Introduction
Taiwan’s health care is one of the most cost efficient health care systems in the world. The universal health care system issues a national health insurance (NHI) smart card which holds a myriad of information about the card holder and grants access to health data on the national online database.
Existing Solution
A professional solution for checking in patients to the clinic already exist, but costs $5000 USD to install, pictured here:
These devices can be found bolted outside each clinical room. When the patient arrives at the clinic, he/she inserts their NHI card into the card slot and the system registers that the patient has arrived. For just simply checking in the patient, a vastly cheaper solution could be implemented with a smart card reader less than 10 dollars.
Proposed Solution
I worked with the neurology department at Cheng Hsin General Hospital to create a check in system for patients who are scheduled for special examinations. Since the patients are already familiar with checking in using their NHI card, given some instructions, the patients automatically check themselves in to the system. The program then has an audio cue to notify that they have been checked in and to remove their card. A demo video will be posted soon.
All in all, this system could be replicated with a Raspberry Pi 3B running Windows 10. The program runs with 400MB of memory.
This project features:
- Automatic check in after card insertion without requiring any other actions from the patient
- Audio cue generated with Amazon Polly following successful check in
- Displays a censored name, check in time, and the last three digits of patient’s id (for differentiating people with the same name)
- Saves an encrypted file of check in history locally
This project serves as an minimum viable product. Functionality that aids the nurses and technicians is currently still undergoing development.
