Current state of business and data related problems:
The hospital’s existing database system has their patient and staff’s data fragmented i.e., divided across
several applications and databases. The database system has been growing organically and now suffers
from several shortcomings. Many different form of data storage systems and formats are used such as
local disks, network access storage systems, spreadsheets, relational databases etc. Many different
forms of data exist such as tabular data in excel sheets, images and videos, digital documents, scanned
paper documents, specialised medical images in DICOM format, transcriptions, nurse, GP, specialist’s
and psychologist records and notes. The staff are currently spending lot of time to retrieve data from
different databases and connect them to make the case history of a particular patient or staff.
Moreover, there are constant changes regarding to the patient ‘s personal details, their locations,
medical condition, physicians or psychologists that they get treated from. Staffs ‘records also need to
be updated. For example, employment’s details such as their expertise, work experience, new
positions needed to be updated. Based on the hospital strict security policies, they want to keep record
of all present and past staff. Although these data would not be used much, hospital would like to store
and secure them.
With all these complexities, generating a patient’s or staff’s report is time consuming and suffers from
several integrity issues. Multiple copies are created and stored which causes redundancy, affects
quality, and increases risk of data loss and exposure. Thus, the hospital is looking for ways to manage
their documents and contents efficiently. They aim to digitize and store all archived patient history,
collect present data responsibly, so that healthcare providers can easily request, use, update, and
delete it as necessary. Furthermore, by digitizing the staffs’ record they will be able to keep track of
staff and their responsibilities.
The data are currently stored in on-premises storage facilities such as network access storage and local
disks with back-up servers all on a local network. The hospital considers this local storage of data as a
secure option for storing personal health and other sensitive information, though it is affecting their
data quality and impacts the outcomes during audits where they struggle to meet regulatory
requirements. Hence, they are seeking advice on benefits and challenges of their current in-house
storage approaches and potential alternatives to data management with increased security and data
protection.
To keep up with their growing patient populations and accommodate their needs, the hospital recently
opened an in-house imaging facility, and their database is expected to rapidly grow with high volume
of digital unstructured data such as MRIs, CT scans, X-ray, and PET scans. Hence in addition to security,
they are also aiming to achieve scalability, interoperability, and ease of integration without a huge
impact on their funding. To improve patient support, they are introducing a new model of medical
treatment using a telehealth platform and are accommodating new sources of data through IoT for
remote monitoring. This again is creating new types of data with integrity and security issues.
Overall, the organization needs a highly scalable and reliable data management solution that identifies
and address their existing issues and provide a futuristic solution to accommodate their digital
transformations and growth
Suggest the data management issues and give solution for the issues from data management perspective with real time technical tools useful for the above case study in 2000 words with introduction
