Assignment: Data and System Integration

Background: Health Information Technology

On the 17th of February 2009 the United States government legislated the "Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act" or "HITEC Act" (America, 2009). At the heart of this legislation is a requirement for all health providers to maintain electronic health records in a manner to facilitate data integration and sharing amongst providers with the goal of achieving this by 2014.

Prior to and subsequent of this legislation, a wealth of scholarly articles has been written in respect to the impact of HITEC, more generally on the benefits of maintaining Electronic Health Records (EHR) and the challenges for Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA), see e.g. (Brennan, 2017) (Adenuga, et al., 2015) (Raghupathi & Raghupathi, 2014).

It is recommended that you undertake your own review of the current literature to gain insights into designing an EIA for EHR.

References

Adenuga, O. A., Kekwaletswe, R. M. & Coleman, A., 2015. eHealth integration and interoperability issues: towards a solution through enterprise architecture.

America, C. o., 2009. HITEC Act. [Online].

Brennan, P., 2017. Is the EHR the New Big Data?.

Raghupathi, W. & Raghupathi, V., 2014. Big data analytics in healthcare: promise and potential.

Assignment Task

You are to prepare a preliminary report for the Australian Federal Government describing the benefits of an Enterprise Information Architecture Reference Architecture (EIA RA) for developing a national EHR system. Attention should be made to an information centric design and how to best achieve this.

The intended audience for this report are government officials who may have knowledge of the health system but limited computing knowledge.

Your report should follow the following template:

Executive Summary Table of Contents Table of Figures

Table of Tables (if needed)

1.0 Introduction

2.0 Enterprise Information Architecture Reference Architecture

Discuss the benefits an EIA RA approach can provide to guide development of a EHR system. This discussion should expand on at least three of the identified benefits and should include at least one diagram providing an overview of the proposed system.

3.0 Information Management and Integration

The disparate nature of entities and systems within health care, the volume of structured and unstructured data, and the sensitivity of that data pose challenges for data management and integration.

You are to describe several of these challenges and propose strategies to overcome them.

4.0 Conclusion

Recommendations Bibliography

Report Format

Your report should be no less than 2,000 words and it would be best to be no longer than 3,000 words.

The report must be formatted using the following guidelines:

• Paragraph text 12-point Calibri single line spacing

• Headings Arial in an appropriate type size

• Margins 2.5cm on all sides

• Title Page is not to contain headers, footers, or page numbering

• Header is to display the Report Title (excluding the title page)

• Footer to display your name and the page number (excluding the title page)

• Title Page - Must not contain headers or footers. Include your name as the report's author.

• Page numbering

o Executive summary to the last page of Table of Figures / Table of Tables to use roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv)

o Introduction and onwards to use conventional numerals (1, 2, 3, 4) starting at page 1 from the introduction

• The report is to be created as a single Microsoft Word document (version 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, or Office 365). No other format is acceptable and doing so will result in the deduction of marks.

• The report must use the built-in features of Microsoft Word to create page numbers, section numbers, citations, cross referencing of sections, figures and tables, table of contents, table of figures, table of tables, and bibliography.

Follow the conventions detailed in:

Summers, J. & Smith, B., 2014, Communication Skills Handbook, 4th Ed, Wiley, Australia.

Assignment Advice

1. The task of developing an EIA for EHR would in practice would take a team of IT professionals hundreds of hours to complete. It is acknowledged that your time is constrained to several weeks and approx. 20 hrs work on this assignment, and as such this assignment is not so much about completing it but seeing how far you get.

2. Whole text books have been dedicated to the topic of EIA RA, thus in your discussion of EIA RA you will need firstly to be succinct, and secondly to be selective in describing aspects of EIA RA significant to an eHealth system.

3. It is not expected that you become an expert in eHealth, but it is expected that you demonstrate your research into the field as it pertains to EIA

4. As this is a master's level course, you will be graded on your ability to put forward an argument supported by scholarly articles. Simply regurgitating the text book is not sufficient.

5. There is no correct answer and it is expected that students' answers will vary greatly, thus there is little chance of accidental plagiarism.

6. Ensure that you clearly understand the requirements for the assignment - what must be done and what are the deliverables.

7. If you do not understand any of the assignment requirements - Please ASK your tutor.

8. Each time you work on any aspect of the assignment reread the assignment requirements to ensure that what is required is clearly understood.