These are qualities the My Health Records system should have as well as the constraints that the cloud based system must operate under. They have a direct impact on the cloud based system’s functionality. For the system to fully meet the use requirements for all stakeholders, it must be available, so availability is among the important non-functional requirements (Cruz & Paiva, 2016).
Availability: The cloud services vendor must guarantee that the My Health Records will have an availability percentage of 99.96 % annually, which translates to about 11 hours downtime that can be used by the provider for scheduled maintenance and other administrative activities.
Security: With the recent ransomware incident that affected health care delivery in the UK and other countries, My Health Records must be guaranteed utmost security from breaches, malware, and malicious access. Further, given how sensitive health records are, security is a very important non-functional requirement. The security should start at the access point, through highly secure and encrypted API’s. Further, the cloud provider must guarantee that all data it manages remains secure from any breaches and malicious use; this implies its physical data centers must be secure from any physical or natural disasters and any data stored in its systems must not be breached, even when making backups or moving data through the network (Castiglioni & Crudele, 2014).
Elasticity and flexibility: The health records system cloud portal must be flexible to rationalize expenses by reducing/ removing computing resources or adding them, such as disk space, memory, and CPU resources depending on the demands of the system workload. The cloud service system should be scaled up or down depending on demand.
Usability: The health record system must be easy to learn and use, from the design of the interfaces, how data is entered into the system, and how they can be accessed and manipulated. The system must be designed with user requirements in mind, such as with buttons and functions that are easy to access
Integration and Interoperability: It should be easy to integrate the cloud solution (public) with any other private resources for the My Health Records, such as physical backups or systems of records while the engagement systems such as data entry portals that are deployed to public clouds. The system should accept data and store it in a standard format from the various EHR and MHR used by various health-care providers (Bento & Aggarwal, 2013).
Adaptability: The cloud solution must be designed that new functionalities and software/ infrastructures can be added (or removed) as the needs of the users and other stakeholders change. For instance, it should be easy to change/ modify/ adjust the business processes for My Health Records
While the cloud-based My Health Records offers a good platform for unified management of health records, its strengths and weaknesses must be considered.
Significant cost reductions: The cloud solution will significantly reduce costs for managing, owning, and operating the My Health Records system; the infrastructure, software, and platforms to be used are owned by another party, from purchase to maintenance while the system owners only pay for what they use. The cloud solution eliminates usual costs, including maintaining an IT staff, electricity, hardware and software costs, and paperwork (Srinivasan, 2014).
Current technology: One of the major headaches for organizations is the frenetic pace at which technology of hardware and software changes such that firms have to replace or update their IT assets every four years on average. Cloud computing providers will provide My Health Records with the most current technologies, based on the SLA agreements as they demands increase.
Scalability: With a cloud solution, My Health Records will only pay for the services and infrastructure it uses and the hardware and software upgrades are not an issue since these grow as the My Health Records business and demands grow (Moumtzoglou & Kastania, 2014.)
Accessibility and Collaboration: because the solution is based on the web, many healthcare providers will be able to access it from any location and many people can use the system concurrently
Unavailability and Security Risk: There are chances the service provider’s systems will shut down or be damaged due to natural disasters such as fires and floods, as happened to ING bank at its data center where services were unavailable for 8 hours. The health records are very sensitive and are attractive to malicious users and can be breached, for example, using ransomware attacks for financial gain by the attackers (Dignan, 2016)
Reliable Internet service: Because cloud solutions are based on the web, Internet connection must remain reliable and constant, which is sometimes not possible. The required bandwidth is large and Internet failures, such as damages to fiber optic cables can significantly affect operations, as are slow connections at peak use.
Vendors of cloud services going out of business: Cloud service providers are also in business and with the industry facing increasing competition and being fast changing, the provider may change their business radically or even go out of business. This can be a disaster considering entire databases can be based on the cloud.
Data format: when getting back data from the cloud provider, it may be in a format that the user cannot handle; this needs to be specified and sorted before the contract is signed through the SLA document (Dhamdhere, 2014)
The different phases of a project or software together make up the system development life cycle (SDLC); the SDLC can be predictive or adaptive. The predictive SDLC makes the assumption that all the steps required can be predicted, and therefore, used to develop the approach to the project. A common predictive SDLC method is the Waterfall model (Peltier, 2014)
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Predictive SDLC |
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Advantages |
Disadvantages |
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An easy and powerful software development model with defined phases that help developers understand the ‘big picture’ for developing a software solution |
All the requirements for the software or application must be specified upfront and there is no room for any mistakes as these will be costly |
|
It is an approach that is disciplined as everything is defined before the project begins and greatly helps to save time and costs |
The scope of the project must be infinitely detailed as there is no room for making changes and adjustments once the project commences and changes are only possible by starting over again |
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The business requirements are fully defined by the sponsor and stakeholders while developers must thoroughly understand the requirements before commencing development, resulting in a robust solution that meets user requirements |
It is rigid with regard to project management and will result in key members of the development team staying idle for long periods |
The adaptive SDLC works on the principle that the scope of the project can, and eventually, will change due to many reasons, including changes in business processes or new user requirements being unearthed.
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Agile SDLC |
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Advantages |
Disadvantages |
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Software/ applications are quickly developed at the early stages of the life cycle |
The iteration phases are rigid and there is no overlap |
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It is highly flexible and therefore changes are much less costly |
There can be problems with the system architecture since not all the requirements are defined and documented upfront |
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Testing and debugging is easy as this is done with smaller iterations and the end result is the final software with few or no bugs and problems |
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Risk management is also easy as risks are identified and managed during the small iterations |
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Every iteration is a milestone that is easy to manage |
(Satzinger, Jackson & Burd, 2016)
Based on the above analysis, the best and most recommended approach to developing a solution, including the My Health Records is to use the adaptive SDLC method, such as using the SCRUM methodology. This is because even with the most detailed and extensive user requirement analysis, new requirements always pop up and the adaptive SDLC is flexible enough to allow several changes
References
Bento, A. M., & Aggarwal, A. (2013). Cloud computing service and deployment models: Layers and management. Hershey, PA: Business Science Reference.
Castiglioni, F., & Crudele, M. (2014, June 30). Manage non-functional requirements for cloud applications. Retrieved May 26, 2017, from https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-bluemix-nfr/
Cruz, A. M. R., & Paiva, S. (2016). Modern software engineering methodologies for mobile and cloud environments. Hershey, PA, USA: Information Science Reference, an imprint of IGI Global.
Dignan, L. (2016, May 25). Public cloud computing vendors: A look at strengths, weaknesses, big picture. Retrieved May 26, 2017, from https://www.zdnet.com/article/public-cloud- computing-vendors-a-look-at-strengths-weaknesses-big-picture/
Dhamdhere, S. N. (2014). Cloud computing and virtualization technologies in libraries. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.
Moumtzoglou, A., & Kastania, A. (2014). Cloud computing applications for quality health care delivery.
Peltier, T. R. (2014). Information security fundamentals. Boca Raton [Florida] : CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group
Satzinger, J. W., Jackson, R. B., & Burd, S. D. (2016). Systems analysis and design in a changing world. Boston: Cengage Learning.
Srinivasan, S. (2014). Cloud Computing Basics. New York, NY : Springer New York
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