Security Requirement Analysis - New Smile Dentists - Research Paper Example

This telecommunication network should enable the dentists to work within the offices and also from their laptops while at the patients’ homes. It should allow only the five dentists and twelve dental assistants to access the medical records of any patient, and the daily schedule, and to receive or send a patient's record even when out of the office. The designed network should meet HIPAA requirements by maintaining a high degree of confidentiality regarding the patient’s details (Claise and Wolter 2007).
In this telecommunication network, the patient's records should be confidential. It should be accessed only by dentists and dental assistants. The firm’s database should restrict access to patient records by asking for a password first from the users trying to access it.

Then after authentication, the information can be accessed. The authorized users should have a unique password which should be confidential. This network should integrate all the functional requirements with the needs of human users e.g. dentists, dental assistants, receptions, and also patients who wish intend to seek services from this dental firm. Dentists must protect the dental health of their patients at all costs by completing all dental procedures in progress within the clinic and even after the prescription. They should remain available for emergencies and it is therefore vital that this telecommunication network allows the dentists and the dental assistant to exercise human resource mobility.

In designing a telecommunication network that will meet the needs of the stationary offices and the mobile doctors we need sixteen desktop computers, five laptops, ten office phones, five modems, five printers, five scanners, networking cables, five- eight pin switches, five routers, fiber optic connection in the city and also the world wide web targeting patients from other areas. The dental x-ray machine should be available in the dental laboratory. Assuming in every New Smile dental clinic office we have at least five rooms; reception, dentist’s room, dental assistant’s room (open office system), dental laboratory, and the server room.

In the server room, we have the server connected to the router. The router helps to connect the local area interconnection to the city’s fiber optic connection thus the metropolitan area network. One of the clinics can be made the headquarters and the server here is connected via the router to the wide-area network-wide. All computers and computing resources in a stationary office are connected via cables to the switch in the server room which is connected to the router.

At reception, we have one desktop, an office phone, a scanner, and a printer. The desktop is connected via a networking cable to the switch in the server room. The office phone is a mobile phone. The scanner and the printer are also connected to the local area network via cables. The scanner is for changing the hard copy into soft copy, especially for documents received from other sources other than any of this firm’s clinics.

In the dentists’ offices, we have a mobile office phone, desktops, a laptop, and a modem. When the dentist is in the office he can use the desktop while on mobile services he can use the laptop and via modem access the records online. In his absence from the office, any other dentist can come and access the records from the office using the desktop.
The dental assistant office has two desktops connected to the server if there are more than two in the office at each particular time they can use the laptop. In the laboratory, the digital X-ray machine and the desktop are connected to the local area network. A network design diagram showing this telecommunication design is shown on the next page (White 2010).

This proposed multi-location telecommunication network design for New Smiles Dental Clinic is a risk of not meeting the expected effectiveness. This could result from confidential information bleach such as the dentist's and dental assistants' passwords which put the patients’ records at risk of being altered. To minimize the occurrence of this risk professional ethics should be maintained by all dentists as stipulated in HIPAA specifications. Unethical behaviors should not be tolerated.
The telecommunication network may also fail to be effective if the internet service provider is not reliable. The feasibility study should be done and a thorough evaluation of the alternative internet provider should be done before the implementation phase to ensure we choose the most reliable (Oppenheimer 2010). All dentists, dental assistants, and receptionists should be computer-literate for the designed network to be effective.

In conclusion, this is a major step towards success in the New Smiles Dental Clinic. A telecommunication network will enable this firm to reach a larger number of patients, do further research in dental medicine as well as acquire worldwide standards in competition and service delivery. Further expansion of this firm will require a more functional specification and thus adaptive maintenance on this telecommunication network (White 2010). Read More