Database Design and Management Report: Baltare Medical Center

This report addresses the database design and management for Baltare Medical Center, which currently uses Excel for record keeping. The report identifies key stakeholders, including the medical center owners, patients, doctors, and nursing staff, and anticipates potential issues such as data privacy, security, and staff competency. It outlines questions to be posed to the owners, like their future plans and resource availability. The report then details mitigation strategies for the identified concerns, such as password policies, data encryption, and staff training. It also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of using a relational database, including its simple data structure, limited data redundancy, and support for SQL queries, as well as its limitations in representing complex data types and implementing recursive queries. The report references Dennis and Haley (2012) and a website on relational database strengths and weaknesses.

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DATABASE DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT
Student’s Name:
Course title:
Date of submission:

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Baltare Medical Center is a local medical center that started in 2016. Baltare offers a wide
range of medical services including in and out patient. The Medical Center is currently using
Microsoft Excel for its record keeping. The owners of Baltare John and Mary Smith would
like a more efficient way to store patient records and report generation.
Thinking about stakeholders in terms of our project, what issues and
concerns do you foresee arising?
According to Dennis and Haley (2012), a stakeholder is a person or group that can
affect or be affected by a new system or project. Main stakeholders are the project
champions, the system users and the executive management. The main stakeholders in this
project include the medical center owners –John and Mary Smith, patients, doctors and
nursing staffs.
Some of the foreseen issues and concerns include
i. Patient data and medical records privacy
ii. Data security
iii. Scalability of the proposed system
iv. Competency of the existing staff to use the system i.e. whether the staff have
basic computer operating skills
What questions should we ask the owners?
John and Mary Smith are the champion stakeholders in this project. Some of the
major questions to them include:
1. Whether they have the time and resources to support the project

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2. Whether they are willing to promote the project amongst the staffs and other
stakeholders
3. What are their future plans for the Medical Center in terms of expansion i.e. is there
plans to open new branches?
How would you anticipate attending to the issues and concerns?
The following ways shall be used to attend to the issues and concerns raised by stakeholders:
Issues and Concerns Mitigation process
Patient data and medical records
privacy
- All system users shall have specific access to the
system using a username and a password
- There shall be a password policy to control
password usage
- Medical records shall be stored in encrypted
formats
Data security - All medical records shall be encrypted formats
Scalability of the proposed
system
- The system shall be developed with future in mind
leaving room for accommodation and integration
with other systems
Competency of the existing
staff to use the system
- All users shall be trained on how to use the system
- The system shall be tested for usability from
novice to expert levels
What are the strengths and weaknesses of our database?
The proposed system shall use a relational database. Some of the strengths and weaknesses of
a relational database include:
Strength:
 It supports a simple data structure -Tables
 It limits data redundancy
 It has no data inconsistencies
 It provides physical data independence

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 It is easy to expand the database
 It supports ad hoc queries using the SQL query language.
Weakness:
 Real world objects and their relationships are poorly presented since objects are
fragmented into smaller relations through normalization
 It is difficult to present complex data types
 It is very difficult to implement recursive queries

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References
Dennis A., Haley B. W. (2012). SYSTEM ANALYSIS AND DESIGN Fifth Edition. USA: John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Strengths and weaknesses of relational DBMSs. Viewed 20 September 2017, <
www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~pchatter/resources/html/rdb_strengths_weaknesses.html>