CareFor hospital is one of the popular hospitals in Scotland with branches all over the world. The
hospital is known for its dedicated staff and high quality services. It has a number of specialized
departments, such as Cardiology, Hematology, Nephrology, and Oncology, each equipped with
experienced doctors. The hospital provides various facilities, such as CT scan, Ultrasound, and Xray.
New patients need to register themselves first and pay a fee prior to the doctor's appointment.
If the doctor prescribes a test, the patient needs to pay the fee of the test before the test.
Currently, the hospital management maintains details of the patients, doctors, and departments
manually. The details of the patients are stored in the Patient file and consist of name and ID of
the patient, name and code of the department, fees, and name of the doctor the patient wishes to
visit. Similarly, the details of the doctors are stored in the Doctors file. These details consist of the
doctor's name, ID, and salary, department name and ID, name of the department head, and the
doctor's prescribed fees to be charged from the patients. In addition, the details of the
departments are stored in the Department file and consist of department name and ID, associated
doctor's names and IDs, and name of the department head.
Recently, the hospital has started a free health check-up camp on the weekends. This has led to a
tremendous increase in the number of patients visiting the hospital. Consequently, it has become
very difficult for the management to maintain the patient records manually. Therefore, the
management has decided to use a hospital management system to maintain the records of the
patients, doctors, and departments online. It has also approached HighTech Inc. for developing
the hospital management application.
At HighTech Inc., a team of developers have been assigned the task of creating the required
application. Jim Houston, being the project manager, analyzes the project requirements and
identifies various components required to create the desired application. Being the database
developer in the team, you have been assigned the task of analyzing the application and creating
the required databases and tables.
You need to analyze the various files in the given scenario and perform the following tasks:
1. Identify the entities that may cause data redundancy. Justify your answer. [5 Marks]
2. Identify the problems that may arise due to data redundancy in the given scenario. Justify your
answer. [5 Marks]