In my last article on Software Design Principles I talked about a methodology to use when designing a software project.  For this article I want to go a bit lower level, less “big picture”, and restrict the subject matter to the realm of database design.  In my experience most of the applications I write start [...]

Reliability -
When it comes to healthcare, the primary focus of any patient data is that the information is both available and accurate at all times. Some businesses can afford downtime, even for long periods, but when the data is patient related, the data involved could become critical or even vital. For this reason, in my [...]

Security
Even before the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was signed in 1996 the confidentiality of patient data had a high priority. Patient records were private and policies covering patient data restricted access to them to specific groups of people. But with technological advances such as The Internet, and public wireless network hardware being pushed in [...]

Versatility

The Versatility of a database is dependent on several factors; Scalability, Interoperability and Usability.
Client/Server databases, normally, can be scaled, that is, you can design your system to allow for extreme growth in the number of users, and the amount of data stored by the system.  Fifteen years ago Scalability was not a primary consideration of most databases.  In [...]

Longevity
Many people I work with do not like changing their routine, this is nothing new, but what makes the healthcare industry different is that there seems to be no pressure on the business itself to force very many changes, unlike more technology based companies which are forced to change their procedures in order to become [...]

Performance
Normally Performance would be the primary concern for most business applications that use databases.  After all application performance was one of the necessities that brought about the development of some databases.  There are some higher priorities in healthcare though, but performance is still one of the highest.
One of the things to look at when [...]

Maintainability
Unless you have worked in an environment where Software Engineering accounts for a large portion of the Services or Sales, maintainability, in my opinion, does not get enough attention.  It may not be at the top of the list but its priority can most times be placed above cost.  In a healthcare environment this problem [...]