Personal health E-record—toward an enabling ambient assisted living technology for communication and information sharing between patients and care providers

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the Personal Health Electronic Record (PHER), a new type of Patient Health Record. This record aims to help physicians shift from a medical practice that is often based on their personal opinion or experience towards one of evidence based medicine, thus improving the communication among patients and their care providers and increasing the availability of personal medical information. The PHER can be considered an enabling Ambient Assisted Living technology because it allows patients and care providers to file and share all types of medical data and useful clinical information so that they can access whatever they need, whenever they need it. The development of diagnostic and therapeutic algorithms that are able to support the physician in planning treatment using the data stored in the PHER is also discussed.