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FYP Final Report v1.0.0
Copyright and All Rights Reserved To: Pee-Lo Team @2003/04
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2.2.4 Consistency of Data
Supposing the patient has been admitted to a hospital say Hospital Z which has no record of the
patient. What Hospital Z’s management can do is to open a new record to document this patient’s
condition.
That sounds rather simple but when it comes to prescribing medication for the patient, the real
problem starts to surface. Suddenly the nurse at the dispensary of Hospital Z does not know that
this particular patient is allergic to certain antibiotic and accidentally prescribed the wrong antibiotic
to him.
The patient returns to Hospital Z and informed the nurse of the wrong prescription and gets his
replacement. The nurse then updates the database of that particular patient to indicate that he is
allergic to certain antibiotic.
Then the next problem arises! Hospital X and Hospital Y are not informed about this particular
patient’s allergy. If the patient visits Hospital X and physicians in Hospital X give him the wrong
antibiotic prescription, he is going to have a hard time with his health. Hospital X finds out this and
soon gives him a replacement and update the patient’s record in Hospital X (by then this patient is
already very grumpy since his medication has been wrongly prescribed twice).
Hospital X does not know that all this information is already available in Hospital Z when the patient
visited that hospital. Duplication of data happens thus no consistency in storing and maintaining
data.
Inconsistency of data is very resource wasting and as a side effect, it makes the whole information
system very hard to manage. This gets worse when there is no uniform way of presenting data.
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