Case Study Question 1

What is the most appropriate IT system that would allow data to be accessed and transferred between the hospital and the village clinics?

Tasks to understand the context of health care and IT:
1. Search through sites such as the BBC News website, The Economist, and the Financial Times for "health care" and "Africa" and other related terms to get a sense of the state of health care and health care technology in Africa.

From reading articles online I am getting the sense that health care in Africa is really sporadic and there are really no generalizations that one can make because they are all so different. But one thing is for sure and that is that the health care can be improved, with the help of technology, and also with the help of better doctors and nurses in the remote areas of Africa.

2. Search through the websites of local hospitals such as Cape Cod Hospital, Falmouth Hospital, and Jordan hospital to find out about their use of technology.

One form of hospital IT is Amalga 2008 which is Microsoft's version of software for hospitals. This program can "capturing, storing, and quickly presenting data from disparate systems." this system has 2 previous systems into one, hospital 2000 and Azyxxi.

The Stake holders for this piece of IT are, Microsoft because they are reliable if anything bad happens because they are the ones that are created, Patients because they are the ones that could potently be hurt emotional or physically- emotionally if a lot of people know about their personal health records and physically if the system fails and the doctors give them medicine that they are allergic to. also the doctors, nurses and hostile staff are stake holders because they are the ones that are running the system.

The advantages for Microsoft is that they are making more money and they have more customers, a disadvantage is that if they fail they will get a bad name and they are a very big company so they would lose a lot of respect as a company. an advantage of the patients is that their health records could be better organized now so there will be less mistakes, but a disadvantage is if the system fails they could be in great danger because the doctors could mess up. and an advantage for the people working at the hospital is that with the new IT it will make their ob easier of keeping everything straight, but if something goes wrong with the IT then they could potentially really hurt one of their patients.

Microsoft and the doctors, nurses and hospital workers are the responsible ones, they are the ones that are making/running the system. Microsoft needs to make sure that the system is working, and the hospital workers are responsible for making sure that the information is correct.

Doctors and hospital workers are the accountable ones because if the system gets messed up and they end up killing someone because of an allergy, the doctors are the one who are blamed.

The laws that apply to this situation is that medical records should be private, and with a IT system records could be viewed by more people. anyone who has access to the system.