Design of an Online Physician-Mediated Personal Health Record System

Electronic Medical Record (EMR) has been adopted by most hospitals in the United States to keep track of patient medical information today. However, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations, technical information system design challenges, and social-economic factors—all contributed to significant barriers to granting patients access to his own EMR maintained by hospitals with the personal health records (PHR) maintained by patients. In this chapter, we describe a new Personal Health Office Framework (PhoF), which is designed to enable patients effectively manage their own PHR integrated with a portion of their EMR with the guidance of health-care providers. PhoF is characterized with a unique online physician-approval process, which can allow a computer agent to retrieve specific information securely on a particular patient maintained with the approving physician’s hospital EMR. The mediated access to medical treatment information enables a physician to administer patient self-education and self-care for online patients and therefore may help reduce medical errors and health care cost. A prototype system with web user interface is described and several case studies are presented to show the how the concept works in practice.