STARTING SITUATION
A major reference hospital in Barcelona needs to incorporate into its databases the complete available stock of pharmaceutical specialities in Spain. Tens of thousands of references, along with their classification and other relevant information for each product.
The information is provided in text files supplied by the health authorities, the structure, logically, does not match with the Hospital’s data model.
Moreover, the Hospital’s pharmacy department wants to create a “subset” of more frequently used pharmaceuticals, known as the “Hospital Pharmacy Guide”. Dicho Healthcare professional would find it easier to search this subset
SUGGESTED SOLUTION
A software program that analyzes the records corresponding to the text files, one by one, in order to check if the specialty is new, has changed its status, or has caused a cancellation. After the process is completed, the information is dumped into a hospital repository with a neutral structure. This database corresponds to the structure of the text file provided.
From there, the different Hospital applications can make their requests, or import the data, so they can be accessed in the different Hospital applications.
In order to allow the Hospital’s pharmacy department to access the information, a WEB front-end is prepared on the Hospital’s intranet. A screen allows to filter the searches, as to whether you want to see all the specialities, or those that have been incorporated as new since the last consignment, or those that are included in the “Hospital Pharmacy Guide”.
On a grid form the manager makes the marks that correspond to the state in which he wants to place the specialty.
DEVELOPMENT
The data is loaded with a program made in VB.NET, which reads the text file sequentially and, on the other hand, writes to a SQL Server database.
OUTCOMES
The Hospital now has centralized, standardized and updated information from the huge pharmaceutical database. The different technological developments that are taking place can use it in a simple way.
Prescription assistance system for automated drug loading