Problem of Retelling the Same Story Every Time

Headspace faced with the problem where a mental health patient needs to retell a story every time they visit a different medical professional. Patients tend to get clammed up and get bored telling the same story very time. As such Headspace needs a system that keeps track of the patient’s medical record every time he/she visits a medical professional. This system will solve the problem of having the patient retell the story and can get better assistance because the medical practitioner can be able to see the previous medical records and history of the patient.

The NewAccess system will function like a typical Electronic Health Record system. According to Rey (2015) adopting such a system will have the following key capabilities:

• Store and identify patient record
• Monitor and control demographics of the patient
• Manage the list of problems
• Maintain history of the patient
• Manage list of medication given to the patient
• Maintain clinical notes and documents
• Provide guidelines, care plans, and protocols.
• Generate on-demand patient report

Fein (2014), argues that an electronic medical record system will help provide better health care for the mental patients by:

• Providing up-to-date, accurate, and complete patient record and information at the time of care.
• Allow quick and fast access to previous medical records of the patient.
• Ability to share patient information electronically with other medical professionals securely.
• Help medical professionals to diagnose patients more effectively and minimizing medical errors.
• Promoting security and privacy of patient information
• Reduce operational costs
• Facilitate more reliable and safer prescribing
• Enhance the interaction between a clinician and the patient 

Stakeholders map with 4 quadrants.

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1. Patients 2. Doctors 3. Health care staff 4. Trustees 5. Health service providers

External Operation

1. Society 2. Local Authority 3. Equipment Suppliers 4. Funding contributors 5. Government bodies

External-Executive

1. Sponsors 2. Clinical Professionals 3. Shareholders 4. Health Insurance 5. Health care social workers

Internal-Executive

1. Board of management 2. Hospital Administrators 3. Directors 4. Application development manager

Patients- their interest is to get services provided by the system.

Doctors- they will get an environment to serve patients better by getting real time, accurate, and up-to-date information about the patient.

Health care staff- get paid for the services and medication given to patients

Health service providers- get the platform to promote their products and services to a wider customer base.

Trustees- better serve the country with the NewAccess platform

Society- society can be engaged to promote their work using the platform.

Local Authority- can join the team to bring more help to further the benefits of the system

Equipment Suppliers-get paid digitally by supplying the various equipment needed by Headspace.

Funding Contributor- funds the project and thus success of the project lies on them.

Government bodies- plays a major role by funding the project and regulating the use of the system by passing laws and policies.

Board of management- they decides on the project status based on the benefits it brings to the institution.

Hospital Administrators- maintain and control clinical work using the system.

Directors- manage project funds.

Application development manager- this the person that will see the development of the system and get paid.

Sponsors- funds the project and aids in affairs related to money

Clinical Professionals- get paid for professional opinions, recommendations, and prescriptions given.

Shareholders- share profit generated by the system.

Health Insurance- provide insurance covers for the patients associated with NewAccess.

Health care social workers- send volunteers to attend various conferences that are held because of the system.

Key Capabilities of Electronic Health Record System

Stakeholder identification

This questionnaire will be developed for patients as they are the key beneficiaries of the system being developed.

Questionnaire has been used in this case so as to determine areas of improvement base on the patient feedback on the usability of the system. Their feedback I very important because they determine if the system will be accepted or rejected.

Headspace is carrying out a research to find about the new information system. We would like to get your opinions and suggestions on how to improve the system. This will help the development team to better imporve the system to meet your requiremnets. This questionnaire will take about 15 minutes of your time. We value your feedback

Admin- the admin is responsible for the security and overall management of the online portal from data loss and unauthorized access. Admin has the rights to update, modify, and control access to information system database.

Patient- can register and sign in to the information system. Once they are logged in, they have the rights to control access to information and can share it with medical professional to get better medical attention and prescriptions.

Professionals- they can access patient information once the patient shares information with them. They can also share information with other professionals for recommendations and guidance to provide the best prescriptions to the patient.

Hospital- the hospital can sign-up, sign-in, and add or update information regarding the hospital on the system. Additionally, they can add patient records and information so that the information can be accessed easily by authorized users.   

NewAccess system is an online medical record system that provide patient information to the patients and professionals for better service delivery and medical prescriptions and recommendations. The system is made up of four main actors: Admin, patients, hospital, and professionals. The system allows medical professionals to sign up, sign in, and access patient records shared to them. Additionally, the system gives the professionals the ability to share the information they have about a patient with other professionals to seek professional opinion about a particular medical case and provide better medical services and prescriptions. The professional will then update the patient information on the system. 

The cloud is still advancing, as such, the struggle for efficient management over protection of cloud data is also developing. There are inadequate cloud security solutions as compared to those for protecting physical machines in a traditional infrastructure (Debbarma, Debbarma, Chakma & Patra, 2011). Although the expense of instantiating virtual security cloud devices is lower, the technology is still developing. Many current operations in embracing the public cloud is in the early adopters’ area. It is challenging to confirm if any processing or information is being used in breach of legal compliance or agreements. An effort referred to as FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management) has been initiated, which is aligned toward allowing the whole process of ascertaining cloud instances are suitable for applications by individual agency.

Benefits of Electronic Medical Record System for Mental Patients

There are two institutions that are fiercely in pursuance of the enhancement of security controls and data improvement. They include cloud computing interoperability forum and cloud security alliance. Jericho Forum is another group that has addressed the issue from various perspective, notably that de-perimeterization has already occurred as a result of different services that penetrate infrastructure perimeter largely by penetrating through firewalls to offer access to vital services. One problem with many certifications is that they are concentrated more on process and facility than on emerging de-perimeterized service-oriented world. Another problem is that several systems that are currently being used have virtualized servers operating on them. If these servers have contradicting requirements of security, there exist an issue in practice. Most of the cloud computing security problems are neither challenging to solve nor unique to the cloud-computing model. The cloud model presents a unique chance to acquire better security.

• A DSL broadband connection should allow any application page to load within 6 seconds.
• The system may be slowed down or throttled on heavy loads to make sure that everybody is attended to. Throttling means that specific functionality may not be available during heavy server load.
• The system should have the ability to support 100 simultaneous users without degrading any performance.
• In spite of attempting to have 100 percent uptime, unless during a scheduled period of maintenance, which will be delivered to site users earlier, issues may occur. Eagerness is important when the need evolve to shift to another server, should the existing server be inadequate to offer acceptable level of service constantly.

The application should have the capability of scaling up to 500 simultaneous users by installing extra hardware elements.

• The system must be available 24/7. It should not have a prolonged downtime, particularly when the project goes global, and time zones will manage the network traffic
• The MTBF should be more than 2 months
• If a failure occurs that result to a system violation, the MTTR should be less than 2 hours.

• Roles of the users should be clearly defined. These functions are administrator and customer. Every individual that visits the information system will be needed to register if they are carrying out more functions other than browsing or reading site content
• A safe server will be need to guarantee confidentiality of the credit card of a customer and other information.
• Because of the various roles, user accounts and passwords must be effected appropriately. It should be challenging to acquire access to the site in a forbidden way.

• The system user interface should be easy to use and interact with.
• A new user should take less than 120 seconds to register for an account
• A registered user should take less than 90 seconds to make a request. 

Organizations can achieve many benefits from cloud computing. Nevertheless, there are also some drawbacks.

It is cheap because the organization do not need to buy or install infrastructure. All organizations exist to make money while maintaining operational and capital costs to a minimum. With cloud computing, a significant capital expenses are saved with zero application requirements and in-house server storage (Linthicum, 2018).

It is reliable and stable compared to in-house infrastructure. Many cloud computing providers provide 24/7 and 99.99 availability system availability.

It is easy to manage because it offers simplified and improved IT maintenance and management capabilities through central administration.  

Downtime: since cloud service providers attend to many customers, they can become overwhelmed and even face technical failure. As a result, business process can be suspended temporary.

Security: storing essential files and data on external service providers present risks (Januzaj, Ajdari & Selimi, 2015).

SDLC is the step by step process of designing, developing and testing a software application (Srivyshnavi, 2013). It is aimed at coming up with a quality product within estimated budget and timeline. Two different SDLC methodologies exist, namely, predictive and adaptive methodologies.

Predictive SDLC follows pre-defined and continuous specific development plan of a software to provide outcome within a particular timeline.

• Adaptive SDLC allows for extensive shareholder involvement before, during and after each stage of the project lifecycle (Holcombe, 2010).
• The adaptive approach allows for transparency. The development team and the customer work jointly stage by stage. The developers illustrate the status of the project in all stages.
• Adaptive methodology allows for early delivery. Since clients are involved extensively in all software development stages, the development process becomes fast thus ushering early software delivery.
• Adaptive SDLC concentrates on the user. The contribution and involvement of the client at each development stage give the development team a platform to come up with high quality product.
• Adaptive methodologies create software applications of high quality. Dividing the project into modules, focusing on development and testing each element at a time, helps in generating end product that is of high quality (Ed, 2013). Besides, quality is enhanced through reviews and testing carried out after every element is developed.

• Adaptive SDLC requires extensive involvement of the user. Therefore, much time and dedication of user representative is taken during project lifetime (Beyer, 2010).
• Adaptive SDLC comprise of many requirements evolution and emergence during the project lifetime.
• Continuous testing in adaptive SDLC leads to additional project costs (Mohammed, 2015). Besides, testing at each stage result to project failure. The expense of the frequent, long test phases overwhelms the project causing it to fail.

Adaptive methodology, on the other hand, is effected mainly when the information system at hand consist of unspecified and unknown results.

It is simple to follow and easy to understand because of the specified phase and steps taken from initiation to adoption/deployment. Secondly, it is easier and faster for system developers to create a quality product within specified budget and time (Srivyshnavi, 2013). Thirdly, it is easier to project the timelines and budget of the project using predictive SDLC since the outcome is already know.

Stakeholders Map with 4 Quadrants

According to Holcombe (2010), using predictive SDLC approaches make it rare to have project overruns, therefore, facilitating development of high quality product. Additionally, it is easy to manage predictive SDLC approaches because every phase has a particular deliverable and timeline. Project manager can use these two aspects to measure and monitor project progress according to Mohammed (2015)

One major setback of this approach is that there is no working prototype until the last development stages. Secondly, review and testing of the software is done after the development process is finished which may render the whole development process useless if some functionalities were not captured. This leads to wastage of money, time, and human resource. Predictive SDLC only applies to small projects and cannot be used in object oriented projects that are complex states Beyer (2010).

The recommended approach is SDLC. This is because NewAccess is a project that will be used by several actors making it complex and cannot be done using predictive SDLC. Adaptive methodology allows the development team to develop the system in modules and testing them during and after every phase of development Ed (2013). This ensures that the correct system is developed. One of the important aspect of NewAccess project is the completeness of the user requirements and this can only be achieved by employing the use of adaptive SDLC because it allows for iterative collection of requirements during development. This makes sure that all the requirements have been satisfied by the system.

Conclusion

Information system development require in-depth research of the system requirements, user expectations, and infrastructure needed to run the system. It is important to clearly state the problem and break it down further to identify the specific problem facing the institution. This ensures that every detail of the problem is provided for in the final product solution. Also the approach used to develop the system matters greatly as the approach used will determine the overall quality of the system. NewAccess is a complex object-oriented system and requires adaptive SDLC approach in order to meet all the set requirements.

References

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Januzaj, Y., Ajdari, J., & Selimi, B. (2015). DBMS as a Cloud service: Advantages and Disadvantages. Procedia – Social And Behavioral Sciences, 195, 1851-1859. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.06.412

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