DATABASES AND THE INTERNET - Fundamentals of Database Management Systems - page 378

14.1 U NIVERSITY D ATA A CCESS OVER THE I NTERNET

YOUR

TURN

C onsider a university information sys-
tems environment that includes both tables with current
data and historic data in a data warehouse.

set of data types as described in this chapter. What
uses would the university have for this data and who
would want access to it? What circumstances could
occur in a university environment that would bring up
Internet database issues of performance, availability,
scalability, security, and privacy?

Q UESTION :
Describe the kinds of data that a university might want
to store and access that would be in an expanded

be intercepted and read while in transit over the Internet. Second, the collected
personal data in the company's database makes a tempting target for someone out
to steal such data. And again, the database is potentially accessible through the
company's public Web site, which brings us back to the discussion about firewalls
and such above.

14-B B APTIST M EMORIAL H EALTH C ARE

CONCEPTS

IN ACTION

B aptist Memorial Health Care Corp.,
headquartered in Memphis, TN, operates a total of 17
hospitals in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Its
flagship hospital, Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis, is a
706-bed tertiary care teaching hospital, closely affiliated
with University of Tennessee Medical School. Baptist
Memphis annually has more than 28,000 admissions,
53,000 emergency department visits, 25,000 surgeries,
and 125,000 outpatient visits. Located on the same
campus are the Baptist Heart Institute and the Baptist
Memorial Hospital for Women.
Baptist Memphis has a state-of-the-art relational
database application, ''Baptist MD,'' that was originally
implemented in 2000. Supporting approximately 1,400
physicians and physician staff employees, the central
feature of Baptist MD is a Web site on which a wide
variety of patient data can be stored. This includes patient
history, pathology reports, blood tests, and radiology
results. The site can also store and display x-ray and MRI
images. A special site feature is real-time fetal monitoring
by which a physician can remotely check on the condition
of the fetus via the Web site while the mother is in labor.
The system provides each physician with a ''My Patient''

list, from which the physician can select one of their current
patients to check their condition. The physician's office
staff also has access to the Web site for record keeping
purposes. Since the system is Web based, physicians can
check on their patients anywhere they can log onto the
Internet. In one critical case, a physician who was out of
state on vacation was contacted by the hospital and was
able to access the Web site and make a decision about
a patient.
Baptist MD is based on the Microsoft SQL Server
DBMS, running on a Compaq server. It relies on XML
to deal with all the different kinds of data in its Web
site presentations. The system by its very nature is
oriented around queries. These are menu driven with
menu selections triggering SQL queries. The relational
database's main tables are a physician table with
physician qualifications and patient admitting authority,
a patient table that contains about 45,000 records
(including a 90-day history), a results table that typically
has 10?20 test results and so forth per patient, and a users
table with additional information about the physicians and
the physician office staff employees who have access to
the database.