A decision support system for morphine usage for palliative care administration in Uganda

Abstract

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) provide aid in clinical decision-making and therefore need to take into consideration human, data interactions, and cognitive functions of clinical decision makers. The objective of this research is to develop and test a decision support that can be used a communication tool between the patients and the palliative care nurses. The system is designed to allow doctors and nurses monitor their patients under palliative care and the effects of the morphine as prescribed. This new system will provide the caregivers with a more structure assessment of patient’s conditions and the patient should receive optimal care and improved data transmission to the next caregiver. This study has a user centered design approach, commencing with qualitative data analysis arising from review of literature and processes in the care of palliative patients and focus group discussions. Focus group discussions were performed to enable the researcher understand the actual processes carried out from when the patient is subjected to palliative care to when they eventually die complement the quantitative data to get a more holistic view of the decision support system. In this project, a DSS is developed for palliative care services provision and caters for selective login given the roles in the provision of palliative care. It also enables the patients to login and record the levels of pain they undergo through while also providing feedback on the side effects of the morphine used. To achieve the objectives of this project, data was collected using paper prototyping as a technique for requirements gathering and elicitation. This approach helped identify fault early in the systems design process. The requirements collected were thematically analyzed and used to design the web based DSS. The system developed seeks to provide real time feedback to the health facilities providing palliative care and information on morphine usage on patients under palliative care. The researcher believes that with the implementation of this systems and its further development there will be improved service provision of palliative care and provide administrators with better decision making in palliative care service provision. In addition, it will boost client’s confidence in services provided at the facility