Personal Health Record Data-Driven Integration of Heterogeneous Data

Abstract

AbstractEvidence-based health care is a desired concept today, especially in these pandemic circumstances. However, the patients’ data are deficient, especially for patients with chronic diseases and their previous medical treatments and diagnosis if they must be treated in other institutions outside of the country of leaving or private institutions. All data for patients are stored in the institutional database as electronic health data (EHR), owned by healthcare institutions, hospitals, and medical practitioners. It is almost impossible to integrate such data because of the different low treatment of personal health data, especially when the patients are from different countries. One solution for providing evidence-based health care and medicine is creating a personal health record (PHR) owned and managed securely by the patient as a central point of the PHR data-driven integration of all data connected with the patient that are mostly heterogeneous. All data types for the patient’s health and medical condition can be integrated into cloud-based PHR owned and managed by the patient to provide their data with them where the patient resides. In addition, the lack of information on genetic disorders of patients of which they are not aware can contribute to an increase in the risk of patient death. This fact also leads to the need to integrate medical and health data with various biological and omics data, especially in pandemic circumstances. Although the urgent need for health care and medical data integration is apparent, personal data protection laws are rigorous. They do not allow much progress in the field without implementing healthcare data security and privacy standards. The proposed solution for this issue is establishing a personal health record as an integrative system for the patient applying HL7 (FHIR) standards. The well-known medical codding systems promise future data integrations. In addition, some attempts are made to associate diseases with data obtained from external environmental sensors that measure disease-related data. Using these data, called exposure data or exposome, one can clarify the increasing symptoms of diseases influenced by external factors. In the paper, we highlight a cloud-based system—a model of PHR-based health care that collects different data sources such as EHR, health information systems, and sensor measurement into the PHR. Medical data, PHR, numerous biological and exposome data, and data obtained from sensors, are considered, stored, and managed on the cloud.KeywordsPersonal health recordsElectronic health recordsInternet of medical thingsPHR data-driven integrationTranslational bioinformatics