Using Observer Design Pattern In Hospital Management System: Good Fit Or Bad Fit Essay.

Description:

Your paper can be either an investigation or a survey. If an investigation, your paper should present an interesting problem or technique relating to object orientation. It should state the problem, provide background and motivation, and describe novel approaches.

Topic: Use of Observer Design Pattern in Hospital Management System: Good Fit or Bad Fit

The purpose of this study is to utilize knowledge of design patterns with comparing and contrasting design pattern appropriateness for supporting different situations such as practical object-oriented systems. In order to conduct the study, the researcher needs to select a practical object-oriented system such as attendance management system, hospital management system, library management system, and others (Mezghani, Exposito & Drira, 2017). Based on study requirements, the researcher has chosen hospital management system; and the hospital management system is considered in this study as combination of several sub-systems. The aim of the study is to utilize design patterns into these sub-systems to show whether the sub-system design can be supported with certain design patterns such as observer, mediator, singleton, façade, flyweight or others.

Design and software development pattern is identified as attempts to describing appropriate and successful solution to common software problems. Software patterns are useful for reflecting common conceptual issues and structures into resolving them in form of providing practical solutions (Zhao & Pauls, 2016). Moreover, the design patterns are likely for applying them in practical exemplar for more than once to analyze, designing, producing applications over particular context. Software patterns consider useful theoretical models for applying their designing rationale, related assumptions and utilization of the models. The models can facilitate the reusing and sharing the model and design knowledge to enable software engineers for adopting the model to fitting into a specific problem. It is essential for understanding that developers cannot invent new patterns based on problem characteristics and nature (Schulz, Kawamura & Geithner, 2017). The designers and developers can discover use of patterns from their corresponding experience in the field. They can describe and document about the pattern usage for a particular problem; based on their discovery, they can state explicitly about the general problem that can be understood on which the pattern is useful.

Before computerized or online service based hospital management system came into use, the situation was quite difficult for keeping records and storing data in information management system. The scenario was quite hectic for limited number of staffs to conduct multiple duties and activities such as mandating patient information, preparing maintenance schedule, preparing inventory management for equipments, funds for application, and use. These operations are resulted into wastage of operational time, money, and workforce. Hospital Management System is identified as information management system that is designed for helping with managing several aspects of hospital such as administrative, clinical, and financial operations. The operational activities are for monitoring and controlling for hospital’s daily transactions and managing hospital performance.

Design patterns are useful for managing and addressing several critical requirements for hospital management systems. The hospital management system can enable access for particular information at right time for using right information and automation complex task. The hospital management system can allow staffs for spending more operational time so that patients can be treated properly. Hospital management system is considered to be custom-built; however, the specific requirements of hospital management system can be met with medium and larger sized hospital in worldwide. Current management system in hospital faces of increases chances of facing several issues under processing hospital management system as some of the operations are still under manual aspects. In some other cases, the other hospital management system uses computerized method for resolving challenges in operational activities so that manual process issue can be reduced. Such problems are identified as:

1. Difficulty in managing high cost for software development, improvement, and deployment
2. Risks in conducting migration to autonomous system from manually operated systems as both staffs and patients are accustomed with manual process as per manual documentation.
3. Processes that are under manual processing can be tricky to cope with speedily improved and autonomous operational activities. Lack of IT professionals and medical staffs are likely to represent identified challenges.
4. There can be bigger influx of patients for visiting government hospitals for making the process of migration to be automated.
5. New operational system is quite difficult for operations; these processes do not have patients for waiting for registration and data entry operations. The patients and staffs already expect the entire system to automatically recognize them. This tendency for staffs and patients comes due to their individual difficulty of operating the management system form their end.

Problem Scenario

Based on above identified problems in hospital management system, there is certain requirement for improving existing operations in hospital management systems. Moreover, the manual operations in hospital management system are likely to migrate to new and automated operational processes. The newly implemented sub-systems in hospital management system are likely to help and customize clinical and patient data. The operational activities in hospital management system will be able to eatable to provide faster diagnosis along with ready-made templates for allowing doctors for following advanced medical prescription process, report generation process, and others.     

Management process can be defined as major processes including social and technical functions, activities, and occurring processes under organizations so that purpose of accomplishing predetermined objectives through human and resources can be made. The Healthcare Sector service quality and patient safety should be considered as two major part of common way to all primary and secondary healthcare service providers. For all hospitals, over several years; multiple types of theoretical models and schemes for hospital management system was used for interventions and development operations; these models and schemes are deployed over several years as well.

Hospital management system is likely for providing major benefits to all streamlined processes and increasing administration, controlling, and superior patient care. The Hospital management system will be able to provide strict and streamlined cost controlling along with improvement in profitability. For automated hospital management systems, there may be several modules for implementation and operations. The modules can be considered as patient care management, patient services management, doctor appointment scheduling, medicine store management and pharmacy clinic management. However, for this particular report, Hospital management system is considered to contain major sub-systems as ‘patient registration subsystem’, ‘doctor appointment managing subsystem’, ‘patient feedback-report generation subsystem’, and ‘billing subsystem’. In the background section, these subsystems are to be discussed considering sample UML diagram, sequence diagrams, data-flow diagram and other visual representation process. In-depth discussion and practical interpretation should be provided showing the entities such as doctor, patient, billing staff, receptionist, on-call staffs, and others. Furthermore, literature review section will be included to consider related studies that have contributed significant level of findings about the agenda.

Motivation in this study came into practice for using medical information as important to improve hospital management system for care capability. The new system should be able to improve management for decision-making at level of health and hospital operational efficiency. Currently, comprehensive Hospital Information Management System for management platform can be developed. The electrical record maintenance and digital information management made hospital management system to be more accurate and effective for instant access to information and operational activities. Establishment and use of the Hospital Management System information can play as important role to improving efficiency. The automated Hospital Management System can improve patient satisfaction, increasing hospital efficiency, and healthcare quality along with protecting safety of data and reducing healthcare costs. Computerized Hospital Management System is emerging as potential tool for healthcare operations to enable deliver high-quality health services.

The automated systems are essential for managing large computerized data along with intended priority to communicate and store health and administrative information. HMS is considered to be with different other components with including broader scope and level of system operations from different departments. The system is limited with specific clinical and financial domain based operations for knowledge based systems to provide disease diagnosis as a support to patients, and appropriate interventions for care activities to be provided. The implementation of HMS is important as it should consider certain organizational process for information technology between the user and patient community. Patient care groups and patient community in health care areas should consider several user groups on different expertise and user groups such as administrators, physicians, managers, researchers, nurses, and others.

Problem Description

Neglecting any of the parties who are directly or indirectly involved with missing relevant information, experience, skills, knowledge, expertise requirements and expectations. Expectations and requirement that arise from what users and patients can see and hear from the system and interpret for manners in which the system can work according to their expectations. van Aken, Chandrasekaran and Halman (2016) claimed to state some findings so that adhering user and patient requirement can be considered to be distinct element for ensuring successful adoption of HMS operations. Moreover, the healthcare organizations can utilize different user groups so that the opportunities for direct and no-direct care operations. Hall et al. (2016) direct care settings and other organizations can provide over care directly to patient, client or resident for seeking services directly from the healthcare organization. The non-direct care setting so that individuals can be made available to proper and daily care in medical operations. Hospitals can be considered as organizations in which innovative technology can be used. Moreover, the sophisticated care system should be developed for patients in order to avail suitable and timely care offering.  

Adopted research methodology in this research is to perform secondary study over application of design patterns in practical examples of object-oriented systems. Moreover, these findings will be used for showing practical implication in form of use case diagram, sequence diagram, UML diagrams, or sample codes. Saxena and Banodha (2017) stated that from the very beginning of software development and engineering operations; the software developers should adhere to specific points in which the software should be developed in order to provide solution to provided domain.

The software developers should have appropriate and clear understanding about problem and specifications; so that the solution can be built with meeting the needs and expectations of the users and patients. The system should be deployed and released for creating pilot project along with studying the user requirements. Moreover, the effort should be developed for engineers for maintaining system to evolve with changing user requirements. in case, the original design is not met according to user or patient requirements, the system can easily be affected from patient and operational end. The software engineers need to follow basic solution to maintain system to be consistent and aligned with currently developed original design of the system. In case, the original design is not accommodating the existing change in design or developed process diagram; the effort for development increases as new requirements into the system should be incorporated with the system inevitable with design intent. Accordingly, the development process becomes difficult for the software designers to adhere to take responsibility of individual module design.

Previously designed and developed software modules become useless and this situation leads to lower cohesion and higher degree of coupling. Design patterns exist as major way to capture proper practice for passing timely solutions for common recurrence of software development. Several design patterns are published where the design patterns can be different from each other based on intention of their successful interaction for design preparation. The solution can be incorporated in establishment of the structure of the solution so that responsibilities of the individual classes and objects so that the pattern can be followed. Primary point can be considered for patterns so that identification and isolation of system-level variability can be evolved in recent time without influencing the basic design structure. The fundamental goal that leads towards three basic strategies should be devised for preparing better object-oriented design:

1. To perform the design towards an interface
2. To provide favor for inheritance
3. To identify and encapsulate system variability

Background and Motivation

The basic strategies can be incorporated for defining new system along with preparing proper design patterns and accounting overall effectiveness. For illustrating the basic idea of designing along with pattern devising, it can be pointed out that some of the strategies can be useful and this report is helpful for showing how observer design pattern can be a good fit for preparing Hospital Management System.

Patterns in designing software system can formalize reusability for making the system at the level of conceptual state. The experienced designers should incorporate recurring class hierarchies so that sequences can be accessed and putting them together so that the patterns can be applied over several practical designing problems for devising solutions. Wallace (2016) stated that these patterns can be useful for particular designing problems for making the object-oriented design to be flexible, reusable and elegant. The design patterns do not only consider the system parts and however, rich relationships can exist between them. Patterns are generally considered as proper way to describe a system as architecture for any object over class hierarchy. Patterns that are described and documented can be used for serving several sources of expertise for facilitating reusable and flexible designs.  

Patterns can address to issue of project size with number for helping over decision-making for choosing over design pattern. Westbrook et al. (2016) discussed about Façade pattern that is important for showing sub-systems in form of objects and discussed Flyweight pattern for depicting support to bigger number of objects at fine grain segmentation. In this way, it can be said that for capturing recurrent behavior that is quite apparent with the system, patterns can be useful for providing reusability to object-oriented software.

Observer design pattern is used for utilizing intention of defining one-to-many dependencies among previously initialized objects. Therefore, when one object is able to change the state; the dependent objects can be able to change its state too. The changes of state can be made automatically and with according to the change made to previous object. In the observer design pattern, the object core is encapsulated and on the subject abstraction, the variable components can be encapsulated for observer hierarchy. Moreover, the design patterns can be aimed for resolving this type of problem in Hospital Management System. In overall manner, the large monolithic design can be scaled at level of new graphical or monitoring requirements for levying. Object-oriented design should included with three actor classes as in subject, observer, and client.

Figure 1: Observer pattern in Hospital Management System

(Source: Created by author) 

Designed UML diagram for showing usage of observer pattern in Hospital Management System (HMS) so that activities can be designed. The observer design pattern in intended to state the process earlier as the pattern can capture practical situation over exemplar as Hospital Management System; the class can depend on other classes. Dependent class is identified as subject element and primary class is identified as observer element for the design pattern. As per identified dependency, the dependent class can state the changes in subject class state for incurring influence over state change of observer class. Abstract class in the design represents observer and subject design element over the major components. For discussing this part as common example, say Microsoft excel datasheet can be considered and graphical way should be used for representing it as graph and chart. Moreover, graph can be changed based on changing in the excel datasheet. Henceforth, the graph can be considered such as observer and data for making it as subject.

Hospital Management System: Background

Based on object-oriented programming concept (OOPs), the observer design pattern is depicted from the previous findings. However, as per UML diagram shown, state of object B is entirely dependent over state change of object A. When state change of object A emerges the object B requires to re-computing in order to making B object consistent with A object’s change of state. In terms of HMS system design, the doctors and patients are considered to be under abstract classes. Design pattern strictly indicates when patient details are changes from the database, the doctor class will be influenced and they will be notified. State change for patient class for instance, InTreatment patient is more important for affecting on the manner in which the patients will get proper diagnosis and proper treatment.   

Conclusion 

As an instance of this design pattern, observer design pattern can be utilized in form of simple article where the patient logging system can be implemented. Main logging system for the Hospital Management System module should show receiving of errors, warning messages, other messages as per services provided. Particular class should be considered to be subject class for visibly stating the details of last messages that is shown in the patient portal or access interface. Logging module for HMS cannot be able to perform accordingly or related additional processing of receiving messages. Logging system should be able to notify the observers in order to generate new messages.

Hospital Management System demonstrating actors involved in the system such as patients, doctors, individual operational activities and related dependencies so that entire management system can be followed. The observer design pattern should be utilized for HMS to state patient and doctor status for updating from primary object of the design. The Hospital Management System will be able to design entire system with developing management operations and activities. Management system should be able to incorporate doctor appointment module, payment or billing module, patient status checking module, patient and doctor interacting logbook access, report generation module, and others. Moreover, the doctor and patient status can be checked or updated for the module for considering how observer design pattern can be used.

An overall learning part from this report is that the researcher can be able to utilize design pattern concepts and according description of the practical system. Moreover, the system can use the relevance of observer design pattern in such as way so that the outcomes from the discussion can directly relate with object-oriented design decision-making and appropriate design process. The discussion in this report stated clearly about entire design pattern making process; so that implications from the study came up to show design procedures. As per the outcomes from the study, observer design pattern is chosen to be a good fit for Hospital Management System.   

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