Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
ISSUES, CHALLENGES AND
RESEARCH PROBLEMS
other organizations/applications located outside
the physical healthcare facility.
Application performance or quality of service
has always been one of the most concern issues by
patients and system users. As healthcare provid-
ers increasingly rely on applications to perform
both routine and life supporting tasks, the need
for good performance and fast response time
from healthcare applications becomes funda-
mental. IT managers must work harder to ensure
that healthcare professionals and end-customers
receive good QoE (Quality of Experience) when
accessing content, especially considering the use of
powerful encryption methods such as SSL, which
significantly affect application performance. The
combination of the need to maintain business con-
tinuity of healthcare services along with emerging
network attacks, results in the need for IT managers
to deal with new security challenges specific to
the healthcare market. These challenges require
healthcare providers to maintain data center ser-
vice availability even when under attack, protect
information integrity and preventing data leakage,
secure healthcare sensitive information in a web
services environment, and prevent credit card theft
and fraud. Quality of live video streaming for real-
time diagnosis is another problem which has been
reported by healthcare professional recently. This
is due to various reasons, including the limitations
of the current video conference solutions such as
SightSpeed. Such video solutions are designed
primarily for business use purposes and support
only moderate video quality which is not good
enough for Epilepsy diagnosis. In addition, the
limitation of Internet bandwidth for wireless con-
nections is also another factor which limits the
quality of live video streaming. A solution which
can optimizes the quality of video over wireless
Internet connections need to be researched.
Ensuring patient data security and authenticity
is a compulsory requirement of an E-healthcare
system. Healthcare providers store and analyze
every patient's private, sensitive information,
Technical Issues and Challenges
Regardless of the rapid rate of improvement in
technology, there remain many technological
issues hindering the success of a centralized
real-time e-healthcare system. Reliability of
the wireless technologies and broadband com-
munication lines, coverage of wireless network,
interoperability between many different devices,
network bandwidth, and live-video quality for
real-time diagnosis are still issues which require
further researches. In addition, it seems that po-
tential side effects of e-healthcare equipment on
patients have been fully considered properly in
current researches.
Network coverage and reliability of wireless
standards such as 802.11x which can be imple-
mented for wireless sensor devices are still fac-
tors which limit the quality of such e-healthcare
systems. Similar problems occur with wireless
sensor devices utilizing mobile phone networks
(Varshney, 2007). Moreover, most of the Epilepsy
patients in Australia are located in rural areas,
wireless technologies seems to be the most fea-
sible network solutions allowing Epilepsy patients
in many dispersed locations to have access to
e-healthcare services. Therefore, improvements
in the quality of wireless solutions will be a key
factor which determines the quality of e-healthcare
services for Epilepsy patients in Australia.
Application availability has always been a diffi-
cult technical challenge. For healthcare providers,
the term “mission-critical applications” is more
meaningful than for other types of organizations -
whenever a healthcare mission-critical application
or service is unavailable, a patient's health is at
risk. Healthcare applications and services rely on
the availability of the network infrastructure and
(in some cases) also Internet connectivity in order
to operate correctly and clearly communicate with
Search WWH ::
Custom Search