CHAPTER ONE

1.1            BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Medical is responsible for the supply of drugs to various inhabitants in zone at specific drug rates.  Form the inception of the medical, billing has been manually processed.

The manual system employed is not very efficient, a lot of paper work has to be done, receipt, irrespective of patients, take a long period of time to prepare.  Due to the volummous number of drugs users, record of patients which serve as information for preparing managerial decision are very difficult to locate manually.

Therefore because of the problem and error arising from such a system, the computer based billing system because very invaluable

1.2            STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

By account of history, medical billing has been plague by several factors based on the current manual process:

-        File and record are not properly kept.

-        Error are easily made and hardly detected.

-        Information is not well maintained.

The sole aim of this project is to reduce units entirely all these irregularities by the use of computer.

1.3            AIMS AND OBJECTIVE

This project aim primary at developing a computer-based medical billing system that will prepare bills for patients in an area.  A computer-based system can be “batched” or  “interactive” a batched processing system is one where transaction are collected and prepared for input for processing as a simple unit.  There may be some delay between the occurrence original event and the eventual processing of the transactions.  Interactive systems are those which allow the user to input data in response to the information displayed on the screen

The project is concerned with only interactive system.  The practical system used is the medical billing system.

The project however aims at the following:

-        A faster means of billing a patient

-        Reducing redundancies of files

-        Generation of monthly billing transaction information

-          Increasing billing efficiency

-        A faster means of calculating revenue

1.4            THE SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY

A.               To assist medical organization to maintain concise patients monitoring.  This project is designed to overview how computer can be use to operation in medical set-up system.  Consequence, this can also serve as aid for computer efficiency designed to carry out administrative job.

B.               In the event of hug investment the risk at least will be reduced, this means that when the medical spends a hug capital to carry out some project, that they will recover the capital with minimum risk.

1.5            SCOPE AND THE LIMITATION

The scope of this study, which is equally the domain or the problem area is particularly the case study of this research work “penults medical Enugu” and it is to provide a program that will effectively handle the operations of a medical billing system.

A program that will be interactive one, which means there will be at time/opportunities for operator to supply data to the computer.

Form the on set; everything seemed, to be good.  But there is nothing with merit without demerits. Some of the constraints, which would have made me not to finish this work.

1.       Financial help which I needed most to carry out this project work

2.       Constant fluctuation of light, which almost made me to have hypertension.

3.       Economic uncertainty in the country

Despite   all this temptation, I thank God or giving me strength to overcome it all

1.6            DEFINITION OF TERMS

            Billing: The process of sending an invoice to customers for goods and services.

            Medical billing: is the process of submitting and following up on claims with health insurance companies in order to receive payment for service rendered by a healthcare provider.

            Automated:  Automated is to apply the principles of automation to ( a mechanical process, industry, office e.t.c). Automation or automatic control, is the use of various control system or operating equipment such as machinery, processes in factories, boilers and heat treating ovens switching in telephone networks, steering and stabilization of ships, aircraft and other application with manual or reduced human intervention.

            Management: In business and organization is the function that co-ordinates the efforts of people to accomplish goals and objectives using  available resources efficiently and effectively.

            Medical: Is relating to the science of medicine, or to the treatment of illness and injuries. Medicine has two basic meanings, it refers to 1. The science of healing; the practice of the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease and the promotion   

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