NETWORK SECURITY

Network Security

Network Security

In the fast moving world of a hospital, the old days of taking out a pen and scribbling down data upon a patient's charts that no one could read except the doctor that wrote it are gone. In today's hospitals the use of hand held devices have replaced the clipboards. Now, doctors and nurses can up-date a patient's chart, while they enter the data, the pharmacy is filling the prescriptions and a note is sent to the nurse that there is a change to the patient's data. Medications are dispensed using computer aided equipment all in the name of providing better care to the patient while saving money for the hospital. Our goal is to find suitable server-side software that is required to be installed on the hospital's servers to support access by the hospital doctors to patients' information using their cellular phones or PDAs while they are not in the hospital. As described above this technology allows advanced and more rapid care by doctors for their patients in the hospital environment. Using their cell phones and PDA's the care is more advanced and rapid because messages can be received faster as well as urgent matters.

Since patient's information is private and protected by U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). How does the hospital ensure that the data is kept private? With the use of both server and client side software that protects the patient's data. We will look at some of the software that hospitals may employ and the applications they provide. The following is a comparison of our research and our decision of what would be the optimum choice for the hospitals server side software needs.

Black BerryOne of the more widely known hand held devices is the Black Berry. In this we knew that it's a great way to access email, text-based web browsing, calendaring and even mobile phone services. With the addition of both server and client side software applications this hand held device can become a doctor's right arm.

Dr. Sankaran, Krishnan, Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics from the Children's Hospital, Westchester Medical Center talking about the IBM Blackberry project . . . “It definitely improved the response time, and of course, medical errors would be diminished when you have more information on the patient rather than guessing as to what really happened.” (IBM E Magazine, 2005)Another use for Black Berries within the hospital environment is to enable children to keep up with there school work while have an extended stay at the hospital. One example of this is the Royal Children's Hospital Education Institute (RCHEI) they have developed and employed an innovative model providing the continued educations of children while hospitalized. The paper written by Fels, D.I., Shrimpton, B., Robertson, M. (2003).described the statement “Kids in hospital, kids in school” and was presented during the EdMedia 2003 in Hawaii. (Fels, D.I., Shrimpton, B., & Robertson, M., 2003)The Black Berry Enterprise Server v4.1 provides a centralized administration console that enables IT staff to manage ...