ABC Healthcare chain has to manage all their hospitals in a specific country. They are run by one headquarter and various panel hospitals in a country. They plan to extend their services to neighboring countries rather than just the locals. Therefore, they are taking the patients from neighboring countries as well and hence need to interact/coordinate with various insurance providers operating within and outside the country. Dealing with insurance providers from abroad effectively leads them to limit the services provision only to the neighboring countries sharing border with them. Every hospital is responsible for its internal operations that is managed by their local server. The patient and their treatment records are managed by the local servers however the revenue and insurance records have been monitored and managed by headquarter of ABC Healthcare. The operations of head quarters are supposed to be increasing very rapidly by the inclusion of insurance companies from neighboring countries. Such an increase of operations depend on the number of insurance providers from various neighboring countries and hence is unknown. Handling such a scenario requires an important consideration to accommodate the needs of dynamic data scalability to resume un-interrupted services by ABC Healthcare. The acceptance of insurance claims are received by headquarters and accordingly the relevant hospitals are informed to proceed with the treatment. By the end of every day i.e. at midnight between 12 am to 12:15 am, headquarter compiles the total bills against the insurance claim to be sent to the insurance providers. In exchange of patient history and potential consultation of diseased case, the hospitals often need to coordinate with each other. Moreover in case of operations based on acceptance of insurance claims, headquarter needs to coordinate with hospitals. Headquarter also coordinates with insurance companies and manages the billing procedure. The current infrastructure of the ABC Healthcare is sufficient to handle the current operational needs. However, they can foresee the growing trend of insurance claims from neighboring countries. In such a case, they will have to scale up their services to meet the growing operational need. The challenge in such scalability is that the insurance claims on certain period within a year is very high whereas it is low in the remaining period of year. It may be noted that ABC Healthcare do not want to spend much on computational infrastructure and relies on the existing one to fulfill their desired business extensions. Such a scenario requires client-server architecture to be established either as centralized or decentralized or distributed that can be extended to modern infrastructure options. The simple definitions of such possible architectures are as following.

Centralized: One server handles all the clients and provides them relevant services. Decentralized: Multiple servers handle their relevant clients and provide services to all of them. Distributed: Multiple servers handle their relevant clients and provide services to all of them. At the same time these servers can coordinate with one another.

Automated systems at hospitals as well as headquarter require a huge storage space to manage the patients records effectively on their data servers during peak hours. For reliability of data, backups are desired to be taken at regular intervals. The bandwidth has to be high so that the backups are to be taken in a tight and short time schedule. The backup strategy can be predefined scheduled (daily, weekly or monthly) or as per updated record. This will help in retaining the system availability most of the time and ensured continuous services. Apart from the other concerns, securing the transactions is one of the major concerns of the insurance claims as it involves payments through third party services as well as confidential customer data. To ensure quality of services, appropriate efficiency, security and live support services have to be provided. (a) Analyze Case Study critically and suggest the specialist underling client-server architectures or the updates for the following. i) Between ABC Healthcare headquarter and their hospital ii) Amongst various hospitals to handle their patients iii) If dynamic scalability is required in case of limited capability of existing servers to handle growing number customers? (b) Considering the overall architecture of the systems elaborated in case study 1, is it a suitable distribution of responsibilities amongst headquarter and the subsequent hospitals? Provide the reason for your consideration.