Instant Hospital payment system is a project that is intended to improve payment systems employed in hospitals, by introduction of sophisticated technological means to speed up health care services and improve the patients experience with the services they are provided with.
Our team's initiative, the Instant Hospital Payment System, was conceived with the aim of revolutionizing the current payment model in Rwandan Hospitals. The existing systems often entail queuing, causing delays in healthcare services and hospital check-outs. Inspired by a commitment to improving patient convenience, aligning with global digital transformation trends, and leveraging technological advancements, our solution eliminates the need for queues.
By employing a system that enables patients to pay bills directly through their phones, we address the inefficiencies associated with intermediate parties. The integration of this innovative system not only streamlines the payment process but also anticipates a significant enhancement in overall health services. The focus on patient satisfaction is a key driver, ensuring that individuals experience a more efficient and modernized approach to healthcare transactions in Rwandan hospitals.
Our team developed a demo that will consist of a web app that is going to have different pages including a patient’s personal identification and password, current pending bills with a checkout option where a patient will enter the payment method that is going to be used to process the payment. After reviewing the medical bill given to the patient, He will enter the payment method he is willing to use (Either MoMo or Airtel Money) and proceed to following the instructions that are going to be provided through a USSD pop up until he finalizes the payment.
Since Hospitals are already using software programs to support the delivery of health care services such as OpenMRS and OpenClinic that keep track of procedures that a patient went through from arrival to checkout, we plan to integrate the hospitals’ databases with our system that when the time to process the payment comes, a patient could simply review his bill and proceed to paying. In our demo we are using dummy data for a purpose of demonstrating a sample of what a provided bill would look like. Methodology • Technology Stack • We are building a nodeJs express server web application that has endpoints to allow the user register his or her identifications • The frontend part of the application is developed using HTML/CSS to build a user-friendly interface with the representation of the core parts of the project. • Application calls different Application Program Interfaces hosted on the local server that are needed. • All data fetched from the users are stored in MONGODB hosted remotely. • Architecture • the system architecture is built in such way that a doctor register a patient with identification and national identification number • After the patient is registered , the patient Id is used to track the patient information and payment status . • On successful payment, a patient is saved in data and the doctor can track the paid receipt.
Challenges Faced
• Limited time frame: • Integrating with hospital software requires navigating through bureaucratic processes and obtaining approvals. • Resource Constraint: • Lack of access to certain resources, such as USSD API, for demonstrating the complete flow of the idea.
• Feedbacks:
Incorporating user feedback into future iterations of the system to address any issues or enhance features based on user experience. We learned this through sharing our idea with mentors that were assigned to us. • Long-Term Vision: Emphasizing the commitment to ongoing collaboration with healthcare providers, insurance companies, and other stakeholders for continuous improvement. • Teamwork and Coordination: Highlighting the importance of effective teamwork and coordination within the project, fostering a collaborative environment for optimal performance and results. • Networking: Recognizing the significance of building and maintaining connections with relevant professionals, organizations, and stakeholders to leverage opportunities, share insights, and stay informed about industry trends.
• Opted to using dummy data to demonstrate the payment procedure since hospitals’ software already has a built database.
• Develop a streamlined approach to navigate through authorities efficiently, possibly through collaboration with relevant stakeholders.
Future improvements
• Project expansion: Although we mainly focused on payment systems in this project, the issue of long queues exists in other various services such as checking in where registration and insurance verification procedures take place. With an establishment of the collaboration with insurance companies, we are confident that the check in process would be faster where by simply login you could identify the whether the insurance is still valid or has expired and get a better clarity regarding the cost covered by insurance. On the insurance companies’ side, the insurance frauds committed will significantly decrease. Notifications regarding the delivery of services in terms of queues would significantly improve where the application of first come first serve would improve services from triage, to medical consultations and examinations among many more others. By employing the physical queues abolishing systems, every single department would improve the quality of services delivered to patients.
• Enhancements: In the future we plan to introduce several other features such as chatrooms to improve the communication between hospital customer care service providers and patients, digital wallet, communication page.
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