Personal Health Book Application for Developing Countries

Abstract

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.

Guidance for Investing in Digital Health

“…Core to identification (both for health and other services) is birth registration data. When health data is recorded about an identifiable individual, this person should have access to it via paper, phone, or other secure digital methods (Alabbasi 2015). A verified identity facilitates payments.…”

Integrated, Reliable and Cloud-Based Personal Health Record : A Scoping Review

“…As a possible barrier to PHR system adoption may be the lack of internet rural zones. To alleviate this, authors in [4] proposes to store PHR information in a USB smart card or smartphone. Patients carry out their information with themselves and provide it to physicians during consultation.…”

“…Nowadays healthcare delivery model is changing from institution-centered to a more patientcentered model [1]. The past fragmented patient health information [2] is changing to patientcentered that enables patients to store and access to their health information ubiquitously in a personal health record (PHR) [1].PHR is defined as 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 [3,4]. There is not agreement or standard on what information a PHR should store [5].…”

Integration of EHR and PHR leveraging cloud services for approving treatments

“…Past scattered information of patients is now shifting to patient-centered information that allows patients to ubiquitously gather and view their fitness information through a personal health record (PHR) [2]. PHR is referred as a collection of computer-based resources that help people to retrieve as well as establish their lifetime health information and render applicable segments of it available to those in need of it [3,4]. There is no consensus or pattern as to what details the PHR can store [5].…”