ITN298 Capstone Project, AND Project Description

Three doctors decide to form a partnership and to consolidate their businesses to leverage their investments and to provide better service to their patients. Each of the existing three offices will remain intact with one being designated as the main office.. Doctors should be able to see their patients at any of the sites and have the ability to see patient records for any patient at any of the sites. The offices are currently using dated personal computers that are not capable of accommodating certain modern medical insurance and information applications, nor can they support the processing demand of specific digital images of medical graphics. Older printers with proprietary software that date back many years are still used to manage the patients information. These computer systems (hardware as well as software) will need to be upgraded and the existing data will need to be transferred into the new computer system. Upgrades will ensure the system capability and capacity that can provide a centralized solution to the data storage and management for the new partnership among all the four offices as well as meeting the additional information and communications needs for the distributed nature of the new partnership. Therefore, the central (main) office will be the official office that handles all the data communications for the entire business. Patient information and major services such as billing and insurance will be hosted in this location for access by all sites. Currently, both the two of the offices also have an identical LAN that interconnects the PCs in a peer-to-peer mode on each site. As the two doctors used to be in some kind of partnership, they have been using a shared billing and insurance management software application installed on a low-end SCO Unix machine located in the West office with directly attached terminals on its site and a remote terminal in the East office connected through a legacy point to point dedicated circuit. These machines are outdated and need to be replaced. Recently some work has been done to fix the network connectivity problems between the two offices in preparation for replacement of the SCO machine and terminals. It is believed that this fix would allow the network connection between the two sites to be capable of the Internet services. Both the North and South offices are equipped with standalone personal computers of different ages. No networking capability exists within and between the sites. Each site has a dedicated computer that handles the billing and insurance using a 56K modem. Each office keeps the record of the patient information and other related data on several personal computers scattered in the offices, and all patients information are manually filed with the hardcopy printouts the in the old fashion. Each computer in both offices has a locally attached low-end printer.

Growth expectations The doctors expectations are to grow. Within three years, they expect to have added three more doctors and a proportional number of nurses to the staff (for the entire partnership), as well as a manager to oversee administrative operations of all offices. They plan to sponsor internships for new doctors and nurses so additional space should be allotted for this in the future. . They are not sure as to the number of interns per year but current thoughts are to limit it to one of each per quarter. The doctors have concerns and are in need of guidance regarding technology, maintenance, upgrades, and warranties. Some thoughts of the future are the use of wireless laptops and notebook computers for use of viewing records during a patient visit, Voice over IP phones among offices and possibly to the external to reduce cost in their telephony, dictation devices so the patient visits are transcribed. They are also not sure when to upgrade or what hardware/software warranties to have. They are expecting the winning technology consulting firm will provide a solution that can address their needs with in such a way that the merger of the three offices can take place without impacting the current service at any location. Security, Disaster Recovery, Risk Analysis The doctors are not sure about the security requirements. However, they know they must provide physical security in addition to complying with the current HIPAA laws. Currently, the only machine backed up is Novell server in the central office. A backup to tape is performed once a week. After the backup is completed, the administrative assistant takes the tape home

ITN298 Capstone Class Project

Defining project purpose and scope of work to be conducted?

Describing the client's business context?

Determine clients' needs, requirements, and compliance issues.

Determine client's business goals in terms of performance, scalability, availability, security, and manageability.