ELECTRONIC HEALTH MANAGEMENT SYSTEM WITH PRIORITY-BASED SCHEDULING

Healthcare delivery in many hospitals faces significant challenges due to poor patient scheduling systems and prolonged waiting times, which negatively impact patient satisfaction and treatment outcomes. This project develops an Electronic Health Management System (EHMS) that introduces a priority-based scheduling mechanism to address these critical challenges. The system enables patients to register, book appointments, and access healthcare services online, while hospital administrators and healthcare providers manage records and appointments through secure, role-based dashboards. The priority-based scheduling algorithm ensures that patients with urgent medical needs receive prompt attention by categorizing appointments based on clinical urgency levels—Critical, High, Medium, and Low—rather than the traditional first-come, first-served approach. The system is implemented as a web application using PHP for backend processing and business logic, MySQL for structured data management and persistence, and HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for creating responsive, user-friendly interfaces. The Agile development methodology was adopted to ensure flexibility, iterative improvement, and continuous stakeholder feedback throughout the development lifecycle. Comprehensive system modeling was conducted using Use Case Diagrams, Data Flow Diagrams, and Entity-Relationship Diagrams to capture functional requirements and database relationships. The priority scheduling algorithm implements a weighted scoring formula that considers multiple parameters including medical condition urgency, patient age, existing health conditions, appointment type, and waiting time duration. System testing was conducted through unit testing, integration testing, and user acceptance testing with healthcare professionals to validate functionality, reliability, and usability. Results demonstrate that integrating electronic health management with priority scheduling significantly reduces patient waiting times for urgent cases, enhances hospital workflow efficiency, optimizes medical resource allocation, and improves overall patient satisfaction. The system successfully authenticates users based on roles, maintains data integrity, and provides real-time appointment queue management. This research concludes that technology-driven scheduling solutions can effectively transform healthcare delivery by ensuring fairness based on medical need rather than arrival order, and the developed system provides a scalable, adaptable framework that can be implemented in various healthcare settings. Recommendations include integration with comprehensive Electronic Health Records, mobile application development, automated notification systems, cloud deployment for scalability, enhanced security features, and incorporation of artificial intelligence for predictive patient flow management.