Medical Assistant In FMC

Running head: SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Software Engineering
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author’s name

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING1
A. The Specification
Context of the Research:
The main context for this research involves the creation of an online scheduling system
for a hospital in Northern Iraq. Faruk Medical City (FMC) is one of the biggest hospitals in
Sulaimaniya city (Northern Iraq) that has 190 Doctors, 37 Departments, 11 Surgery rooms and
210 Beds. FMC performs a variety of complex surgeries. FMC provides various inpatient and
outpatient services to their clients such as daycare procedures, Intensive care services, pharmacy
services, Hospital hotel services, checkup centers, physical therapy centers, and sleep disorders
treatments. FMC conducts many different operations daily that require the engagement of the
surgery rooms in most of the hours. This is why they established a surgery room booking form
where doctors (surgeons) are requested to fill in some details about their patients, type of the
surgery, equipment required and date/time of the surgery. The request scheduling form will be
submitted to a staff member (medical assistant) who checks the availability of the rooms and the
availability of the equipment on the requested dates (currently performed manually using papers
and some Excel sheets/Word documents). Sometimes equipment quantity is not enough to be
used in all surgery rooms in the same time; therefore, the medical assistant needs to check and
make sure that the equipment requested is not used by other rooms during the requested date and
time. After the approval of the booking request, the medical assistant usually calls the patient and
would inform him/her about the appointment date for the surgery. The patient would be called a
second time as a reminder one or two days before the surgery.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING2
Problem statement:
FMC already has a well-structured network-based computerized system where they collect
different data about their patients and then use them in different activities during their treatment
process; however, their computerized system lacks a powerful scheduling tool to enable them to
book surgery rooms for performing surgeries.
The dissertation aims to build an IT solution to manage the surgery room’s booking requests in
FMC through the development of a web-based application: an online scheduling system where
all surgeons in the medical city have access and will be able to request date, time, equipment and
a room to conduct their surgeries. An option to send SMS messages to the patients will be added
to the application so that clients are informed immediately after the approval of the appointment.
As a reminder and if required, another scheduled SMS will be sent automatically within a
specific time prior to the surgery (will be set by the admin).
This IT solution can be used not only by the FMC but also by any other medical centers,
different service providers, or even agencies who have a similar booking/scheduling procedure.
Dissertation Questions:
There are four Key Dissertation Questions that will be explored:
 What is the current method that FMC applies for providing surgery room’s appointments
to their surgeons, and what are the gaps in this system?
 How can an IT solution improve the efficiency of the surgery room’s appointment system
in providing a sufficient and error-free appointment date/time to conduct their surgeries?
 How can an IT solution ensure that the equipment requested by the surgeons is not in use
during the requested date/time in other rooms?

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING3
 How can an IT solution deal with emergency cases when all rooms are reserved and what
should be the procedures for dealing with urgent surgeries?
Ethical Implications:
The project will involve surveying with surgeons anonymously to learn their opinions
about the current surgery room’s appointment system in FMC, as well as interviews with the
medical assistant who is responsible for the scheduling to identify the daily problems they face.
According to the Liverpool university rules, involving human in the research require ethical
approval and therefore ethical approval form has been submitted and approved by the GDI. The
participants (surgeons) have received the survey form and 10 results were received. A brief
interview with the medical assistant has been conducted in order to have a better overview of the
gaps in the current surgery rooms booking system. All participants in the survey and the
interview were kept anonymous based on their requests.
The anticipated outcomes:
The result that can be expected in this examination is a brief investigation of the present
framework for an appointment for the FMC medical procedure. Furthermore, it is likewise
expected that this examination will uncover the ambiguities of the present framework for
booking medical procedure rooms. Another normal result of this framework is to comprehend
the most proper methods that will encourage the formation of a framework just as a tangible
planning framework for booking medical procedure rooms in FMC just as giving a helpful
strategy inside the framework to manage dire cases.
This article will likewise incorporate a conversation with the medical assistant in FMC
who manages the booking procedure. One of the normal results, for this situation, will be a