Cloud Enabled Standard Electronic Health Record Architecture for Indian Healthcare Sector

Abstract

The current health care system in India has a three-tier structure for delivering health care services to different strata of society. Individual patient health information is scattered across many levels of the health care system in which consistent data availability at the point of care is very much essential. Currently, many healthcare sectors use hospital-centric approach to maintain and manage hospital information in which patient health information cannot be shared with another hospital at the point of care. In this work, a cloud-enabled standard Electronic Health Record (EHR) architecture is proposed, which uses the patient-centric approach in which distributed patient health records are made available in an integrated and unified manner at the point of care. Health data recording and reporting are done using standard codings such as SNOMED-CT, LOINC, DICOM and NDC. For unique identification of patient in different levels of health care system EHR system is linked with Aadhaar which enables portability of patient and gives easy access to the patient health records in local, regional and national level database. Also, Security Assertion Markup Language-Single Sign On(SAML-SSO) authentication model is adopted to access multiple services of health information after signing in once which improves the security and increase the access speed of the health information service.