Health Informatics Applications - Assignment

You are required to describe an existing manual or electronic system (or hybrid i.e. aspects are manual with others being electronic) with which you are familiar. This system should be in use in a healthcare context to support healthcare administration and/or healthcare delivery. If this is a very comprehensive system, for the purpose of this assignment, you should concentrate on an appropriate aspect of it.

Part I: Description of Current System

Your description of the current system (sub-system) should include:

a) details of the flows of data/information and the entities (people, organisations, other systems and so forth) involved as sources (originators) and/or sinks (recipients) of this data/information

b) an assessment of the current data/information governance in place at your healthcare organisation paying particular reference to the system you have chosen. This assessment should provide details of any limitations and associated risks.

Part II: Description of Proposed System

You are required to provide a description of your proposed system (sub-system) which overcomes the limitations, mitigates against the risks including any improvements concerning information governance (identified in Part 1). Your description should include:

c) details of the flows of information and the entities (people, organisations, other systems and so forth) as sources (originators) and/or sinks (recipients) of this information

d) draw a Context Diagram and a Top-Level Data Flow Diagram (TL-DFD) to model your proposed system. These diagrams may be drawn using a tool or freehand. For each
- external entity in your TL-DFD, complete the External Entity Template (cf. Table 1)
- data flow in your TL-DFD, complete the Data Flow Template (cf. Table 2)
- process in your TL-DFD, complete the Process Template (cf. Table 3).

e) using the data stores from your TL-DFD, identify the set of relations/tables required to support the proposed system. For the relations identified, using a database management tool show the resulting tables and the relationships between them. For each table you include in your solution, specify for each attribute a brief description, its data type, length and any constraints (cf. Table 4).

f) You should modify the captions on the tables mentioned in d) and e) accordingly.

Part III: Interoperability
Two frequently cited Software Quality Models are those proposed by McCall and Boehm. Having started with 55 quality characteristics (factors) McCall reduced these to eleven (efficiency, integrity, reliability, usability, accuracy, maintainability, testability, flexibility, interface facility (interoperability), re-usability and
transferability).

Quality characteristics, also referred to as non-functional requirements (NFRs) or emergent properties (NFRs), are a description of how the system should operate as opposed to what it should be functionally capable of doing). (Because of the format used to describe these quality factors they are often referred to as the ility factors.)

Boehm's model in 1987 proposed 19 quality factors namely, usability, clarity, efficiency, reliability, modifiability, re-usability, modularity, documentation, resilience, correctness, maintainability, portability, interoperability, understandability, integrity, validity, flexibility, generality and economy.

The vast majority of these are outside the scope of your work, therefore I propose for the 10% you detail the interoperability considerations.