’ records in a specific date.
Patient’s page is shown in Figure 9. Patient can check
his/her medical history by entering SSN. Each visit to any
clinician registered in CLINIC will be displayed with all the
details including date, orders, clinician name and address,
disease, and any comments from the corresponding clinician.
Patient can also check some updated medical articles, as shown
in Figure 10, and view some useful first aid tips. Last but not
least, patient can request an online chatting consultation, as
shown in Figure 11. This online chatting is based on instant
messages sent from patients to available clinicians and vice
versa.
New healthcare features and activities can easily be added
to our application. The appointment scheduling module should
be added soon to make the application even more powerful and
reliable.
Figure 11. Request consultation page
IV. C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE W ORK
In this paper, we proposed a Web-based application called
CLINIC. CLINIC was designed as an open-source clinic

Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-61208-677-4 31

ADVCOMP 2018 : The Twelfth International Conference on Advanced Engineering Computing and Applications in Sciences

system that can be used by patients/clinicians to facilitate

the process of healthcare management and administration.
CLINIC provides a free-access interactive environment and
meets the high-quality requirements of security, technology
and functionality. CLINIC comprises different modules that
cover many useful features and activities for both clinicians
and patients. CLINIC allows clinicians to manage and access
the records of their patients conveniently. It also authorizes
patients to check the status of their cases, get information about
clinicians, request online instant consultation, and check the
orders of their pharmacy medications and labs while saving
cost, time and effort. Last but not least, CLINIC demonstrated
promising results and hence it has the capability to be used on
a larger scale.
Path forward, we plan to integrate more modules such
as appointment scheduling into CLINIC. We also think that
making this app available on mobile phones should positively
affect its popularity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Hashemite University
for providing the required resources.

V. R EFERENCES
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Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-61208-677-4 32