MIS Assignment
Case: Healthy Texan Medical Clinic
The Healthy Texan Medical Clinic in Middleberg, Texas has hired your company to consult on a major upgrade to its information systems used in its clinic. The clinic consists of 22 doctors working in general practice and specialty medicine. The clinic supports over 10,000 patients in the Middleburg area. The clinic's last systems upgrade occurred in 2002 and consists of outdated equipment and has limited networking and integration abilities.
The doctors and administration have hired you to study their practice and make recommendations on how they can improve their efficiency and effectiveness. The main areas of functionality include:
Diagnostic: Doctors want their systems to integrate with medical systems that will help them improve patient diagnosis. This may include easy access to specialized databases such as PDR (Physician Desk Reference) and other resources specific to their area of study. The doctors must have access to a patient's complete medical record and they need software to increase their efficiency in charting. Charting is the process of recording the interaction between the patient and the doctor, as well as recording any diagnosis, recommended treatment, lab work, or referral.
In addition to internal documentation, the doctors would like easy ways to distribute electronic information to their patients about their diagnosis and recommended treatment plan. Finally, doctors would like to be more mobile and interactive with their patients instead of tied to the PC in the examination room. The doctors recommend the use of mobile devices to use when moving from exam room to exam room.
Medical Records: The clinic needs a sophisticated records system that stores a multitude of information about its patients. In addition to the medical history of a patient, each visit, diagnosis, and treatment must be documented, insurance information must be stored, and payment information must be maintained. The records system must be secure and meet all requirements of local, state, and federal privacy and security laws. The system must be able to securely transmit medical records to other users outside of the clinic, including other doctors that patients may be referred to, insurance companies, and any other authorized users of the patient's medical information. In addition to this, the clinic is interested in implementing a resource for its patients to allow the patient to view information about their medical history, current diagnosis, and instructions for their treatment plan(s).
Because the clinic has moved to digital imaging for many diagnostic tools in imaging (mammograms, CT scans, etc.), patients' records are dramatically increasing in storage requirements and the system must be able to handle all current patients' records for some time to come. In addition to current patient records, the system must also maintain former patient medical records as required by law.
Scheduling and Billing: The system must be able to handle the scheduling of all patient appointments with doctors, lab work, and other diagnostic treatment such as imaging and physical therapy. In addition to scheduling, the system will handle all of the financial transactions of the clinic. This includes, but is not limited to, patient billing, insurance claims, collections, purchasing, and inventory control. The clinic is interested in improving the efficiency of its business staff and would be interested in systems that could maintain and order supplies automatically and could interact with other systems to decrease the amount of paperwork needed for processing of purchasing and insurance claims.
Additional Processes: The information in the clinic's database is integral to the clinic's business as well as the health of its patients. The clinic needs your company to review current processes and recommend a plan that ensures the quality and safety of its databases. The clinic's current backup plan will need to be adapted to the new system installation and the clinic's disaster recovery plan is out of date and has not been thoroughly reviewed in the past five years.
Dr. Alex Who, the managing partner of the clinic, will be the contact for the initial stages of this project. To begin the process, Dr. Who has been working with her internal IT department (7 personnel who mostly maintain workstations and servers) to prepare the clinic for the systems upgrade. On a day to day basis, the IT department reports to the senior managing partner, Dr. Bobby Oops, who founded the clinic. Dr. Who is the newest Managing Partner with the Clinic, and is serving as the contact with the consulting team because of her experience leading a system upgrade at another clinic in 2010.
The IT Director and Assistant IT Director were with the Clinic when the systems were upgraded in 2002. Since the last upgrade, they have been responsible for all maintenance patches and customizations (e.g., they recently added an Ebola risk flag to the medical records system) to the current systems. Both the Director and Assistant Director understand the need to upgrade the systems at "some point in time". However, they are both near retirement, and have recommended to Dr. Oops that the system upgrades should be delayed until they retire in 2018. The remaining employees in the IT department have very limited knowledge of the inner workings of the current systems.
Dr. Who has the following Problems for members of your consulting team.
1) Here, you should write a paragraph about how this is an original work; that you have not violated the honor code in any way. Tell me how it is appropriate to trust you, that your instructor is not a sucker for doing so, and how you believe in truth, honor, or some kind of value beyond ‘whatever it takes'...because ‘whatever it takes' includes a lot of nasty things.
2) In addition to the information provided in the case, what additional information systems-related "reasonable" assumptions are you making related to Ms. Dogooder's campaign? Note: "Reasonable" assumptions do not include that the organization has unlimited amounts of resources (e.g., money or personnel). To which specific Problem or Problems (2 through 5 below) does each assumption pertain? Why are you making these assumptions? How do these assumptions add to the subsequent answers?
3) Define what management means in the context of inforamation systems. Based upon this definition, what are the most critical information systems-related management issues facing Ms. Dogooder's campaign? Why?
4) Define what organization means in the context of information systems. Based upon this definition, what are the most critical information systems-related organizational issues facing Ms. Dogooder's campaign? Why?
5) Define what technology means in the context of information systems. Based upon this definition, what are the most critical information systems-related technology issues facing Ms. Dogooder's campaign? Why?
6) Based on the issues outlined in items 2, 3, and 4, what specific recommendations do you have for Ms. Dogooder to address the most critical information systems related issues? If you identified one or more issues in Problems 2-5, what do you think I'm going to expect? Make sure that you identify SPECIFIC, ACTIONABLE items.
Format your assignment according to the give formatting requirements:
• The answer must be using Times New Roman font (size 12), double spaced, typed, with one-inch margins on all sides.
• The response also includes a cover page containing the student's name, the title of the assignment, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
• Also include a reference page. The references and Citations should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.