Web-based personal health records (PHRs) are being widely deployed. To improve PHR's capability and usability, we proposed the concept of intelligent PHR (iPHR). In this paper, we use automatic home medical product recommendation as a concrete application to demonstrate the benefits of introducing intelligence into PHRs. In this new application domain, we develop several techniques to address the emerging challenges. Our approach uses treatment knowledge and nursing knowledge, and extends the language modeling method to (1) construct a topic-selection input interface for recommending home medical products, (2) produce a global ranking of Web pages retrieved by multiple queries, and (3) provide diverse search results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques using USMLE medical exam cases.

Web-based personal health records (PHRs) are under massive deployment. To improve PHR's capability and usability, we previously proposed the concept of intelligent PHR (iPHR). By introducing and extending expert system technology and Web search technology into the PHR domain, iPHR can automatically provide users with personalized healthcare information to facilitate their daily activities of living. Our iPHR system currently provides three functions: guided search for disease information, recommendation of home nursing activities, and recommendation of home medical products. This paper discusses our experience with iPHR as well as the open issues, including both enhancements to the existing functions and potential new functions. We outline some preliminary solutions, whereas a main purpose of this paper is to stimulate future research work in the area of consumer health informatics.

Web-based personal health records (PHRs) are widely available to ordinary consumers at present, but the existing PHR systems have limited intelligence and can fulfill only a small portion of users' healthcare needs. Previously, we proposed the concept of intelligent PHR (iPHR) to improve PHR's capability and usability. By introducing and extending expert system technology, Web search technology, natural language generation technology, database trigger technology, and signal processing technology into the PHR domain, iPHR can automatically provide users with personalized healthcare information to facilitate their activities of daily living. This chapter presents an overview of our iPHR system that currently provides four functions: guided search for disease information, recommendation of self-care activities, recommendation of home health products, and continuous user monitoring.

Web-based personal health records (PHRs) are widely available to ordinary consumers at present, but the existing PHR systems have limited intelligence and can fulfill only a small portion of users' healthcare needs. Previously, we proposed the concept of intelligent PHR (iPHR) to improve PHR's capability and usability. By introducing and extending expert system technology, Web search technology, natural language generation technology, database trigger technology, and signal processing technology into the PHR domain, iPHR can automatically provide users with personalized healthcare information to facilitate their activities of daily living. This chapter presents an overview of our iPHR system that currently provides four functions: guided search for disease information, recommendation of self-care activities, recommendation of home health products, and continuous user monitoring.