Case Study - West Coast University Medical Center

Recently, a medical diagnostic system development has been a controversial issue in the medical world. Due to majority benefits of this kind of system for the medical world, it has been a valuable to find perfect Medical diagnostic system that can really serve the medical field.

Humans always make mistakes. However, when a matter related to a person's life, it is worth to reduce these mistakes as much as possible. For example, doctors are such humans who getting tired from any mental work, forgetting crucial details of a problem, begin unable to remember large amounts of data quickly, recalling stored information in memory slowly..., etc. All these natural features of doctors need an Expert System as Medical Diagnostic System that can advance medical diagnostic process.

Medical Diagnostic System is one of many projects that can either success or fail. The failure can happen when a wrong is made during project stages, especially misunderstand user requirements. So, I think Project of West Coast University Medical Center failed because of two reasons. First, lack of the desired results which the customers want. Second, some benefits do not satisfy customer needs. A project must satisfy customer needs; if not, the project easily can be a disappointment. So, it is very essential to make a clear user requirements definition in a system and determinate which of them are the system objectives or the system operational modes. In addition, it must determine constraints and interface of the system with other systems. This means more understanding of the user requirements, more ability for contractor to raise good solutions. Unfortunately, this concept did not apply in the comprehensive medical diagnostic system in West Coast Medical Center. As a result, benefits of the system were irrelevant, and doctors complained about the system. So, the system had a lack of use, because it was undesired to the customers of the project. Especially, West Coast Medical Center has a great reputation in the medical field, and its diagnostic system must be high level of performance to use accurately. The doctors, of course, wanted a system that improves their performance. So, if the system missed of some features, it will not give support for them. What is more, it is really risky to diagnose patients' medical symptoms via a failed system.

What caused this misunderstanding of user's requirements is a result of the absences of some of the steps in the conception phase in this project. One of these steps is Needs Definitions. Even The hospital IS group did interviews with users who were involved in this project, they still had to collect more information and data especially from doctors. I think they had to ask more questions for the users to get a clear understanding for their needs as possible. The contractor must decide if needs are feasible or not, and more data helps him to decide about possibility