Database Information System for Research Department

Explain and apply aspects of database management to a database scenario;

Identify and explain different types of database technologies and information systems;

As soon as a sample is established for a project, researchers need to track down the relevant twins, who may have moved since they were in hospital. This often involves a great deal of time and duplication of effort, as researchers on other projects may have previously found the patients, but failed to record the new address in the file. There are also suspicions that some researchers deliberately withhold information that they have spent weeks, or sometimes months, tracking down. This has been a great source of frustration for the research manager who believes that this has slowed down progress on a number of projects. He needs to be able to provide regular detailed updates on theprogress of all projects to the Hospital Research Director. The projects are divided up into a number of documented stages, each with their estimated completion dates so that the Research Director is easily able to spot if a project is slipping or running ahead of schedule.

The research department now wishes to set up database information system which it hopes will address the above issues and allow for the following, as a minimum:

1) A record of basic contact information relating to each sick twin and his/her cotwin. This will enable speedy and flexible retrieval of twins based on given criteria. (eg age, sex, contact details, place of birth, nationality, blood type, illness, age and nationality of mother at date of birth, age and nationality of father at date of birth); The database also needs to keep a record of all previous addresses for the twin, in order to monitor twin migration/movements.

2) Records of all illness and date of diagnosis for each twin along with additional information (eg whether hospitalised – if so, which hospital and for how long etc), so that there is an easily accessible health history for each twin to help researchers to locate suitable twins for their research projects and to learn the background health history from the records.

3) A record of which twins were involved in which research projects, and the result of any standard tests carried out on twins as part of that research project. A project will involve any number of tests administered to individual twin members; a twin may re-take a test in a new project. The system should be able to provide a complete ‘testing record’ for each patient, showing when they were tested, which test they took, for which project, what the results were, etc. The system   should also be able to generate various reports based on the tests.

4) The twin record should show the number of research studies that he/she has participated in so that researchers can avoid aggravating twins by approaching them repeatedly to ask if they would mind taking part in a new project. There should also be some indication of whether a twin wishes to participate in future  projects – sometimes twins will ask not to be contacted at all, or they might say they don’t want to take part now, but are happy to be contacted in 5 years time.

5) Each project has a budget agreed at the start. This consists of a ‘manpower budget’ which represents the amount of time (in hours) allotted to carry out the tests deemed to be necessary for the project, and a ‘miscellaneous budget’ (in £s) which covers just about any other expense incurred on the project (eg travelling expenses, hotel costs, consultancy etc). Each standard test is allotted a set amount of time to complete (ranging from 0.5 to 6 hrs). The time is fixed and is the same for whichever project the test is run on. The hospital would like the system to allow lead researchers and their managers to see at a glance the manpower budget remaining on any given project. The same goes for miscellaneous expenses. All miscellaneous expenses should be recorded in an appropriate way, so that a report can potentially be run showing who is incurring the highest expenses, and what for. This area of operations has not been controlled very well in the past and various researchers have lodged complaints of ‘favouritism’ – saying that certain colleagues have been allowed to attend conferences in exotic locations, whereas they have been restricted to conferences and events in the UK.

6) Easily accessible information on the publications relating to projects: With health department finances being squeezed and increasingly directed to the most successful institutions, Pinkton needs to ensure its research outputs are of a high quality (and quantity) to continue to attract government and commercial grants. Each successful research project should lead to a number of publications in scholarly journals. The hospital wishes to monitor the publication activity of individual researchers and to this end wants the new system to record, for each researcher, details of all their published articles, together with the journals in which they were published and the date of publication etc. Many of the publications are linked to conferences, and this information also needs to be recorded (ie which researcher is going to which conference, and whether it is linked to a publication).

The above is a basic outline of the scenario for the new system. The new system must be able to produce a number of useful reports to satisfy the requirements of its stakeholders. You may make any reasonable assumptions in the course of constructing your database model for the proposed system.