Gecko Allied Health Services (GAMS)
Standards in community health care are steadily rising. A recent development is value-based health care delivery where greater attention is focussed on the patient. This has resulted in the traditional “silos” of health care delivery being broken down so that medical services are delivered by a multi-disciplined group of doctors and allied-healthcare professionals. There is further pressure to extend this model into the community so that access to these specialised models of health care delivery is not limited by the location of where people live.
You have already undertaken a number of milestone exercises that relate to GAMS. The purpose of this assessment exercise is to build on this work to develop a comprehensive set of documentation that reflects the three aspects to McCabe’s approach to network design: analysis, architecture and design.
Background
For General Practitioners (GPs), there is pressure to provide health care services that cater for a greater variety of and more specialised health care needs outside the traditional “Monday to Friday, nine to five” opening hours. Individual GPs realise that in order to improve their ability to provide additional value to their patients they must join forces with other GPs in their region who are experienced in areas different to their own as well as allied healthcare professionals.
An essential aspect to the success of this model is information and communication technology infrastructure. In order to improve the accessibility patients have to these new multi-disciplined medical clinics its necessary to connect GP offices in the region to provide an integrated set of services over a large geographical area.
For this exercise, you have been requested to provide a network design that is able to support a group of four GP practices who are separated by 10 kilometres in the Illawarra. The GPs from these four practices have agreed on a strategy to collaborate to provide their services to a much wider audience. The combined medical practice is called Gecko Allied Health Services (GAMS). While they intend to maintain their primary health care function of addressing the general health care needs of the community, they also wish to provide access to more specialised medical services such as imaging, pathology, psychology, plastic surgery, tropical diseases, obesity treatment and so on.
It is not practical to physically locate these allied healthcare professional in each practice so broadband technologies have been suggested to virtualise the provision of these services in each practice though telemedicine and other applications.
Preparation.
You are required to organise an online meeting to plan for the completion of your project. You are to schedule weekly meetings until the submission of your project. You will be required to individually complete a weekly questionnaire that records your personal experience by answering some basic questions about your group’s progress. Even though the questionnaire is not directly assessable (i.e. it is not marked) your final mark may be withheld if you are found to have been an uncooperative or unresponsive group member!
Component architectures.
The component architectures are to be researched by individuals. However, it’s important to remember that you will need make trade-offs with other group members who are researching other component architectures. It’s important that you work closely with each other so that you can develop a coherent reference architecture.
Design:
You will discover that the design phase of McCabe’s planning and design process has three orders of design documentation. We understand that we cannot expect you to develop a full set of design drawings. We require first order design documentation. This means that we expect that you can identify locations of switches, routers and servers in your design. You are not expected to specify technology vendors and/or model numbers.
