Abstract
We introduce a Personal Health Book application that is used as a portable repository for Personal Health Records (PHR) in order to alleviate healthcare organizational problems in developing countries. The Personal Health Book application allows low literate people to access and carry their own medical history from a rural healthcare provider to an urban healthcare provider. This will improve the efficiency of medical care and lower costs for health clinics in underserved areas. This paper introduces a software application that can be ported onto a USB Smart Card or/and managed by smartphone or personal computer connected to cloud computing environment. The Portable Health Book application aims to ease the problem of interoperability between health clinics by accepting any file format and contents and applies a decomposed database to categorize, group and reorganize the data. Querying the application’s database, the consumer can create a unified report presentation that is understandable by the consumer, family, and healthcare provider. We tested the Personal Health Book framework by importing PHRs in an extensible markup language (XML) format with a basic structure, without checking the PHR content from the Grameen Portable Health Clinic database in Bangladesh and from different departments from a hospital in Japan. The Personal Health Book was able to generate a human readable output as its database reorganize and store any type of PHR including sensor device data.
Highlights
The introduction of an affordable and small Personal Health Book software application that stores Personal Health Records can help alleviate healthcare organizations‟ problems in developing countries.Personal Health Records (PHR) are a set of computer-based tools that allow people to access and coordinate their lifelong health information and make appropriate parts of it available to those who need it [1,2]
Consortium) and allow consumers to maintain their health information on private online accounts accessed by a login ID and password; Integrated PHRs with Electronic Health Records (EHR) where a healthcare provider combines patient entered content with EHR data [6]
The Personal Health Book (PHB) test results demonstrate that PHR XML files can be imported, the patients‟ characteristics and medical data stored in a decomposed database and human readable reports can be generated
Summary
The introduction of an affordable and small Personal Health Book software application that stores Personal Health Records can help alleviate healthcare organizations‟ problems in developing countries.Personal Health Records (PHR) are a set of computer-based tools that allow people to access and coordinate their lifelong health information and make appropriate parts of it available to those who need it [1,2]. PHR systems were developed in the late 1990s to target patients who were travelling and needed healthcare and for situations where patients were not able to provide their health information [3,4], or have communication difficulties. Three types of PHRs have become available [5] These include: stand-alone formats (PC, USB drive), where consumers store health information on personal computers but lack the ability to exchange information between consumers and healthcare provides; Web formats that are managed by third parties Consortium) and allow consumers to maintain their health information on private online accounts accessed by a login ID and password; Integrated PHRs with Electronic Health Records (EHR) where a healthcare provider (such as MyHealthVet of the US Department of Veteran Affairs) combines patient entered content with EHR data [6]. From a literature review of 28 articles the common challenges for the use of PHRs include: data accuracy, data privacy and security, digital divide, and literacy issues
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