Task Requirements

. Write a report about the following case study (see the description below).

. Type of assessment:  Group work (group of 1-4  students).  Group members can be from different workshop sessions.

. Word limit: maximum of 10,000 words (excluding the reference list)

. Referencing style: APA6

. Submission: via the Moodle site by 11:30 pm on Friday, 22 Dec 2023

. Turnintin check is required to avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism policies can be found from the link.

Marking

. The major project is marked out of 100 and worth 20% of the total mark of the subject.

. A submission marked by the Moodle site as Late is treated as a late submission. Detaild information of the late assessment can be found in Section B of the subject outline.

. A submission marked by Moodle site as a Draft will not be marked.

. Submissions received 7 days after the due date will receive no marks.

Case study description

Gecko Allied Health Services (GAMS)

Standards in community health care are steadily rising. A recent development is value-based health care delivery where greater attention is focussed on the patient. This has resulted in the traditional “silos” of health care delivery being broken down so that medical services are delivered by a multi-disciplined group of doctors and allied-healthcare professionals. There is further pressure to extend this model into the community so that access to these specialised models of health care delivery is not limited by the location of where people live.

You have already undertaken a number of milestone exercises those relate to GAMS. The purpose of this assessment exercise is to build on this work to develop a comprehensive set of documentation that reflects the three aspects of McCabe’s approach to network design: analysis, architecture and design.  Please refer to the marking criteria. 

The following requirements must be met in order to achieve maximum marks.

ü All parts of the marking criteria need to be addressed

ü The documentation for this project must be standalone – this means that you cannot assume that the marker has an understanding of Milestones Activity 1-4 to make sense of your response.

ü Individual students are required to take responsibility for the development of a component architecture. The author of the component architecture needs to be identified.

ü All members are required to collectively take responsibility for the remaining parts of the submission.   ü All  students  are  required  to  synthesise  the  concepts  learnt  in  class  to  develop  Supplemental

Performance Requirements as outlined in Section 3.8 of McCabe. You need to undertake an analysis of your proposed design in relation to operational suitability, supportability and confidence.

Background

For General Practitioners (GPs), there is pressure to provide health care services for a greater variety of and more specialised health care needs outside the traditional “Monday to Friday, nine to five” opening hours. Individual GPs realise that in order to improve their ability to provide additional value to their patients, they must join forces with other GPs in their region who are experienced in areas different to their own as well as allied healthcare professionals.

An  essential  aspect  of  the   success  of  this  model  is  the  information  and  communication  technology infrastructure.  In order to improve the accessibility for patients, it is necessary to have new multi-disciplined medical clinics those are necessary to connect GP offices in the region to provide an integrated set of services over a large geographical area.

For this exercise, you have been requested to provide a network design that is able to support a group of four GP practices who are separated by  10 kilometres in the Illawarra. The GPs from these four practices have agreed on a strategy to collaborate to provide their services to a much wider audience. The combined medical practice is called Gecko Allied Health Services (GAMS). While they intend to maintain their primary health care function of addressing the general health care needs of the community, they also wish to provide access to  more  specialised  medical  services  such  as  imaging,  pathology,  psychology,  plastic  surgery,  tropical diseases, obesity treatment and so on.

It is not practical to physically locate these allied healthcare professional in each practice so broadband technologies have been suggested to virtualise the provision of these services in each practice.

The following interview with the chief information office (CIO) of Gecko Allied Medical Services (GAMS) should be used to elicit requirements (see the interview details in page 3). The CIO has a background in library management and has minimal technical knowledge.

Other Information:

Assumptions:

Internal IP Address Range: 10.0.0.0/8

External Range: 203.2.144.0/20

Interviewer:  Can you describe the services that you want for GAMS? 

CIO: We are seeking to provide a suite of IT resources that will enable GAMS to work as an integrated unit over four locations in Wollongong, Thirroul, Dapto and Kiama. Given the critical nature of the services, we provide the network that should be available for 24/7 use. For example, it would be unacceptable if the network was not available because of maintenance and we need to urgently access a patient’s health record.

Interviewer:  OK. So what specific applications do you require?

CIO: We plan to use high quality video conference facilities that will enable doctors and other professionals to interview patients remotely. The standard of these connections needs to be of HD quality without freezing or dropouts.  As part of our commitment to secure record keeping, we will house a secure database server in the Wollongong office. This connection is important. The other sites will require a secure connection that is able to allow client applications in each office to retrieve patient records in real time. As part of the My Records government initiative, as stipulated in government regulations, the availability of this service must by 99.999%. As part of our commitment to government’s data integrity mandate, we need to provide a backuparchive server in another office location.   It is anticipated that the backup-archive will be updated every five minutes. Finally, the GAMS consortium has instituted a policy that permits staff to access personal emails, social media accounts or other web based applications available through standard web browsers. However, this traffic is considered as best effort service.

Interviewer: What is your estimate for the time that the HD telemedicine application can be out of service? In other words, how long can you comfortably wait for this service to be

restored if it fails?

CIO: Good question.  We would need to have this problem resolved within 10 minutes.

Interviewer: How many offices need to be accommodated within each location and should there be a difference in levels of service for individual offices?

CIO: We think that in the interests of flexibility all of the offices should be configured with the same level of service metrics. We want to have five offices in each location. In order to avoid network congestion assumes that each of the offices in all locations needs to simultaneously access each of the above services with the exception of personal emails and social media access.

A subsequent interview revealed a further requirement.

Interviewer:   Since  the  last  time we spoke, we clarified the requirements for the  secure medical  records  database.  You   requested  real  time  but  we   think  that  this  is  a  very expensive, and suggested that you accept interactive burst. CIO: What is interactive burst?

Interviewer: An interactive burst definition outlines the time that users are willing to wait    for the system to respond to a request for records which could be textual records or images. In the case of the database, we suggest that a maximum of five seconds is a reasonable

waiting period in this day and age.

CIO:  Hmmm.  This sounds OK. One further requirement that we want to consider is the interactive surgical robots that we want to  implement  in  the  future.  These  devices  enable  surgery  to  be  carried  out  using telemedicine software connected to a robot with cameras. The network needs to be fast enough to enable the the surgeon who is using equipment to remotely control a robot to feel like he is operating on the patient in close proximity. Obviously, there is a lot of logistical work to enable this to happen, but the new network needs to be able to support this future requirement into the future.