At their last meeting, the hospital board asked your team to develop a proposal on how the organization might upgrade its telecommunications network to improve the quality of health care delivered to hospital patients.
Identify Current Systems (Stephanie) Currently Patton-Fuller Community Hospital (FCC) utilizes four information yester in an effort to improve communications and collaboration among the management, administrations, clerical, employees, physicians, nurses, and patients. The four information systems help to improve the efficiency of daily hospital operations and improves the relationship with patients, current and future, and assists the senior executives of FCC in the management of finances.The systems currently used are: 1) Accounting and Finance Information System: This system is used mainly by the senior executives to manage the cash flow, assets, liabilities, and net income of FCC. The accounting and finance information system generates the financial statements are consistent with federal regulations. 2) Human Resources Information System: This system is used to manage hospital policies, procedures, and compliance requirements.The human resources information system allows the human resource (HER) department to conduct personnel inquiries using the hospital Intranet allowing the HER team more time to concentrate on actual HER Issues.
The system Is also used by the HER team for the recruiting of new employees, training purposes, and evaluations of current employees. 3) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Information System: This system helps build the loyalty of patients by allowing an interface with FCC through the World Wide Web.The CRM tracks patients recommendations, complaints, and comments and Improves overall patient satisfaction which are then reported to all seniors managers. 4)Knowledge Management (KM) Information System: This system Is utilized by physicians and nurses to gain access to numerous online medical databases as a tool to assist In diagnosing and administrating drugs to patients. Advantage and Disadvantage of Telephone Systems (Miriam/Ronnie) There are advantages and disadvantages of avian a phone system in place.
No matter what kind of business you are involved in, voice communication is a vital component to the success of any company. The staff needs an assured way to speak with patients and/or customers, conduct business to call in with questions or concerns without having to commute to the actual location. Installing a dedicated telephone system in the Patton fuller hospital can offer a number of vital competitive advantages and disadvantages for the Patton fuller hospital. There are many advantages to having a telephone system in place.
First is that a loophole system has easy expansion, once the telephone system is in place it will be extremely easy to expand the telephone system as the hospital grows and the larger system will have the ability to accommodate extra staff with the latest features. Second is that the features that a telephone system offers allows Patton Fuller to keep track of the employees, caller ID, and voice mail if calls are missed and call forwarding for staff on the go. Third is very important, which is lowering cost. A hospital or any business has communication costs and that cost is probably a huge part the budget.Moving towards an integrated telephone system and moving away from individual phone numbers and phones can trim the cost.
Telephone systems can trim cost by simplifying the process of the month-to-month phone system invoice. Connecting a new phone system can also make it simpler to examine the month to month charges and helps to pinpoint any problematic calling patterns, for example if an employee is making an unapproved telephone call on company time it will be much easier to recognize and put a stop to those calls. There are far more advantages then disadvantages to having a telephone system installed in the Patton Fuller hospital.One of the disadvantage is that employees can hide behind the telephone and be rude to patients without the patient being able to identify who they were talking to. This can be very hurtful to the hospital from a customer service standpoint. Another disadvantage to having a telephone system is if there is a patient that is handicap and needs assistance over the phone a patient can get transferred hundreds of times before reaching the person they need to speak to an the patient sometimes hangs up in frustration.
Integration of Telecommunication System (Windy)A Hospital Information System (HIS) would be beneficial for Patton-Fuller Community Hospital (FCC) and a way to integrate telecommunication. Hospital Information System is a computer system that manages all the information needed for health care providers so they can give quality care to patients. The article "Hospital Information System (HIS)" explains, "Modern HIS includes many applications addressing the needs of various departments in a hospital. They manage the data related to the clinic, finance department, laboratory, nursing, pharmacy and also the radiology and pathology departments" (2014).HIS has advanced since it was first introduced in sass and it can be complicated and confusing without the proper education of the system.
Technology is constantly changing and it is beneficial that FCC educates personnel that will be using the system. HIS can be designed for different departments of the hospital. For example, "Physician information systems are delivered through computers, servers, networks, and use widely deployed and popular applications such as, electronic medical records (Emirs), electronic health records (Errs), and more (2014).The Nursing Information System (EN'S) can enhance nurses in staffing as well as charting patient's records. The Pharmacy Information being used in the hospital. HIS needs to be cost effective, user friendly as well as web based accessible.
According to the article, "A web based system becomes even more important if it is used to share information between two or more hospitals. Healthcare facilities in different geographic locations can share relevant data quickly if they use an internet based HIS.If a patient is being transferred to another hospital, a web based HIS can transfer their medical records to the other location. Recommendations for Changes and Benefits of Suggested Improvement (Marks) Patton Fuller Community Hospital (FCC) currently utilizes four information systems: Accounting and Finance Information System, Human Resources Information System, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Information System, and Knowledge Management (KM) Information System. These systems have helped the hospital efficiently manage its finances, management of daily operations, patient and staff information.These systems are necessary and have been effective however improvements could be made to the network, hardware, and information systems.
Due to the advances in technology and increase of patients, Patton Fuller will need to sake updates and improvements to increase the speed of the network as well as the performance of all the systems. Wi-If should be implemented but separated from patient and guest access. The use of Wi-If in the hospital is divided into Life-critical, Mission-critical, and Consumer-critical categories. Life-critical applications such as telemetry require a low bandwidth but high reliability and stability.Any interruption in the flow of data could cause interruptions and affect patient safety. The mission- critical applications such as voice over Wi-If, ARTS, and COW would require mobility and high bandwidth.
These are data intensive and the loss of connections and data affects the productivity of staff and causes and interruption to daily care. Consumer- critical applications are used by patients and other hospital visitors for personal research and use. They need it for research on their own medical conditions, staying in touch with family members, and entertainment while waiting.This has become high in demand with patients and the public and has been linked to patient satisfaction (Mere Networks, 2013). Network Models A Review Current Network Topology for both the Hospital and the Individual Departments (Stephanie) Patton-Fuller Community Hospital is equipped with a multitude of network infrastructures in an effort to provide the best quality of care to the patients. In order to achieve such a high quality of care to the patients, the communication in the hospital, along with staff, and all departments require specific networks in order to be connected electronically.
Both administrative and clinical areas of the hospital require a network with an ability to distinguish between one and the other. A reliable network as well as a back-up system are vital to the daily operations of the hospital to function at a normal pace. Patton Fuller Community Hospital currently is equipped with a large diesel motor generator and every department has an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for assurance of functioning normally in the event of an outage. Currently the network architecture for the entire hospital is abases T and each individual department's network uses a abases F.
Patton Fuller Community abases T using a CAT 6 cable and abases F which uses a single mode fiber with a Network Bridge and is the second layer of the OSI model (Apollo, 2013). The following departments are categorized as administrative and include the allowing: Hospital Executive Management Operations Facilities Finance Information Technology and Data Center The Clinical departments include the following: Radiology Operating Rooms Wards Intensive Care Units Emergency Room Labs Pharmacy All of these departments are characterized by the Bus Topology Network (Apollo, 2013).The clinical areas of the hospital use of documentation are the Apple imams because wireless access point (WAP) is a requirement in certain areas of each floor. The radiology department has a requirement for nodes that are specific to images and certain printers in order to print the details off digital image. Every hospital must be in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HAIFA) regulations.
Therefore patient health information (PHI) must be encrypted and requires identification and authentication from every user to have the ability to option any kind of patient data.All of the data in the hospital, internally and externally, is communicated through an open system interconnection (SO') model. The hospital also provides wide access network (WAN) to accommodate patients and their families with the modern technology of using their Kindles, tablets, and any other devices able to connect to the internet. Rationale for the Adoption of Existing Topologies (Marks) Patton-Fuller Community Hospital has a complete power backup system with automatic cutover to a large diesel motor generator set and each individual department has an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) (Apollo Group, 2013).This helps to avoid any interruptions if power outages occur. The network structure for the entire hospital is 1000 Base T.
It is a Gigabit Ethernet on copper cables using four pairs of CAT-5 balances copper cabling and a 5-level coding scheme. The benefit to this structure is the compatibility with existing network protocols, existing applications, Network Operating Systems, network management platforms and applications. This long-haul copper-based structure is ideal for all of the clinical areas of the hospital.The individual sections of network departments such as the Radiology department use a different Ethernet standard of 1000 Base F. This is a speeds mobcaps and more.
This allows for fiber optic local area networks to transmit short to long-distance network communication reaching up to 550 yards for small or full duplex multimode fiber coverage and 5,500 yards for long-distance full duplex single mode and 11,000 yards for a longer haul. The Radiology department has different standards that need to be met.In all Radiology modalities the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine standard and Picture Archiving and Communication System are standard. This allows for the integration of scanners, printers, servers, and workstations.
Patton-Fuller Community Hospital understands the importance of protecting every patient's rights and protected health information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HAIFA) provide the rules and policies that must be enforced to protect patient information.Patton-Fuller encrypts al patient data files for storage using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). All Patton-Fuller employees are required to use individual surnames and passwords to have access to patient data files.
Advantages and Disadvantages of the Topologies (Windy) How the Cabling Affects the Choice of Topology (Miriam) Recommended Improvements (Ronnie) A topology is described as the layout of the land. A network topology describes how a network is physically arranged and how signals travel from one device to another.Nevertheless, because the physical layout of devices and cables does not necessarily explain how signals travel from one device to another, network topologies are classified as physical and logical. We will be improving our topology structure to the tree (hierarchical) topology. The tree topology is comparable with the star network topology, but the nodes are connected to the main hub.
The repeater is contained in within the active hub, which continuously restores the bits array it receives before sending them out.The reason we decided to go with this improvement is because tree topologies is an extension of bus and star topology, so for any reason if the star or bus topology cannot be implemented the tree topology will serve as an excellent alternative. A good benefit to having a tree topology is each of the sections is provided with loyal point to point wiring connected to the main hub. Also, If one of the segments are damaged the other segments will not be affected at all.
Current Network Types (Stephanie) Patton-Fuller Community Hospital needs a network infrastructure improvement in order to handle new technologies. Before making any recommendations of the networks within the hospital the current types of network will need to be identified. LANA, WAN, and MAN are all current types of networks used in the hospital, with LANA and WAN the main types. However, there are certain parts of the network that have MAN capabilities and are mainly in the administrative and information infrastructure, whereas the clinical areas of the network do not have any diversity.
LANA and WAN show as a combination of networks for the clinical areas of the hospital. This set up should be impossible however, the wiring and devices show a presence of both networks. LANA networks are set up in the departments and is suited to the individual needs of each department while still having the ability to end and retrieve information to a different department such as the radiology department sending images to the emergency room. There is an exception with the LANA network in the operating room (OR), intensive care unit (ICC), and all ward floors.The OR, ICC, and all ward floors have wireless access points giving the departments a broader network type with WAN.
However, the hospital is not utilizing the WAN with all of the other networks. The WAN network being utilized for the OR, 'CUE, and all ward floors is for the monitoring and reporting of patients and not for communication between departments. The clinical areas of the network are using LANA and WAN with the administrative areas having more types of networks.LANA, WAN, and MAN combine for the administrative areas of networks. All executives, senior managers, human resources, and the finance department use a wireless access card giving these areas of the hospital a WAN type of network. All executive and senior managers have the capabilities of a MAN type of network with the wireless access card.
The wireless access card allows all executives and senior managers to access the network from other areas outside of the hospital.
