Lab description: Doctors Information Technology (DocIT) is an IT services company supporting medical practices with a variety of computer technologies to make medical offices more efficient and less costly to run. Medical offices are rapidly becoming automated with electronic medical records, automated insurance claims processing and prescription submissions, patient billing, and other typical aspects of medical practices. In this assignment, you will address only insurance claims processing; however, what you develop must be able to be generalized and expanded to these other areas of a medical practice. Your assignment is to draw an ERD to represent each phase of the development of an insurance claims processing database and to answer questions that clients might raise about the capabilities of the application the database supports in each phase.

a. The first phase deals with a few core elements. Draw an ERD to represent this initial phase, described by the following: 4

A patient is assigned a patient ID, and you need to keep track of a patients gender, date of birth, name, current address, and list of allergies.

A staff member (doctor, nurse, physicians assistant, etc.) has a staff ID, job title, gender, name, address, and list of degrees or qualifications.

A patient may be included in the database even if no staff member has ever seen the patient (e.g., family member of another patient or a transfer from another medical practice). Similarly, some staff members never have a patient contact that requires a claim to be processed (e.g., a receptionist greeting a patient does not generate a claim).

A patient sees a staff member via an appointment. An appointment has an appointment ID, a date and time of when the appointment is scheduled or when it occurred as well as a date and time when the appointment was made, and a list of reasons for the appointment.

b. As was noted in part a of this exercise the first phase, information about multiple members of the same family may need to be stored in the database because they are all patients. Actually, there is a broader need. A medical practice may need to recognize various people related to a particular patient (e.g., spouse, child, care-giver, power of attorney, an administrator at a nursing home, etc.) who can see patient information and make emergency medical decisions on behalf of the patient. Augment your answer to part a of this exercise to represent the relationships between people in the database and the nature of any relationships. 1