New Network Infrastructure For A Hospital: Essay On Requirements, Resources, And Risks.

Consider ONE of the following scenarios:

• You are an IT Director hired by a newly established business called “Best Care within Your Fingertips”. The company’s business plan is to provide telemedicine driven solution for improving accessibility of care to patients in rural areas. Your company’s headquarters and data center are located in a large metropolitan area and you have all the resources necessary to succeed with a server, network, and application infrastructure. However, your customer base will be located in the rural areas of the state. The idea is to potentially expand out of state by extending and expanding existing business model and infrastructure to more patients and greater geographical coverage.
• You are an IT Director of a large healthcare system and your employer made a decision to build a new hospital within 15 miles of your current location. Your main data center will remain in the same location, and all your clinical applications will be made available to the new hospital. However, you need to plan a network infrastructure to extend access to all clinical applications at the new location.

You are expected to:

1. Identify all critical elements and technologies necessary to achieve stated goals of your project (3 points).
2. Describe the resources you will require to achieve your project goals (3 points).
3. Architect, at a high level, your proposed solution and draw a diagram in a software application of your choice, typically Power Point or Visio (5 points).
4. List and describe clinical applications that will run on your proposed infrastructure (3 points).
5. Identify benefits and risks to business operations and patient care environment, resulting from your proposed solution (3 points).
6. Briefly describe to senior management why your solution is a good fit and how you will address the risks identified above (3 points).

When working on the technical questions, do wear your technology analyst and network engineer heads – not business leader heads. What this means is that we require deep technical analysis in your papers, as part of this technical course. In fact, many business level executives in technology companies have strong technical backgrounds, and rose through the ranks via engineering, software development, and other technical channels. So, they possess comprehensive understanding of technical matters in their decision-making processes.

Your paper will be 8+ double-spaced pages in length, written in APA style. This includes 5 pages of content + title page + abstract + references.You must maintain the minimum requirements for length of the paper. There is no maximum requirement, but you do need to adhere to the topics requested above in order to present a cohesive paper that is readable and not overcrowded with unnecessary details. Do not attempt to boil the ocean…

Please remember to use APA style and reputable sources for your case. Faculty members have multiple tools available to them to check for authenticity of your work, as well as to identify potential sources of plagiarism. The best way for students to avoid losing points and having academic disciplinary actions taken against them for plagiarism is to not plagiarize.

Identification and Analysis of Requirements

Due to the need for addressing the increase in allotting health care in hospitals, the increasing concern for adopting a strong network is a necessity. This is the main cause for strengthening the network of a hospital in terms of security and reliance. As such, the need for network infrastructure and information technology is also a concern and many hospitals are reinventing their network infrastructure. This report includes a discussion about the development of a new network infrastructure for a hospital. Moreover, this report also includes a discussion of the general resource and requirements that will be used. Lastly, this report presents various risks and mitigation strategies that will be utilized for the architecture.

Discussion

            This section discusses the main contents of the report.Identification and analysis of the requirements

            The main objective of this report includes the deployment of a new network infrastructure for a hospital that will be effective in addressing to the needs of the communication. This includes deployment of the dual MAN (metro area network) and the SnMP tool (Simple network management protocol) which helps in efficient network management (Mandl et al., 2014). The various centers in the healthcare facility will be connected by using the Dual-MAN network. This will be made by taking connections from service providers who will be addressing the faulty issues or other problems associated.

            Another requirement to consider is wired and wireless access to the system. This will also be addressed for utilizing mobile devices. Network access points and quality of service balancing (QoS) are other requirements that will be identified for the organization. Authentication and security is also considered to be efficient requirements which will be in place with video monitoring and support. Lastly, the system will also include network monitoring and logging for efficient management.

Description of resources

            There are various resources that are to be used for making the infrastructure technology. The first requirements are the allotment of land (Catarinucci et al., 2015). This will be the area where the structure will be built. The blue prints are to be analyzed and the necessary constructional materials are to be chosen.The next is the need for computational devices which will be utilized in setting up the connections. After the allotment of devices, the need for service providers will be necessary. The local service providers will be responsible for establishing of connections among the various devices across the facility.

Description of Resources

            Moreover, access points and routers will be added to each place in the center so that various devices and mobile devices will be successfully added to the network infrastructure. The doctors and the patients can stay connected to the facility after the processing of the security and monitoring checking (Yang, Ge, Li, Rao & Shen, 2014). After such facilities, the quality of service will be maintained by appointing quality analyst who will then be responsible for measuring the level of quality.Network architecture.

Figure 1: Network architecture of the healthcare center

(Source: Created by the author)

Clinical applications

            The major applications of clinical environment involve the utilization of the electronic health record (EHR). This helps in sharing of information from one center of the facility to the other. This is also termed as a digital version of the records of a patient. In place of a paper to store the information, an electronic record of the information is maintained. As such, these can be sent to various places by utilizing the digital mail sending system. These are sent to authorize users only whose credentials are stored in the system (Gope & Hwang, 2016). It consists of the medical history of the patient, medications of them, diagnosis results, any allergies and other health related data. These helps in removing the need for manual checkups of each patient for every visit they make to the healthcare facility. This helps in automating the workflow of the system which in turn leads to the increase in efficiency of the system.

            Another clinical application that is to be used in the healthcare system is the Electronic Intensive Care Unit (EICU). This system provides the possibility of monitoring the floors. This also helps in checking the patients and the number of beds in each department. As such, it will be utilized to track the changes associated with it (El-Sappagh & El-Masri, 2014). This requires allocating each of the departments with resources such that they keep track effectively. This involves allocation of bandwidth per site and per application consumed.

justify;">            Moreover, the use of GUI (Graphical User Interface) monitoring system is to be adopted for the network. This will enable the system to receive real-time data from the patients which will then be utilized to monitor the health conditions of the patients (Saleem et al., 2015). The GUI monitoring system will be made using he reference values listed in the table below. According to the parameter of the detection results, a notification will be sent to the doctors regarding changes to the records.           

Alert Type	Detection Parameter
Tachycardia of woman	>100 bpm
Bradycardia of woman	<80 bpm
Tachycardia of fetal	>110 bpm
Bradycardia of fetal	<100
BP of woman	> 139/90 (systolic/diastolic)
movements	From past 4 readings>=3

Lastly, there is another clinical application known as the personal digital assistants (PDA). This is also termed as a portable application that can be utilized for recording details. This is termed to be very simple and easy to use. The doctors use this to check their schedule and apply accordingly (Zhang, Qiu, Tsai, Hassan & Alamri, 2017). Moreover, they also use it to fetch the records of the patients by connecting to the healthcare system network.  In addition, the system architecture uses the network to send any information or alerts to the doctors in their PDAs. This helps to remind them for any notifications necessary.

Network Architecture

Identifications of benefits and risks associated

            There are various risks and threats associated to the implementation of the project. This can range from system related risks to infrastructure related risks.

Risks

            For a health care system, there can be various risks related to it. The first risk is the network outages. Although, the system includes an architecture that is supported by two different service providers, there can be possibilities of network outages (Wang, Mahmud, Fang & Wang, 2016). This is the first risk to the system which can lead to halt in the business processes of the healthcare system.

            The next infrastructure related risk is that the development of the project can take more than one year to complete the whole facility. In addition, the adoption of system deployment can also take up to various months to get it started (Aziz, Tarapiah, Ismail & Atalla, 2016). The service level agreements from these two service providers are also another point of uncertainty that provides a certain level of risk to the system.

            The next system related risk is the need for adopting security measures to the system. These healthcare organizations are termed to various hacking incidents and threats which are the main causes for breaches to it. As the system consists of various records of the patients, it can be used to sell that information in exchange of money. As a result, hacking continues and the organizations are subjected to adoption of changes in their system (Parane et al., 2014). Moreover, the healthcare systems can be breached by hackers to cause harm to the patients. This is another security related implications that are to be mitigated by the health care organization.

Benefits

            There are various benefits to the health care organizations with adopted modern facilities. The first benefit is the decreased cost for operation. As an electronic health record is utilized for addressing the records of a patient, the need for maintaining physical registers are reduced. This in turn reduces the cost of the system for addressing such requirements (Moosavi et al., 2015). Furthermore, an effective management of the drugs can be achieved through the use of such architecture.

            Another benefit to the system is the reduction in errors. The doctors and patients are notified on a daily basis to keep them occupied about their meetings. Moreover, as all the records are maintained digitally, the reduction in errors are evident.

Clinical Applications

            Lastly, due to the adoption of various methods, the customer satisfaction will increase. As such, they will opt for the same services in case of any ailments. Moreover, this will be able to satisfy the customers and make a business image in the market. Acquisition of better market and better market requisition will be enabled leading to more health based approaches.

Mitigation

            The solutions that can be achieved from this healthcare unit will be able to address all the necessary threats that arise from any kind of traditional health care organizations. The threats that are evident can be removed by addressing the requirements (Weaver, Ball, Kim & Kiel, 2016). For security related threats, advanced security mechanisms and VPN setup can be used to address them. Similarly, the system related threats can be mitigated by utilizing various methods necessary.

Conclusion

            Thus, it can be concluded that the utilization of the health care system can be effective in addressing the needs of the population concerned. It will also be utilized in increasing the brand value of the organization which will increase the revenue made. This report has successfully listed the various network related resources that will be utilized for running a healthcare organization. This report has also discussed about the clinical applications that is to be used. Moreover, this report includes a system architecture diagram that will provide a blueprint for the system. Furthermore, there are various risks and benefits to the system that have also been discussed here. Lastly, this report ends with listing the various mitigation strategies that can be used to address them. 

References

Aziz, K., Tarapiah, S., Ismail, S. H., & Atalla, S. (2016, March). Smart real-time healthcare monitoring and tracking system using GSM/GPS technologies. In Big Data and Smart City (ICBDSC), 2016 3rd MEC International Conference on (pp. 1-7). IEEE.

Catarinucci, L., De Donno, D., Mainetti, L., Palano, L., Patrono, L., Stefanizzi, M. L., & Tarricone, L. (2015). An IoT-aware architecture for smart healthcare systems. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2(6), 515-526.

El-Sappagh, S. H., & El-Masri, S. (2014). A distributed clinical decision support system architecture. Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences, 26(1), 69-78.

Gope, P., & Hwang, T. (2016). BSN-Care: A secure IoT-based modern healthcare system using body sensor network. IEEE Sensors Journal, 16(5), 1368-1376.

Mandl, K. D., Kohane, I. S., McFadden, D., Weber, G. M., Natter, M., Mandel, J., ... & Adams, W. G. (2014). Scalable collaborative infrastructure for a learning healthcare system (SCILHS): architecture. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 21(4), 615-620.

Moosavi, S. R., Gia, T. N., Rahmani, A. M., Nigussie, E., Virtanen, S., Isoaho, J., & Tenhunen, H. (2015). SEA: a secure and efficient authentication and authorization architecture for IoT-based healthcare using smart gateways. Procedia Computer Science, 52, 452-459.

Parane, K. A., Patil, N. C., Poojara, S. R., & Kamble, T. S. (2014, February). Cloud based intelligent healthcare monitoring system. In Issues and Challenges in Intelligent Computing Techniques (ICICT), 2014 International Conference on (pp. 697-701). IEEE.

Saleem, K., Derhab, A., Al-Muhtadi, J., & Shahzad, B. (2015). Human-oriented design of secure Machine-to-Machine communication system for e-Healthcare society. Computers in Human Behavior, 51, 977-985.

Wang, H., Mahmud, M. S., Fang, H., & Wang, C. (2016). Architecture. In Wireless Health (pp. 27-37). Springer, Cham.

Weaver, C. A., Ball, M. J., Kim, G. R., & Kiel, J. M. (2016). Healthcare information management systems. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Yang, L., Ge, Y., Li, W., Rao, W., & Shen, W. (2014, May). A home mobile healthcare system for wheelchair users. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD), Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE 18th International Conference on (pp. 609-614). IEEE.

Zhang, Y., Qiu, M., Tsai, C. W., Hassan, M. M., & Alamri, A. (2017). Health-CPS: Healthcare cyber-physical system assisted by cloud and big data. IEEE Systems Journal, 11(1), 88-95.