The Role of Resource Awareness in Medical Information System Life Cycle

During the process of medical information system development, resource awareness is neglected. It is often assumed that the underlying hardware will always have enough memory, processing power, and network bandwidth. Unfortunately, this approach seems not so feasible in every case, and these assumptions, if proven wrong, will harm the initial development run, a later system upgrade, and life cycle in general. This paper aims to raise a resource awareness problem that could still influence all information system deployment and maintenance steps. As an example, we described the influence of the general hardware and network limitations on the information system design, functionality update process, and external system integration. Our research results are a set of guidelines that should be applied to support resource awareness, as an important part of the system design.