PART 3: GENERAL AND CASESTUDY BASED QUESTIONS {25 MARKS ALLOCATED) Home Health Arena
The present investigation regards the selection of a software package by a medium-size regional hospital
for use in the Home Health segment of their organization. The hospital (to be referred to in this
monograph by a fictitious name, General Hospital) is located in the central portion of a southern state in
the USA, within 30 minutes of the state capital. Its constituents reside in the largest SMSA (standard
metropolitan statistical area) in the state and consist of both rural, suburban, and city residents. Services
offered include Emergency Department, Hospice, Intensive Care Unit (ICU), Obstetrics, Open Heart
Surgery, and Pediatrics. Additional components of General Hospital consist of an Imaging Center, a
Rehabilitation Hospital, Four Primary Care Clinics, a Health and Fitness Center (one of the largest in the
nation with more than 70,000 square feet and 7,000 members), a Wound Healing Center, regional
Therapy Centers, and Home Care (the focal point of this study)
The Home Health portion currently encounters difficulties, the software they were using was at least
seven years old and could simply not keeping up with all the changes in billing practices and Medicare
requirements and payments. The current system was not scalable to the growing needs and
transformation within the environment. To solve this challenge, portion of the Analysis stage, great care
is taken to ensure that the new proposed system meets the objectives put forth by management. To that
end, we met with the various stakeholders (i.e., the Director of the Home Care facility and potential end-
users) to map out the requirements needed from the new system. Copious notes were taken at these
meetings that helped to understand the business needs, and a conscientious effort to synthesize our
recollections was done. Afterwards, the requirements were collated into a spreadsheet for ease of
inspection).
The health system will store some of its data on the cloud so that the data is easily accessed through a
web interface, this might possess some security issues. The project is assumed to commerce soon, and
the SLDCwill be used for implementation of the new system. The Director hope that these
advancements will be disruptive during everyday operations. Such upgrades are especially important in
the health care industry, as changes to Medicare and billing practices are common occurrences. General
Hospital expects to use the software for the foreseeable future, with no plans to have to embark on
another project of this magnitude for quite some time.
Read the case study above and answer the questions below, note some questions requires your general
knowledge
1. What does SDLCstand for
[1)
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