A GREEN COMPUTING MODEL FOR OUTPATIENT MEDICATION PROCESSES
Creators: name: AMSALU DINOTE
Publisher: name: National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia
Year: 2017

description: Health is the most critical issue in human life. It has been observed that different paradigms
like ―computerizat ion‖, ―automat ion‖, and ―re-engineering of service process automation‖
have been taken place in across the world in these medical institutions. The developing
country‘s medical inst itutions like Ethiopia are still falling into either computerization phase
or automation phase. In this context one of the most important challenges and issue addressed
in this research is ―unified automat ion with reduced duplicat ion of efforts in automated
systems through green aspects considerat ion in computing and communication‖. In Ethiopian
context  the use of computerized, semi-automated or manual systems challenge in terms of
patient‘s safety, service timeliness, accuracy, redundancy, resource utilizat ion efficiency and
greenness in the computing and communication processes. Primarily this research aimed at
analyzing the existing system (computerized, semi-automated and paper-based) patient
information computing &amp; communication system with respect to aforementioned process
parameters. Afterwards analysis of the fact finding, the research designed an efficient and
unified green automated system model named ―Unified Green Pat ient Informat ion Computing
and Communicat ion System (Green PICCS)‖. In order to ensure the functional validation of
the research a prototype for the designed model i.e. Green PICCS was developed and
implemented. The study concluded that Green PICCS can be used as new knowledge based
generalized model for Ethiopian Health care institutions to transform their current state of art
computing and communication processes to the next generation green computing and
communication process systems. The research study used two modes of fact-findings i.e.
personal observat ion and stakeholder‘s interview for collecting the facts about efficiency and
green requirements of PICCS. Here outpatient documents were also reviewed to know annual
facts about outpatients visited and amount of paper annually consumed. Pre-implementation
evaluation of existing system was performed using a web-based questionnaire of 30
evidences. Based on the collected facts and analysis; a Green PICCS Model was designed and
later developed as a prototype for functional demonstration and validation. The Intel
Application Energy Toolkit was used to collect power consumption data in Green PICCS
Model. Post-implementation evaluat ion of Green PICCS Model‘s Prototype was then
performed using the same tool. Finally, a comparative analysis was done for existing
computerized, semi-automated and paper-based system vs. Green PICCS Model based system
Prototype. In order to achieve the greenness of the Green PICCS computational efficiency,
data efficiency, context awareness, idle efficiency determinants were considered and
recommended for including in design and development process. The analysis was conducted
at outpatient department of Karat District Hospital as a case for primary data collection and
functional demonstration of research outcomes. The findings of the research result reveals that
Green PICCS Model has found better safety (5.97% vs. 84.67% unsafe), better timeliness
(3.90% vs. 88.54% not quick), better resource efficiency (5.40% vs. 85.15% inefficient),
better accuracy (2.70% vs. 85.30% inaccurate), better data redundancy (5.40% vs. 90.55%
data redundant) and better greenness (17.13% paper consumption and 13.64% power
consumption of the existing systems consumption was reduced). Based on the results of the
study, it was concluded that Unified Green PICCS Model can be a New and Next Gen Green
Model for greener service provisions with efficient computing and communications services
in health care institutions in developing countries like Ethiopia.