Exploiting Cloud-Based Personal Health Information Systems in Practicing Patient Centered Care Model

Abstract

The introduction of new emerging healthcare models, such as patient-centered care, pharmaceutical care, and chronic care model, are changing how people think about health and of patients themselves These healthcare models need technology solutions that support the co-operation within patient’s healthcare team, provide a platform for sharing patient’s healthcare data among the healthcare team, and provide a mechanism for disseminating relevant educational material for the patient and the healthcare team. Unfortunately current health information technology solutions only provide the connection between patients and healthcare providers, and thus do not support the new emerging healthcare models. Instead, cloud-based healthcare delivery models will potentially have more impact on developing appropriate technology for the new healthcare models. In this paper, we describe our work on designing a personal health information system, which supports patient remote monitoring and the new emerging healthcare models as well. The key idea is to develop the system by integrating relevant e-health tools through a shared ontology and to exploit the flexibility of cloud computing in its implementation. In developing the ontology we have used semantic web technologies such as OWL and RDF.