A completeness evaluation of patient records in medical tourism using completeness evaluation tool

• Main Author: Nor Rabbiatun, Mohamed Nazri
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English; English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: Q Science (General); QA Mathematics
• Online Access: http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/14996/; https://plh.utem.edu.my/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=92148

Medical tourism is a new and fresh industry that is not fully explored by researchers. In fact, there are too few medical tourism data due to the lack of exploration in this area. In recent years, it is shown that medical tourism industry is blooming. People travel worldwide in order to find cheaper, available and accessible medical treatments. However, when people travel a lot from one place to another for medical treatments, some of their medical records went missing or incomplete. Due to lack of tuple-based completeness evaluation tool in medical tourism, the completeness of patients’ medical records in hospital databases are unknown.This study aims to investigate data completeness issues in medical tourism. This study also proposes a prototype that able to evaluate tuple-based completeness of patients’ medical records. This study will involve two important phases which are investigation and implemention phase. In investigation phase, various literatures regarding data completeness issues in database are reviewed. In implementation phase, the prototype is developed to evaluate tuple-based completeness. In this study, diabetes patient records from 1999 until 2008 of clinical care at 130 United State hospitals were collected. A prototype is developed by using object-oriented and PL/SQL programming. The method used to evaluate tuple-based completeness is aggregate measure. This prototype is able to evaluate tuple-based completeness of patients’ medical record. To justify the results generated from tuple-based completeness evaluation, the prototype also evaluate null-based completeness. An experiment is conducted based on three cases using three different patients’ medical records which are Patient X, Y and Z. From the experiment, the completeness of patients’ medical records for each Patient X, Y and Z are known. As a conclusion, data completeness issues of patients’ medical records in medical tourism are explored and the prototype is able to evaluate both tuple-based and null-based completeness of patients’ medical records.