Documenting Business Rules

• ·         A type of business rule that indicates the types of information to be stored and how the information elements interrelate. – structural business rule
• ·         A formalized statement of the usual, customary, or generalized course of action or behavior for a business. – business rule
• ·         A type of business rule that is workflow or business process related. (e.g., A has to happen before B, and then C has to happen at the same time as D.) This is also called a process business rule. –procedural business rule

1. Members of your design team have been working with the local hospital to develop a data model for their need to store information about patients, the patient's room number, the patient's doctor, drug prescriptions given, and specific drug information.

However, they all went on vacation and left you to figure out the model. They also failed to give you any of their documentation other than the entities and attributes illustrated here. Instead of going back to the hospital, which could reflect poorly on your company, you’re going to have to think about everything you know about hospitals!

Your task is to generate a list of business rules you think were used to arrive at the information shown here. Use your imagination. List 10 structural rules, 5 procedural rules, and 2 programmatic rules (rules to be addressed by computer applications in the future). State each rule as a single sentence.

Based on your set of business rules, draw the ERD.

·         Each floor in all buildings has a VIP room which should be allocated to normal patient only when all other normal rooms are full. – procedural business rule, need programming

·         Patient, who has past dues, will not be admitted, if there is a balance from past admissions – procedural business rule, needs programming

·         When a Physician goes on leave, all his patients are directed to one of the junior doctor in his team, available on the day of admission. – procedural business rule, need programming

·         If a prescription is raised for a drug, while giving medicine, if generic version in stock, it will be issued to the patient, unless doctor mandated use of branded drug in follow-up call by pharmacist. – procedural business rule, need programming

·         If the drug being issues to patient is going to expire in next 6 months, drug won’t be issued and drug label won’t be generated. – procedural business rule, need programming

·         When a DrugLabel is generated, means patient is issued a batch of dose, no of available refill reduce by one – procedural business rule, need programming

o   A room is identified by room number and building number, in same building there can be no rooms with same number – structural business rule

o   A room can be VIP room or ordinary room – structural business rule

o   Each room has the capacity of one patient – structural business rule

o   Patient may be issued a room, or not. – structural business rule

o   Patient must be issued a unique patient number at the time of registration. - structural business rule

o   A patient must be assigned a unique physician while admission – structural business rule

o   A Physician has unique physician number – structural business rule

o   Physician must have a valid license number to be employee of this hospital.- structural business rule

o   A Physician may have a senior Physician under whose supervision he works – structural business rule 

o   A prescription has unique prescription number – structural business rule

o   If a doctor prescribes multiple drugs, for each drug he will raise separate prescription – structural business rule

o   A prescription is bound to a unique patient – structural business rule

o   A drug must mention, whether it is generic or not – structural business rule.

o   Drug label must mention the expiration date of pills included in the container. - structural business rule

o   A drug label must be issued with prescription – structural business rule

o   No drug label may not generated for a prescription, if patient condition improves before the drug label is generated, but doctor don’t cancel such prescription, just in case symptoms come back soon. – structural business rule.

Even though DrugLabel (if seen as a print out) generated contains a lot of information from Prescription, I won’t repeat information, since it has prescriptionId in the database.