The Role of Resource Awareness in Medical Information System Life Cycle

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of resource awareness in the development and maintenance of medical information systems, highlighting hardware and network limitations that can impact system lifecycle and proposing guidelines to address these issues.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of resource awareness in medical information system development and provides practical guidelines to incorporate this consideration into system design.

Findings

Resource limitations significantly affect system design and updates.

Guidelines for supporting resource awareness in system development.

Hardware and network constraints influence system integration.

Abstract

During the process of medical information system development, resource awareness is neglected. It is often assumed that the underlying hardware will always have enough memory, processing power, and network bandwidth. Unfortunately, this approach seems not so feasible in every case, and these assumptions, if proven wrong, will harm the initial development run, a later system upgrade, and life cycle in general. This paper aims to raise a resource awareness problem that could still influence all information system deployment and maintenance steps. As an example, we described the influence of the general hardware and network limitations on the information system design, functionality update process, and external system integration. Our research results are a set of guidelines that should be applied to support resource awareness, as an important part of the system design.