Supporting Mobile Health Clinics: The Children’s Health Fund of New York City

Name Kernell R. Salisi Course BSIT 313

Case Study No. 1 - 4

Title of the Case Study: Supporting Mobile Health Clinics: The Children’s Health Fund of New York City

Introduction

The mission to provide comprehensive health care to the nation's medically underserved children is the main goal of the Children's Health Fund (CHF). CHF develops a Mobile Medical Clinic (MMC) to achieve their goal, helping people specially homeless children. To conduct this critically medical objectives in 15 to 17 states in United States and the District of Columbia, they faced different trials or difficulties. One of these is network availability and reliability. the number 1 networking requirement is that remotely access of data and people need to be available. In a system like this huge organization, network or connection to each other to collaborate all the information are needed is very important.

Background of the Case

In 1987 at New Year City, a 36 - to 44 - foot long blue vans, designed to provide a full range of pediatric primary health care. It is routinely visit low - income neighborhood, homeless and domestic violence shelter, not only giving medical services, but it also been deployed to response to the public health crises or emergencies. This "clinic van" called the Mobile Medical Clinic (MMCs).

By 2009, some of the MMCs had been successful in service for many year but time passed by and having new technologies, the MMC is not obsolete and lacked of some the newest features such as modular networking cabling and upgraded electrical generators.

In the us today, it is still not unusual to find paper - based record keeping in physician practice. There are 2 software package that develop and maintained by the vendor these are the PMR or the Practice Management Software and the EMR or Electronic Medical Record.

The data rate must support the transfer of text - based files and the transmission of high - density medical images such as X-ray required much higher throughput rates and therefore provides a biggest challenge to MMCs. The latency is a killer for MMCs so that the CHF decided to tried different network solution for this problem. First equipped a satellite-antenna system in the roof-top of the vans. But in some situation the satellite communication also unacceptable large latency due to the nature and design. Second they tried is the wireless modem to access to the internet but this services provided a 3rd Generation (3G) wireless services that with a "fall - back" capability to 2.5 G wireless services in areas where 3G services was not available. Obviously the disadvantages of this approach are the delay in accessing