A Service-Oriented Model for Personal Health Records

Personal health records (PHRs) have received widespread attention as a tool for people to store and manage their own or their family's health records. Today PHRs are provided by a variety of players, including health care systems or hospitals, health plans, employers, and technology vendors. Traditional PHR systems are institution specific and have not been concerned with the interoperability and privacy of PHRs when interacting with other systems. The paper reported here seeks to address this challenge by presenting a service-oriented model for PHRs. In this study, we examine the challenges faced in the integration of existing electronic medical record (EMR) systems and health information exchanges (HIEs). We then propose a service-oriented model for integrating PHR and EMR systems. Furthermore, we analyze the services in SOA and explore the potential of service-oriented personal health cloud. We present a practical case study to verify and validate our the proposed approach. We conclude by discussing practical and policy implications and future research directions.