Design and Quality Assessment of an Intelligent Electronic Health Record and Prescription System for Low-Resource Clinic Settings

In low-resource clinical environments, paper-based patient records and prescriptions are often the norm, resulting in fragmented documentation, inefficient work processes and that contribute to higher medication errors. This paper discusses the design and quality evaluation of an Intelligent EHR and Prescription System which has been developed for health units in General Tinio, Papaya, Nueva Ecija, Philippines. An Agile software development process was used to build the system, and its evaluation was carried out with ISO/IEC 25010 Software Product Quality Model.

A developmental descriptive design of research was used. The process included successive stages of requirement specifications, system and database design, sprints of development, user acceptance testing and pilot implementation. Reviewers were IT professionals and healthcare end users, such as nurses, pharmacists and administrative workers. Structured questionnaires were employed to measure eight software quality attributes functional adequacy, performance efficiency, compatibility, usability, reliability, security, maintainability and portability for overall system acceptability. Descriptive statistical analyses were employed.

The outcomes indicated that IT experts assessed the system as highly performant, efficient, reliable and secure in terms of all ISO/IEC 25010 factors. The acceptability for the end users was also high as reflected by faster patient record retrieval, improved workflow, shorter time to script, increased prescription accuracy and usability. These results suggest that using Agile and assessed with international software quality standards an AI-assisted EHR/ordering application is highly promising to improve healthcare documentation, operational efficiency and data security in low-resource clinical environments.