ICT700 System Analysis and Design- The Healthcare System

Describe the critical system qualities, system interfaces, user interface requirements, and system constraints.Use to acronym as reference, and ensure you at cover the non-functional aspects of the acronym, Usability, Reliability, Performance and Security.review of strengths and weaknesses of cloud based solutions. Taking into consideration the environment which the solution would be deployed.

Write brief description of the Pros and Cons to approaching the project using the SDLC, then the Pros and Cons to approach the project as  SDLC. Then recommend either Predictive or Adaptive to the SDLC for the project and briefly describe why.

Answer:

Advancements in ICT has helped various different sectors and industries. Similarly, Healthcare industry have also hugely benefited from ICT. There have been advancements owing to ICT in healthcare in every single sub-areas including nuclear medicine, research, inter-department connectivity, communications, erp systems for the healthcare industry and many more. Keeping this in mind, Australian Commonwealth Government has decided to leverage this advancement into creation of an application that would ultimately benefit the citizens of Australia. They are undertaking this grand venture in the form of an application called My Health Record that aims to digitize healthcare information of a patient and put it up on the cloud for easier sharing and access.

Application Requirements

Primarily there are two distinct type of requirements for any application. These fall in functional and non-functional. Functional requirements are the core requirements that the application is supposed to perform whereas non-functional requirements are the benchmarks, standards or some core qualities that the application should reflect in the application.

Functional Requirements

Citizens

• The application must allow users to create an account for themselves using their email address or provide 3^rdParty authentication login such as Google and Facebook.
• The application must allow users to scan their physical health records using the camera function of their smartphone.
• The application must allow users to update their detailed profile in the system.
• The application must allow users to reset their password for the system.
• The application must allow users to view their health records in the system.
• The application must remind users about important health announcements or their upcoming visits to Healthcare professionals.
• The application must allow users to view doctor’s prescriptions.

Government Administrator

• The application must allow users to view citizen’s information as a whole.
• The application must allow users to view citizen’s information per user.


The application must allow users to view all the healthcare professionals.
The application must allow users to edit citizen’s information.
The application must allow users to suspend the citizen or the healthcare professional’s account.
The application must allow users to edit the citizen or healthcare professional’s account.

Healthcare Professionals

• The application must allow users to create an account for themselves using their email address or provide 3^rdParty authentication login such as Google and Facebook.
• The application must allow users to scan their physical health records using the camera function of their smartphone.
• The application must allow users to update their detailed profile in the system.
• The application must allow users to reset their password for the system.
• The application must allow users to update citizen’s information.
• The application must allow users to write prescription for the citizen.
• The application must allow users to write private notes for the citizen.
• The application must allow users to view tests and results of the citizen.
• The application must allow users to retrieve past records of the citizen.
• The application must allow users to remind about pills, tests or other important things to the citizen.

Non-Functional Requirements

Usability

There are system qualities which should be present in the system. One of such qualities, that should be present in the system is usability. This usability are key aspects of the system and these usability principles should be present in the system as well to ensure that the non-functional requirements are met for the users (Lauesen & Younessi, 2016). There would be many different functional requirements of the My Health Record and to ensure that all these are working coherently and that the intended users are able to use it well, it is imperative that the focus is paid to usability principles and that the application is designed according to usability principles.

Reliability

Since the application deals with a critical area of healthcare, it is imperative that the system offers a high degree of reliability. There cannot be any kind of loopholes or bugs that ultimate affect the working of the system. The system should work as intended at all times and should not fail to operate or give unwanted results. At the same time it should be made sure that the system should in no way compromise on privacy and that it should be protected well against hackers and malicious threats (Chung, 2016). 

Performance

The performance of My Health record should be quick and efficient. This is because, in healthcare industry every second matters. A second could be a difference between life or death or could stop from happening something major. As such the application should deliver impeccable performance at all times, even under heavy load especially in times when there’s an disease breakout or seasonal flu among others (Malan & Bredemeyer, 2010).  Every input should yielf a quick and efficient response and that the system does not ends up over-utilizing the underlying hardware.

Supportability 

As discussed previously, many areas in ICT change rapidly over the course of time. Given this, it is important that the system should designed in a way that is rapidly scalable in the future both in terms of performance and capabilities. The application should be architecture keeping in mind that it should scale up or down as needed in the future and that any changes that would be required could be implemented within the system without having to re-do everything from scratch (Shaikh & Misbahuddin, 2016).

Interface

User Interface Design

• The user interface of the application should be designed keeping in mind that the application would be used by a range of different individuals from highly computer literate to lowest computer literate individuals and from different age range as well as people with certain disabilities. Therefore, the gold standard in user interface design such as Theo Mandel’s book of Essentail user interface design and Shneiderman’s eight golden rules of interface design shall be referred.
• Apart from this, the user interface should be designed such that it accommodates different needs of the user and should be well optimized for touch screen devices.
• The application should try to make use of colors that are associated with the healthcare industry and at the same time should ensure that there are no overuse of colors as without good contrast, some people may find it difficult to read the information displayed.
• The buttons, text elements, menus and interaction should be clearly labeled and any interaction with the system should be responded with change of colors, shadows, highlights etc. so as to give a clear visual feedback for the system.
• The user interface should be consistent across all the screens.
• There should be a clear-cut navigation system in place because some may find it difficult to navigate within the application if the navigation is difficult in the first place.
• Wherever possible technical jargons should be avoided and / or explained so that it is easier for users to understand the system.
• The medical records if communicated from the system should be summarized whenever possible so as to not bury the user with technical information that a patient may not require.

External Interfacing

• The application should be interfaced with Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP so as to communicate some details using Email if needed.
• The application should also be interfaced with File Transfer Protocol or FTP to upload large documents, medical records or scan reports.
• Apart from FTP and SMTP, the application should also make use of TCP or Transmission Control Protocol and User Datagram Protocol as these are essentials for network access.
• The system should also support common video formats such as MPEG4, MOV, JPEG, WEBM so as to ensure video-communication or tele-conferencing can be made possible.
• The application should be able to interface with common healthcare equipment so as to quickly transfer data to and from the application to standardized healthcare equipment.

System Constraints 

• My Health Record would be programmed using HTML5, Javascript and PHP for the bulk of the front-end and backend design and functioning.
• For data storage, the application would make use of cloud based NoSQL database or MongoDB.
• Testing of the application would be carried out in a tool such as Bugzilla (Dettmer, 2016).

Cloud Solution 

In order to best implement this application for the entire citizens of a country, usage of cloud based solutions would make the best sense. There are three different models Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a service and Software as a service and in the case of My Health Record, Platform as a Service makes the best sense. The reasons for these are enumerated below:

1. Since the system is being phased out, it does not make sense to go ahead with a full-fledged infrastructure. Therefore, the complexities and technicalities of an infrastructure may be detrimental for the application.
2. The application can be easily implemented on a platform wherein the base infrastructure is completely managed by a third-party organization.
3. There would be less worry about managing the infrastructure, patching the systems on top of it, among other things.
4. The security of the platform would also be better managed as the platform service provider would handle the entire security infrastructure of the system.

Apart from that, the next thing to decide is upon the cloud deployment model. There are various types of models and these included Private, Public and Hybrid cloud. In such case, end users of the application should have been pre-defined. Also since the data contained within the database is highly sensitive and confidential, it is best go with a private cloud to maximize on the security and to minimize any unfortunate security incidents.

SDLC Approach

SDLC or Software Development Lifecycle is set of methodologies to be followed for development of the system. There are two types of categories Predictive and Adaptive.

Predictive 

Predictive SDLC is a set of methods that follows through phases and steps that are already defined and there would be no scope of any alteration or any change during the project. Also, patterns and any behaviors associated with system are estimated and also noted in advance. In the My Health Record case, the requirements are already defined and therefore this method would be better suited.

Adaptive 

Second approach is where the activities of development are not pre-defined and that addons or changes are incorporated as the development is carried out. The drawbacks is that the cost could add up and the original schedule could be missed.

Conclusions 

Given the case above, it is imperative that the predictive approach would be better suited for the development of the Application. The developed application would be deployed on a private cloud using the best platform as a service provider.

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