Background

National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) was established in 1895. There are

approximate 8,000 outpatients, 300 emergency cases, daily on average, and around 2,200

beds for inpatients. The NTUH portal is the main entrance to various aggregated systems

supporting operations for NTUH staffs, physicians as well as educational purposes. The

portal provides essential directions for users to browse over NTUH Intranet behind the

firewalls. It involves extensible difficulties:

1) There are over 30, rapidly increasing, major independent systems in NTUH. The systems

encompass many resources; it becomes cumbersome for medical staff to authenticate every

time while attempting to access a new resource. The legacy or previous portal did not

support SSOS. Users need to keep separate identifications, passwords to execute different

systems individually.

In addition, the multiple login processes disturb medical staffs. It also generates resistances

and causes the system’s usage downgrade or undesirable. There were cases that doctors

avoid the login process, and simply provide usernames, passwords to the assistants and ask

them to operate directly. The situation raises security concerns regarding the correctness of

patient’s records and data entered. Later, it may generate threats to patient’s health or life. A

Single Sign-On facility is a must.

2) The previous portal main page contains scrollable extension menu (Weng et al., 2007;

Goodman, 2003) to support function linkages. As NTUH users’ operation demands increase,

the number of linkages, steady increments, is over 300 currently. The scrollable menu is not

spatial sufficiently, well organized. Thus, the menu utilization is not convenient.

3) The existing portal has been implemented at server side ASP scripting technologies. Any

ASP page modification only requires uploading onto web servers for menu deployment.

However, the newly designed portal is implemented in ASP.NET with C# programming

language. C# is a compiling language. If any menu altered, the server side programs have to

be re-compiled and re-deployed. The menu modification efforts increase significantly.

Therefore, more efficient approaches ought to be brought up and enhanced under the new

environment.

4) Because of lacking maintenance, the legacy portal contains failure links as well as

redundant entrances in the previous scrollable extension menu.

Related Work