Lesson 2 - The Ecosystem

According to Google, an ecosystem is a community of living organisms interacting with their physical environment in a specific area.

As The Becoming a Programmer Series is teaching you how to build Business Information Systems, I thought it wise to create a fictitious healthcare ecosystem we can use throughout the series.

We will be focusing on five organizations, each interdependent on the others.

Government Healthcare

Government Healthcare is the center of everything health-related. Government Healthcare is a lot of typing, so I will call it GovCare henceforth.

In the big picture, GovCare has three jobs:

. GovCare maintains a list of all members and their treatments and prescription medication.
. GovCare maintains a list (called a formulary) of all surgical items and drugs they are prepared to pay for.
. GovCare maintains a list of treatments and procedures they are prepared to pay for.

Medical Practice

The Medical Practice is where the doctors hang out. The doctor treats patients, using surgical items and drugs in the process, and writes them prescriptions to be dispensed by the pharmacy.

Once a month, the practice bills GovCare for procedures done and surgical items and drugs used. GovCare will only pay for members and items on the formularies. The patient pays out of pocket for procedures and items not on the formularies.

Pharmacy

The Pharmacy is where the pharmacists hand out. The pharmacist looks up the patient's prescription from GovCare and dispenses accordingly.

The pharmacist may also render services that do not require the patient to visit a doctor.

Once a month, the pharmacy bills GovCare for procedures done and surgical items and drugs dispensed. Again, GovCare will only pay for members and items on the formularies. The patient pays out of pocket for procedures and items not on the formularies.

Supplier

Both Practice and Pharmacy order their stock from the Supplier. The supplier may need access to the GovCare formularies to know what items and drugs to keep.

Once orders are filled, they need to be delivered to the Practices and Pharmacies.

Courier

This is where the Courier comes into play. They collect the shipments from the Supplier and deliver them to the Practices and Pharmacies.

Communication

To ensure that this ecosystem runs smoothly, proper communication is needed.

Now in the old days, all communication was either in person or by mail.

Once the telephone became a thing, things happened a lot faster.

Again, once email became a thing, things happened even faster.

These days we are cool, so we don't call or send email anymore. Originally it was, "My people will call your people." Now it is, "My app will call your app."

We will look at this interaction between systems in great detail later.

Conclusion

As you can deduct from the above ecosystem, all five of these organizations need Business Information Systems, and these systems need to communicate with each other to some extent.

In The Becoming a Programmer Series, I will teach you how to build these types of systems and how they can interact with each other.

Please note that it is a slow, but deliberate process. So be patient and take things one step at a time.