JERTIH: Besut Polytechnic lecturers and students have developed an online diet food ordering application for patients of Hospital Besut here to replace the manual method that was previously used.
Hospital Besut director, Dr Wan Muhammad Faizuddin W Mohd Fauzi, said the application enables nurses to place diet food orders at the hospital's Dietetic and Food Service Unit compared to the previous practice of having to manually fill in a form for every food order for the patients.
"Previously, orders were made by filling up forms and sending them to the Dietetic Unit twice a day, at 7am and 2pm. But patients come and go because during that period new patients are admitted to the ward and some are discharged.
"With no uniformity in the collection of data, this leads to food wastage. This application can monitor real-time data between wards, specialist clinics and operating theatres in the process of ordering food," he told reporters at the handover of the 'Smart Nutrition System' innovation project Version 1.0 to the Besut Hospital's Dietetic Unit.
Also present were the Higher Education Ministry's Polytechnic Education and Community Colleges Department director-general, Dr Mohd Zahari Ismail, and Besut Polytechnic director, Che Mukhtar Bakar.
Dr Wan Muhammad Faizuddin said the application can also reduce paper usage and save time.
He said the application has been in use at Hospital Besut since January 12 after getting positive feedback from hospital staff, who described it as simplifying their task.
Meanwhile, Dr Mohd Zahari said the innovation was developed by the lecturers and three final-year students of the Diploma of Information Technology (Digital Technology) of the Besut Polytechnic.
"Last December, this innovation, the result of six months of research and development, won the Gold Award at the Students' Exhibition and Innovation Project programme organised by the Information Technology Department of the Besut Polytechnic, which had judges from industry players and lecturers from Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM).
"This application is the first to be developed by a polytechnic in the country for use in a hospital and it reflects the close collaboration between the Polytechnic Department and Community Colleges together with Hospital Besut in finding an innovative solution to raising the quality of healthcare services," he said. — Bernama