Research On The Impact Of Internet Technology On Improving The Efficiency Of Hospital Outpatient Procedures

Outpatients usually go to hospitals for medical consultation.In large-scaled hospitals,long waiting time in registration,waiting room and payment but short time for consultation is a prominent phenomenon in China.Long waiting time can be attributed not only to rising populations and but also to inefficiency in healthcare delivery.Inefficiency causes inconvenience for outpatients.Root cause for this situation is that hospitals are not patient-centered,and this may lead to complex outpatient process,repeated lines and long waiting time,and then outpatients will have low evaluation on hospitals’ service quality.Internet technology has developed rapidly in recent years.The concept of"Internet +",was put forward two years ago and became an opportunity to solve this problem.Internet technology has been applied in every aspect of daily life,but in healthcare,the promotion of its application is slower than other industry.In China,hospitals’ informatization level is relatively low.Hospital information system only takes several functions such as information transmission and storage.It didn’t give full play to its value and therefore in need of improvement badly.Using business process reengineering theory,this thesis analyzed the existing outpatient process of First People’s Hospital of Yunnan Province,and found out that the process of registration,waiting to see the doctor,and payment all need to be optimized.Mobile Internet technology was used to set up an online healthcare self-service platform for outpatients.Using this platform,outpatients can finish a series of process through their mobile phones or other intelligent transport system by themselves.To test the effect of process optimization,a comparison analysis of outpatient waiting time and total process time was discussed using queuing theory,combined with the time data extracted from hospital information system.Result shows that process optimization by Internet technology has effects of reducing waiting time and total time in hospital,and improving hospital’s service quality.