Abstract:
The importance of documenting and reviewing medical records for pregnant women
has been emphasized over decades, as they are critical in determining the country's
maternal mortality rate. One of several perceived issues challenging private healthcare
facilities in Sri Lanka is that the many of them continue to retain medical records by
paper documents. Numerous problems arise when medical records are kept on paper,
including inaccuracy and a severe lack of detail such as misplaced medical records by
patients, excessive use of paper and other stationary materials which is not
environmentally friendly and lack of updated medical folders. The project was carried
out to investigate the challenges with the patient record management system at a Sri
Lankan maternity care facility and afterwards plan, design, and evaluate an
information management system which does serve both medical personnel and
pregnant patients. As a technique, the project was developed using an agile framework
for each stage. The web-based prototype was designed to alleviate the difficulties
associated with keeping paper-based medical records for hospital staff and maternity
care patients. An automated diet recommendation algorithm was constructed to
provide dietary suggestions based on the patient’s calcium, iron, and folate levels,
three of the most common micronutrients that are routinely monitored throughout the
period of pregnancy to ensure the health safety of the mother and the infant. It was
embedded into the application as a feature that differentiates itself from other similar
applications. A machine learning algortihm will be implemented in the future with the
data gathered from the rule-based model to train the algorithm"
